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Springpad (Android) review: Powerful personal assistant with some flaws

Springpad packs tons of features to help save everything you want to remember, but it can feel overwhelming to get started.

Sarah Mitroff Managing Editor
Sarah Mitroff is a Managing Editor for CNET, overseeing our health, fitness and wellness section. Throughout her career, she's written about mobile tech, consumer tech, business and startups for Wired, MacWorld, PCWorld, and VentureBeat.
Expertise Tech, Health, Lifestyle
Sarah Mitroff
7 min read

Outsource the task of remembering anything with Springpad (Android|iOS), a free app that lets you jot down notes, create lists, bookmark Web sites and products, save recipes, record voice memos, and so much more, right from your mobile device or desktop browser.

8.5

Springpad (Android)

The Good

<b>Springpad</b> is a beautifully designed app with tons of features that make it easy to save anything you want to remember.

The Bad

The app gives you many ways to save content, and it can get overwhelming to navigate all of the features.

The Bottom Line

Springpad takes time to set up, but once you find how it works for you, it's a fantastic free tool for staying organized.

Springpad keeps you organized (pictures)

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The best way to describe what Springpad can do, is to imagine you have a personal assistant who researches lifestyle-related topics for you, from which wine to pair with the roasted chicken recipe you just found online, to alerting you when the TV you want to buy goes on sale. Using a built-in search engine and partnerships with a handful of shopping and lifestyle websites, Springpad acts as a digital personal assistant that helps you find products, recipes, and other kinds of content.

Springpad started as a simple note-taking app, and has grown into a mixture of Evernote and Pinterest, with a dash of Google. While the app is awesome at gathering everything you want to save, its seemingly endless features can make it overwhelming to set up and use.

Getting started
After you first launch the app, create a Springpad account using Facebook, Google+, or an unique username and password combo. That account will sync with Springpad's website, and the Springpad app on other devices.

Once you're logged in on your mobile device, you'll see your home screen, which displays every single item you've saved to Springpad. There are toggles at the top of the app to view all of your notebooks (collections of items) and a search portal, where you can look up recipes, videos, music, books and more. There's also a left sidebar that shows all of your notebooks and has a search bar where you can search through all of your springs.

Springpad can be overwhelming at first, because there are a whopping eighteen types of content you can save, plus several ways to share and collaborate in the app. I really only use maybe fifty percent of the app's features, choosing the ones that fit my personal needs best and ignoring the rest. My best advice is to start slowly and figure out what kinds of things you want to save with Springpad, whether that's recipes, shopping lists, and personal notes, or books, movies, and TV shows you want to buy. Don't try to use every feature at once.

Get organized
With Springpad, you can save anything you find online, photos and files from your own device, and anything you type out on your own. Any individual piece of content you save -- a text note, voice recording, link, photo, etc -- is called a spring. You can create a new spring by tapping the large yellow plus sign in the app, and either start typing a text note, record an audio clip, or use Springpad's search feature to look up movies, recipes, businesses, or products on Amazon.

The layout of each spring depends on the content, but most have a spot at the top for photos or a map, followed by text, tags, links to external Web sites, and a place to leave comments. The comment field is especially helpful for when you share a notebook with another Springpad user to collaborate.

Your home screen shows everything you've saved in the app. Screenshot by Sarah Mitroff/CNET

You can also attach photos, links, audio recordings, PDFs, and reminders to each note, which makes for an incredibly robust note-taking experience. And of course, you can share a link to your notes with any of your device's other installed applications using Android's share feature.

There are several different kinds of springs: Note (regular text), Task (essentially a time-sensitive action and reminder), Business, Restaurant, Wine, Product, Book, Movie, TV Show, Album, Shopping List, Packing List, Check List, Recipe. The nice thing is that Springpad will format your note appropriately and even add some relevant information according to the category selected. For instance, add a movie, and you'll get a synopsis, release date, and cast information. Add a restaurant, and Springpad will show its location on a map and embed a link to the corresponding Yelp, Foursquare, and OpenTable pages where available. Conversely, if you're looking at a restaurant from your Yelp app, share it with Springpad, and Springpad will turn it into a Restaurant note with all the relevant information. It's a very convenient feature.

If you save a Web site bookmark or online article, Springpad will only pull in the link and small snippet of text into the spring, not the full text of an article. That's disappointing to me, because I like to save entire articles to reference later and to do that in Springpad, I'd have to copy and paste the article into the spring after I saved it. In contrast, Evernote's clipper tool captures the full Web page or article.

You can group your springs into collections called notebooks. You can customize each notebook by giving it a name; choosing a color and design scheme, which includes a handful of textile, paper, and wood textures (such as denim and grid paper); and choosing to share it with others or keep it private so only you can view it. If you don't keep your notebook private, other Springpad users can see it when they browse public notebooks in the app. I am a big fan of the notebook themes, where I can choose a color and textured background. The effect in the notebook is subtle, but it makes the app look refined and pretty to look at.

Since explaining everything that Springpad can do could go on for pages, I'll describe two ways I've used the app over the last several years.

First, Springpad has served as a digital cookbook, where I store recipes I find all over the Web. When I'm poking around online cooking blogs and find a dish I want to save, I use Springpad's clipper, available for both desktop and mobile browsers, to save the recipe ingredients, directions, and any photos to my account. Every recipe is saved as its own spring, and I can then organize them into themed notebooks, such as "Breakfast Recipes" or "Desserts and Treats." Springpad formats each recipe so that the ingredient list and directions are as easy to read as they would be in a cookbook.

You can organize your Springs into notebooks. Screenshot by Sarah Mitroff/CNET

Another way I've used Springpad is to save anything that I want to buy for myself, including gadgets, books, and beauty products. In the app, I tap the plus sign to add a new spring, and select the appropriate category, such as books, movies, or albums.

For anything that doesn't fit into one of Springpad's genre-specific category, I just choose the generic "product" category. Then I search for what I want to buy using the product name, such as "iPad Mini" or "To Kill A Mockingbird." The app searches Amazon and other databases to find the product and gives you a list of search results. When you find the right match, you can save it to Springpad and the app will include a description, product category, price, photos, and any other relevant information. If the item goes on sale, the app will send you an alert.

I had occasional problems with Springpad showing the wrong price for a product I saved, which was annoying. You can manually edit that detail in the spring, but I wished it got it right the first time.

Sharing and discovering
If you choose to keep your notebooks public, other Springpad users can see them and follow them. The way it works is similar to Pinterest; you can create a theme-specific notebook, such as "Hot Tech Gadgets" or "5K Training Workouts" and add springs that match that theme. Others who use Springpad can find and follow those notebooks, and whenever you add a new item, it will show up in the home feed.

If you want to find notebooks to follow, tap the search button at the top of the app and choose the Explore option. You'll see trending notebooks, and collections of notebooks broken down by theme, like organization and entertainment. Springpad's partnered with Glamour, Real Simple, Breville, and other brands and Web sites to create curated notebooks. You can follow any number of notebooks and re-spring items to your own notebooks.

You can explore other user's notebooks and follow them to get updates. Screenshot by Sarah Mitroff/CNET

Springpad lets you share your notebooks with just a few other people so you can collaborate with friends, family, or co-workers. For example, you could have a notebook for an upcoming trip to Europe that you share with your fellow travels where everyone can save points of interest they want to visit and share their thoughts about places to stay.

At top of your Home feed, there's a slider that controls which Springs you can see: Only your content, content from others users with whom you collaborate, and content from the Springpad users that you follow. That helps keep your Home screen organized as you follow notebooks in the app.

Conclusion

With its seemingly endless number of features and ways to save content, Springpad can feel overwhelming, even to me, who's used the service off and on for the last few years. But once you figure out exactly how Springpad works for you, whether it's a place to save all of the gadgets you want to purchase or a digital recipe box, it's easy to see how valuable the app can be.

Overall, I think Springpad is an incredibly useful note-taking tool for those of us who sometimes suffer from information overload. The way it handles notes according to the category of information they contain (e.g. Restaurant, Movie, etc.), really makes it more unique and proactive than Evernote. However, at the same time, I wish it had more robust text editing and could handle file attachments the way Evernote does. Regardless, Springpad is a powerful note-taker; it comes with customizable Home screen widgets, it can create reminder alarms, and I highly recommend it.

Portions of this review were taken from an older review on Download.com, written by Jaymar Cabebe.

8.5

Springpad (Android)

Score Breakdown

Setup 10Features 8Interface 9Performance 8