For lack of a better term, Evernote is a “note-booking service”, think Gmail for your notes. You take a note, title and tag it, then save it to your online notebook. This notebook can then be accessed via an online web app, a desktop app (for Windows or Mac OS X), and mobile apps for iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch, BlackBerry, Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, Windows Mobile, and Android.

In a nutshell, Evernote lets you take notes, pictures, audio recordings, and upload files from the client to your online notebook. Additionally, you can tag your entries with keywords to help you find them easier.

The Evernote service comes in two flavors: free, and a US$5/month “premium” version. The premium package allows for uploading a wider range of file formats to your notebook, collaborative tools, and more upload bandwidth per month.

Evernote recently released a somewhat substantial update to their Android Client, bringing it to version 1.4.

Enhanced Search Functionality

Most notably, the new search bar lets you search by keyword and image, filter by filter tag, notebook, and even lets you pull up saved searches. As you type, the search bar displays suggestions from what you’ve previously uploaded to your notebook, and provides helpful icons that show you what the item is.

Enhanced Picture-Taking

For pictures taken with your phone’s camera (called “Snapshots”) Evernote now uses the phone’s native camera capabilities, which gives you better control over the quality of your snapshots. The killer feature of snapshots it text-recognition: Evernote (online) will scan you images for words and store them along with the picture, letting you easily find images based on the words they contain.

More Languages

Evernote for Android now supports English, German, Spanish, French, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish.

What’s not included? Local Storage

One of the biggest advantages of Evernote is that it’s web-connected: your notes are saved into the cloud. That’s great when you’re under a data bubble (EDGE, 3G, WiFi, etc.), but when you’re not, suddenly your notebook is inaccessible. That’s a major drawback.

Although not included in this version, Evernote says “offline storage will be coming to Android”. When? They don’t say.

The Evernote Android app is available free in the Market.