14th December - If you don’t use a smartphone it can be tough to take notes with your phone. Even simple ideas, like a book you want to read or a product you want to research, can be hard to record. You can text yourself but without a notepad application or email there are not a lot of good options.

A quick, and free, solution for this might be kwiry (sounds like “query”). This site intends to solve this problem in a way that is a lot more useful than you just texting yourself. What happens is, after registering, you text your note to 59479 (k-w-i-r-y) and the site saves the note in your account page and it emails the contents of the text message to you. It’s a pretty painless procedure and it gives you a homepage for your text notes as well. Notes can also be created on the site is you are already online.

The site also has some social features so you can send your notes to friends or make public notes that every member can see. And there is added functionality–the site will examine a note and automatically do a web search for it or put together a shopping page about whatever text it is examining. If that wasn’t enough kwirys can be sent to all sorts of services, like RSS, iGoogle, Facebook, Pageflakes, and more.

Overall, the service is a lot like Jott, which lets you speak notes into your phone and then it makes a transcription that it will email you and save to the site. kwiry throws in a few social features, which are basically mandatory at this point, but appear to be of limited usefulness unless you have some friends that also use the service. Also it looks like by default your notes are available for public viewing– this can easily be changed on a note-by-note basis or as a rule but it’s a concern.

With more people moving to smartphones, every day notes are very easy to do on a phone or just by emailing yourself, but tools like this can be useful. This is a especially true if you don’t have a smartphone and, like an increasing amount of people, you prefer texting to voice notes. It remains to be seen how useful the social features will be, but the site is easy to use and it quickly gets your texts in your email box so it will be all a lot of people are looking for. The real power of the tool will be using it as a way to get information–via text message–from your phone to other tracking tools, like RSS.