This is beyond annoying: I’ve been using the Notes application on my iPhone 3G to keep track of different things and now that I want to get the notes of, I realize that I’m kind of trapped. I can’t see any way to access them off the phone, even within iTunes, which reports that it’s backing up and syncing those same notes. Frustrating!!
You are not the first person to notice that the Notes app on the iPhone would be a ton more useful and helpful if you could actually see the notes on other devices rather than having them locked onto the cellphone itself. What’s puzzling is that “Notes” is one of those things you can specify to have sync’d in MobileMe too, but what it’s sync’ing to is a mystery.
There are third party apps that let you extract Notes from your iPhone backup files, both for the Mac and PC, but those aren’t a good solution either. I mean, really, Apple, why isn’t there a Notes app for the Mac and PC that has a “keep in sync with other i-devices?” option?
What turns out to work, however, is to stop asking about how to access those notes from another computer and instead look at how you can email them to yourself. Let me show you what I mean…
When you’re in the Notes app, you probably have more than one note therein:
Tap on the appropriate note to see what you’ve tapped in:
Can you see the highlighted little envelope icon on the bottom? That’s what you want. Tap on it and you’ll find that you’re now composing an email message with the content of that particular note conveniently as the message body:
Send it to yourself, tap the “Send” button and a few seconds later you’ll have the contents of that particular iPhone note accessible from any computer you can use to access your mailbox.
Not the most elegant solution in the world, but certainly quite passable as a workaround!
i dont have that function at the bottom as i am running on the 6.0.1 version
If you have outlook 2013 the notes are automatically synced under the notes tab…
Thanks for the update on Outlook 2013, Jim!
If you haven’t got too many notes, just copy and paste them into the notes section on one of your contacts then sync you’re contacts with your computer and problem solved.
I’m not quite sure how you helped “nara” solve the notes problem. I have a PC with XP. I’ve put off activating my iPhone 4 for a week now because I can’t figure out how I’m going to migrate notes from my iPhone 3. I’ve cleaned mine out until I only have 55, but MY GOODNESS, that’s still too many to email! Since this discussion began, have you discovered any other solutions to this problem? Thanks.
I have been f@#%ing with the settings on my iPhone & lap top all morning trying to figure out what I was missing. You are a gosh darn genius my friend. Thank goodness for google leading me to you.
I have over 500 notes on my iphone emailing them would take way to long.
I finally discovered how to sync them with my gmail but then gmail does not allow you to download to your computer.
You can forward an email to pop3 email program yes but then gmail does not allow bulk forwarding!
HOW DO I GET THE NOTES ONTO MY OWN SECURE HARD DRIVE. Not a cloud and not one at a time!?????
Please help. Thank you!!!!
@DeadParrot — thanks for mentioning Mail — I never used it for notes before, so didn’t even think to look there. You’re a gem!
But you don’t retain the timestamp and I don’t want to manually email 1,000+ notes, let alone have copies floating in plain text around the ether.
Thanks Dave!
Cindy, go to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars and pick your main account. Look at what you have specified to sync. I’m betting that “Notes” is one of them. Uncheck it and you should be all set!
I just got the iphone4 and for some reason all my notes are sent automatically to my email. Is there a way to turn off this feature?
Looking in Apple’s documentation (iPhone Settings Panes in iTunes):
Notes
Sync notes in the Notes application on iPhone with notes in Mail on a Mac or with Microsoft Outlook 2003 or 2007 on a PC. (On a Mac, you must have Mac OS version 10.5.7 or later installed to sync notes.)
On the Mac 10.5 & 10.6, notes that are synched appear in the Mail.app (in the “Notes” section). I don’t have a PC, so I don’t know how that works there.