Syncing and storing (learning) content on your phone for offline use with Google apps

While google has no note-taking app that could compare with Evernote or Springpad google apps do have quite a lot to offer to sync your notes from the PC to your mobile phone or vice versa. So here are some apps that might come in quite handy for your studies:

1. Save feeds posts and webclips to Google reader

Read your news and blog sources on your mobile phone and mark them with a star for later reading on a PC (e.g. you might want to watch a flash movie which is not available on the phone or the article might be too long to read on the phone). Select a specific part of of an article on the web or on the phone and post it to reader as a note (webclipping).

2. Store links to websites on Google bookmarks

Have your bookmarks available anywhere. Similarly to delicious and diigo you can even create lists and share your bookmarks (social bookmarking)

3. Create a multimedia notebook in Gmail and sync for offline use on your phone

With a little trick you can use gmail as a multimedia notebook a là Evernote.
Set up a label “mobile notes” and a filter with a key word (e.g. “MNote”), and you can send anything including files, images and audio to your own inbox (include the key word in the subject line and attach media to email). Don`t forget to set up the gmail app on your phone to sync your label so that it keeps the content of your label on the phone.

4. Using google tasks to create notes and lists

You can use google tasks for more than just to do lists. You can store as much text as you want inside a task, say the 50 states of the US, and study them offline. Basically you can create a mobile notebook by making a “mobile notebook” list ,which will be kept in sync automatically.

5. Using gdocs notepad  app that syncs with a Google docs folder

A nice little app is gdocs notepad. It allows you to create a google docs folder and syncs all (text) docs inside that folder.

6. Using Memento app to create a database using a Google spreadsheet

Memento is a great app that allows you to create offline databases that snyc with google docs. You can use it to keep records of  the books/resources you have read, your grades, or anything else you want to squeeze into a data schema. The free version allows you to link to three google spreadsheets, which is probalby enough for most people, unless you are hyper-organized.

7. Creating flashcards with Google spreadsheets

Create a google spreadsheet  with two rows which you can use as the front and bike side of flashcards, respectively. You can make flashcard for anything, like English vocab, history dates, geography facts, etc. You will find a lot of content on the web, so you might not have to type your own flashcard. If you can’t paste into google spreadsheet you can use MS Excel or Open Office Calc and then upload the file to docs. Use vocabulary trainer for gdocs to import the data from your spreadsheet and study offline, anywhere, any time.

It would be great if Google added offline storing capabilities to its gdocs app. That would really boost its value for mobile learning as you could store any docs and presentations for offline use. It is possible to save your google documents to your phone with the documents on the go app, though. Alternatively you could save your google docs to your dropbox and use third party apps to view or even edit and sync them.