Let's take a tour of one of npad's defining features, the ability to create and retrieve notes anywhere you go.

There are three main ways that you can use besides npad.com: text message, email, and mobile web. Using any of these channels, you can create and retrieve your notes.

Text Message (SMS)

Before you can use npad via text message, you need to have a confirmed phone number attached to your account. Log in and visit the 'Acct' page to make sure this step is all set up.

Now, fire up a new text message and make the recipient n@npad.com (that's right, an email address -- most mobile phones allow you to send text messages to any email address). You might have to switch the input type from numbers to letters and symbols in order to get it right. Now, for the body of the message, type "Test mobile note" and press send.

Check your npad account; if you did everything right, you should have a brand new note waiting for you with the text "Test mobile note." See, any text message you send to n@npad.com, with a couple of exceptions, gets saved as a note in your account! (If you don't see the note right away, wait fifteen seconds and then refresh the web page. Sometimes text messages take a little while to shuffle through the cellular network.)

Now, if you thought that was cool, take a second to add n@npad.com to your phone's address book. It will save you a ton of time in the future. Trust me.

So that was the basic, most common way to use npad with text messages. Now let's have a look at searching your notes, using the same method as above, except using a question mark to indicate that this is a search query, not a new note.

Fire up a new text message to n@npad.com, make the the body of the message "?test", and press send. Within fifteen seconds you should get back a text message from us with the results of your search.

If there's only one search result, you'll get the note itself. If there are multiple notes, you'll get a numbered list of notes. You can reply with the number of a note to see the full note, or reply with the word "more" to see the next page of results.

You can also get a list of all notes with a certain tag. It's basically the same as searching your notes, except you use an exclamation mark. For example, if you wanted to retrieve all notes that have the tag "movies" you would send "!movies" to n@npad.com.

Email

Interacting with npad by regular email is very similar to interacting by text message. If you have a confirmed email address registered in your account, you can send any text you want to n@npad.com and it will get saved as a new note. For example:

Creating a note via standard email - secure from any computer in the world.

You can also search: just prefix the subject or body of your message with a question mark, and the following text will be treated as a search term. For example:

Just like with text messages, search by sending an email prefixed with a question mark.

The example above will return all of your notes that contain the word "restaurant." I should point out that unlike text message search results, email search results contain the full text of every note.

Just like with text messages, you can get all the notes that match a certain tag by using an exclamation mark: "!restaurants" would return all notes that have the tag "restaurants" applied to them.

Mobile Web

As convenient as it is to create notes on the fly using text messages, there are some advanced features, like searching and editing, better suited for a web interface. That's why we created a miniaturized version of npad, specifically for your mobile phone. Launch your mobile browser and navigate to http://www.npad.com/m (you can probably just type npad.com/m) and you'll recognize your surroundings right away. At your fingertips are all your npad notes, organized into My npad, Filed, and Trash tabs.

Sign in just like npad.com	Read your notes	Edit your notes

Save this URL in your phone's favorites, making it quick and easy to come back to whenever you need it.

So that's all for this tutorial. If you haven't yet, make sure to add n@npad.com to your phone's address book; once you get hooked on npad, you'll start using it to remember everything.