Moleskine Notes Reviews

My last 1-star review mysteriously vanished somehow. Crazy how that happens with only the low reviews…

Anyways, don’t waste your time with MoleskineNotes. Outside of the crazy terrible bugs (app crashes 3x before it can completely upload a single page of notes, time/date syncing and reverting back to literally January of 1969, and functionality that rarely does what it claims to do on the most basic level), you also wont get any sort of timely customer service.

This is extremely disappointing, as I’ve purchased a half dozen notebooks from Moleskine every year for the past 15 years. They usually put so much more thought into the products they market. It’s a bummer that this piece of crap cost me hundreds of dollars.

I am a big fan of Moleskine products having used their notebooks and pens for many years. Having tried using the Apple Pencil and various notes apps I decided to switch back to good old pen & paper for note taking during business meetings. Whilst the original V1 app was lacking in the UI/UX I generally found that it worked without incident. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of this version. Synchronizing with the Eclipse pen is inconsistent but worse still is the impossibility of opening and reading any note/ page that did manage to sync to my iPhone. In my experience as soon as I attempt to view any page on my phone MoleskineNotes crashes. I would not recommend MoleskineNotes or writing systems until it drastically improves.

Why on earth would you make your customers transfer to a new app when it’s still in the development stage?! It makes absolutely no sense!
The transfer and backup process was confusing and not very user friendly. Once I figured out how to backup my notebooks, there were still missing pages. Also, whenever I clicked on a notebook page to view, it took a few seconds to load each and every single page. How time consuming!
As a customer who has spent a decent amount of money on these products specially for the digital transfer from notebook to device, I’d expect more out of MoleskineNotes.
The previous app was working just fine. I wish there was more time spent making Notes 2.0 version useable before kicking us out of the working app.

Device - iPhone 12 Pro
iOS Version - 14.8.1
Pen+ Model - Pen+ Elipse

March ‘22 Update
——————————

Very shady developer practices here. Where are all the poor reviews. Only 3 as of my writing?

Anyway - app is totally junk now. Cannot login:

Notes_2_0.LocalServicesError error1.

J U N K waste. Still working on a legal dispute with this junk technology. Love the stationery though - which is not reflective of this 3rd party junkified tech. Neo works fine everywhere else.

MoleskineNotes does. It stay logged in to Moleskine Account. Syncing across devices result on conflicts. Decided to just sync with my iOS and ever since then, I have to reconcile EVERY single notebook (I have one) and every page when I sync. Worst $300 spent. The store won’t even talk to me and support ignores me. Oh, and my set was missing a charger cable so I am on my last legs before this becomes a cheap pen with a cheap refill and some really expense books. I am disputing the purchase. I hate this thing. I spend more time fiddling to make it work rather than creating. So frustrating.

I’m incredibly disappointed with MoleskineNotes.
This 2.0 version is really glitchy. I can’t sync in my notebook from google drive and pass the stuff from version 1. The old app was getting annoying with its pop up message that I need to move to the new version. However, the 2.0 version is useless. It crashes all the time. I can’t even get to the point of syncing with google drive.

I have an iPhone in the latest system, and this doesn’t work. I would not recommend getting this notebook. Stick with the analogue version, since this digital option has too many issues they need to work on.

Pretty sure Moleskin is just trolling us at this point. Coin toss odds if your notes will synch from the pen to MoleskineNotes . Half the time the upload completes without transferring any data to MoleskineNotes and its lost forever because the pen clears its memory after every synch. The moleskin smart note system functions just fine as a regular pen and paper notebook but isn’t reliable enough to count on it for much else. Its like the wish version of a Rocketbook. Hard to imagine Moleskin can make a product this bad on accident. The amount of thought that had to go into designing all of the cleverly malicious failure points, of which there are dozens, is truly impressive.

I just bought the moleskin smart writing system and MoleskineNotes is terrible. It lacks features that the old moleskin notes app had, such as the ability to export to OneNote. It somehow jumbled my only notebook so now the notes are split into 2 different notebooks and there is no way to copy notes from one notebook to the other. I don’t have an iPad - only an iPhone - so maybe the iPad version is better, but it would be nice to be able to have the same features as the iPad version AND the same features from the previous version. Until they get this right, I’m sticking to the old moleskin version because I can at least export to OneNote. Plus, only the Moleskin v1 app is available on the Windows Store.

The smart writing set is a very impressive technology system, but it all depends on MoleskineNotes , which doesn’t seem to be working right. I thought the main point of the 2.0 version was to sync across devices, but nothing is syncing—I have two in complete notebooks on my two devices. This defeats the whole purpose of the technology itself. I’m not able to log in via Google either, and the option to sync over Evernote (another reason I was interested) doesn’t even show up. App also crashed on me the first day, forcing me to uninstall and reinstall, and in the process lose everything I had written. MoleskineNotes needs to be fixed, or the whole system is worthless.

For One - the “Moleskine Smart Account” Just doesn’t work - I’ve created 3 different accounts because the just seem to disappear - yeah as silly as that sounds, every time i try to log-in, it doesn’t work. Even the “Forgot Password” function doesn’t work. Like literally doesn’t work (taking into consideration junk mail and all normal precautions)

#2 - Like Other People Seem to be experiencing - Moleskine Customer Service is also insanely bad, like virtually non-existant.
- They don’t know how to support their own product. Like they actually don’t know how to navigate around their own product, down right embarrassing.

#3 - The idea of the smart pen is good, the implementation is still not 100%, I get it is hard to design and engineer these things to work and then mass produce, while setting up wide spread support for a product, If Moleskine was a startup i would be more forgiving, but as mature company, this is way below their standards

My pen would not connect to the new app, so I flashed new bios to the pen. The pen works fine with the old app. When I try to pair with the new app MoleskineNotes crashed.

3/22 update
Updated app to new version and it still crashes when attempting to recognize and sync the pen. For what I paid for the pen and notebook I expected the device to work.

It appears that moleskine either doesn’t care about the customer or doesn’t care about the legacy pen.

Even when logged in to same account on both devices, writing with MoleskineNotes on iPhone doesn't update the notebook on iPad, and vice versa. Would expect this feature to work and be straightforward-- the way other apps like Notability function.

Even purchased two custom notebooks. 1 Zero product support 2 No real instructions on how to maximize value of system 3 Apparently no Evernote integration, despite thousands of references online (including screenshots) asserting that it exists. 4 etc… Thinking perhaps Evernote integration is enabled by setting up a Moleskine Smart online account, went to sign up but was absolutely astounded to see that I would have to agree to basically give up all (and I mean *all*!), rights to privacy, just to set up the account. In this day and age, that is the single most tone-deaf and absurd thing I’ve seen in a long time. Pure idiocy. I will go no further in expanding my adoption of this platform. Again, pure idiocy.

Every one of these things have to be agreed-to to create an account where “more features are available”:

-I declare to have entirely read the privacy notice provided by Moleskine S.r.I. and:

-I hereby give my consent to receive promotional messages relating to Moleskine's products and services

-I hereby give my consent to allow Moleskine to carry out profiling activities

-I hereby give my consent to process my geolocalization data on order to improve my experience with MoleskineNotes

-I hereby give my consent to process my data contained in contents and files stored on my device and disclosed

All I can say is…. Backpfeifengesicht!! Seriously! Idiots.

While the original app wasn’t perfect, the newer version is much less user friendly to navigate the notebook on your phone. So many steps to get to January. You used to open the notebook and it opened to the last page you had edited. Also, the pages don’t just flip through anymore, each page has to load before you can swipe to the next. Also, it would be nice when you load a new notebook, that all pages automatically load instead of having to put a little line on each page. When you're out and you need to add a date via your phone but you haven’t yet added that page it’s inconvenient. And the new version no longer allows the pen to download in the background.
I also have always had trouble loading a new notebook and customer support has been terrible. I call and explain. They want a video emailed of the problem. I send the video showing how the pen works with the old notebook but not the new one and never get any response after repeated emails. Then eventually I guess they flip a switch and I can use the next year’s notebook. This has happened two years in a row. If a notebook can’t be loaded Until a month before the new year, just say so! And the transfer from the old app to the new one was a joke. Never worked.

I know for a fact Moleskine has a better dev team. Look at their other apps! I have no idea why this is such a MESS of an app. The transfer from the old app was a true mess. And moleskine knew that, they were just lazy. After a day of using it it just crashes seconds after opening. What a giant mess. Also when the pen is downloading (which we all know takes wayyyyy too long) MoleskineNotes is totally unusable. Why isn’t their a background download??? I shouldn’t even have to open MoleskineNotes .

Also when will integration with the calendar and reminders apps happen??? That would be amazing for the journal users. I would love to be able to check off some boxes on my notebook and have them update in MoleskineNotes . Why is moleskine sooooo behind with this?? They have advertised the entire smart system as complete product but it has been in dev since day one. This is insane.

For years the Moleskine brand has been well regarded for its elegant, practical design and quality builds. When you see a Moleskine notebook you think serious, quality, and beauty. You think modern and timeless.

That’s what makes the Notes App such a disappointment. I’ve been using the Moleskine Smart Writing System (pen & notebooks) regularly for work and school for three years. While the pen and notebooks are in keeping with Moleskine’s reputation, MoleskineNotes fails to do even the basic functions (like upload pages) consistently. The more advanced features, like transcribing handwritten notes to text rarely work at all and with some updates you can’t even access them.

Perhaps this is an example of what happens when a traditional company tries to do technology but I want to believe Moleskine can do better.

MoleskineNotes has potential. However, currently some of the most basic features do not work whatsoever. For example, I forgot my password for my moleskine account, and the password reset feature DOES NOT WORK. I tried multiple times over the course of weeks — never received an email to reset the password. Even worse, I sent a message to Moleskine about this issue and received an auto-reply saying they would get back to me within 2 business days… that was over 3 weeks ago. Very cool, to not respond at all. Sure gives me confidence in my new smart pen…. NOT. If I don’t get a response I will return the pen. Ridiculous.

There are quite a few bugs the dev team should work on, including syncing issues with the Pen+, drawings that randomly appear and cannot be erased, and strange issues where the previews or workspaces in the notebook look small or contorted when they render in the digital notebook.

I’ve had to delete entire pages because I can’t get erase a random line that appears, and therefor cannot be translated.

I hope the team works on identifying and fixing these bugs because it could otherwise be a great app. But so far it’s been a below average user experience (which I wouldn’t expect from a $300 pen).

Does not support the apple pencil.

So far, it does what it’s supposed to do, however, part of the reason I opted for the Smart writing set is aesthetics. I just much prefer the look and feel of real ink on paper. Unfortunately, the stroke rendering resolution is too low to look good. Given that everything seems to be available in vector format, it would be great if users got an option for choosing the rendering quality both for display in MoleskineNotes and when exporting as image/PDF. This would be ideal for people who care about this kind of thing, and are OK with larger file sizes as a result.
Also, I’d like to see an option for line smoothing similar to what other Apple Pencil based Apps do (this would likely also reduce the file size for the vector graphic)

MoleskineNotes was off to a rocky start but the new version works so much better. I love the text editing and export

there are no instructions and what they have is lousy. I have turned all blue tooth stuff off and still it cannot find the pen when I hold the on button and the light blinks it says it finds it but will not let me move on. So I guess I get to return the book the pen and all because I can use it like I was expecting to. What a awful product.

I bought the smart pen and journal a few days ago. It is a really cool concept and would be really useful for me but it is completely useless because large chunks of my notes are completely missing when I download the pen to MoleskineNotes . It sort of defeats the purpose if you aren’t capturing 100% of the notes. Wish I wouldn’t have spent the money on this to be honest.

Please fix the issue of MoleskineNotes crashing and closing as soon as you open it as it is trying to transfer data from the pen. Based on the comments and my experience, it is a common bug or error. Ridiculous…

I am sad that this works so poorly, because I was really excited about it. MoleskineNotes crashes pretty regularly and I can’t really figure out why. It will also freeze while it’s attempting to sync the notes off the pen.

I bought the 2021 smart planner and the pages are off - whichever page I write on in MoleskineNotes shows up two pages prior in MoleskineNotes , which is a pretty critical issue for a planner. I can’t sync it to my calendar, because MoleskineNotes keeps crashing. Again, destroys the usefulness of a paper to digital planner.

Still unable to migrate notebook from version 1. Unable to open Google drive in version 2 to upload the notebook.

I thought that MoleskineNotes would synch the active notebook across devices (iPhone and iPad) but it doesn’t. Disappointing.

Why hasn’t MoleskineNotes evolved into one that doesn’t require the use of a stylus? Most folks with an iPad have the Apple Pencil. Kind of annoying. Also, Flow app pages should be able to be exported to notes app notebooks. I’m making all these flow pages and there’s really no good way to organize the pages with any of the current notebook apps you offer for iPad.

Big improvement - thanks!

Amazingly, you won't believe that I received exceptional customer support on an issue I was having with my pen. In fact, I spoke with Italy support viz google and they sent me a replacement pen and helped sort out the problem. Perhaps it's because I'm in Europe where customer service is a requirement, not an option as it is in the States? I don't know, that's my best guest. The pen is engineered in Germany, not China or US, so there is more than a profit motive. Meanwhile my Smart Moleskin account isn't working like everyone else, and my suspicion is that it's not support any longer. But that's just a hunch.