Some very interesting new features are in the pipeline for OneNote, one of the lesser-known gems among Microsoft's applications.  The main trick of the current product is to synchronise a recording of a conversation or meeting with your notes of it, so that you can go straight to a recorded passage simply by clicking on the relevant words.

It's one of those very simple ideas that can transform the way you work. You'd expect it to be popular with journalists, because it streamlines one of our most basic tasks, but it is of equal use to students and lawyers, and indeed anyone who has to take notes anywhere. It can be used with typed handwritten (on a Tablet PC) or typed notes - I use it for phone interviews, though I've yet to find a really satisfactory way to record a call on a PC.

Also useful is the ability to store and index web clippings. You drag your selection to a small OneNote window, where both the content and the address is stored. You can download a trial version here

The next version which will be launched with Office 12 and a (non-public) beta has been released. There are three major innovations, including a new OneNote client that not only provides the basic OneNote functionality on a Windows Mobile smartphone or PDA, but will sync both ways with a PC. And there is much more.

Not only you will be able to drag pictures taken with a camera phone into OneNote Mobile but the product will pack optical character recognition. This means you can snap business cards and press cuttings and then find them by searching on keywords as if they were text.

The product will also have speech recognition so that  you will not even need to taken notes during recording. Provided the audio is well captured you should be able to search the recording directly for keywords.

How well all this works in practice remains to be seen and will to some extent depend on hardware quality.