As a PhD student, I use it to organize my research. Instead of having physical notebooks, I have virtual notebooks that I use to note and track the evolution of my ideas over time or when I need to write a report, because it syncs between my lab computer, my phone and my laptop. I also use the web clipper when I want to download and annotate a web page. I know that I could use a combination of free tools to do the same thing but I like having all of it bundled in the same package. The only big drawback is that they take my data hostage - I can't access it using a third party client (at least to my knowledge).

Multiplatform, sharable, exportable, background syncing GTD getting things done implementation. Basically a really elaborate "to do" system that puts all the complication into the system thus clears my mind.

If I had to do it over again, I could do it in google drive or dropbox but evernote always seems to have that one killer feature (out of the 100s of useless ones) that I just can't live without. Evernote 0.00001 would be a no brainer I'd drop it like a hot potato, but each user has a different killer feature they'd can't do without...

I also make one EN notebook per major project and upload "everything" into it as a centralized location. GTD events in the form of a note flow back and forth from my projects to the GTD system as required.

I second that.

It seems like it has lots of features and call do all this stuff, but no real direction. What is it?

I think they could benifit by having some use cases, hot to use evernote for receipts, evernote for ideas, evernote for shopping lists, that sort of thing.

Bookmarks (migrated there after Yahoo sold Delicio.us and never have regretted it, all my are now full clips so I don't have to worry if the URL goes stale) Research & notes. Tips tricks and other miscellania eg how to do conditional formatting in excel Recipes Lessons learnt Scans of business cards that I might need but don't want cluttering my contacts Scans of 1 page manuals eg the instructions that came with the combo lock on the side gate

All of that and other stuff :) I use most of the features, the only thing I wish it did have is a Delicious style tag cloud to make navigating those tags quicker, and a native Linux client.

I can only answer how I use it, but here it is.

I take notes. Those notes sync to my work and home PC's my phone, my iPad and are available in a web app.

Those note can contain images and rich formatting such as tables.

I also keep my todo list in it, as notes can contain check boxes.

I keep my notes in hierarchical "Notebooks" (folders).

Finally I can search through all my notes.

All of the above make it a really excellent note app, not quite as good as OneNote but the syncing in Evernote is vastly better then OneNote's.

I know that other people scan documents into it, and that Evernote will OCR hand writing and make it searchable but that isn't my use case. You can also send emails, PDFs etc to it but once more I don't use this.

I just dump rich content in there that I want to search/access in the future, possibly from my phone.

I tried it for typing notes, but its strength is copy and paste, not formatted text entry, so I keep Notational Velocity for actual notes.