Why didn't they include the ability for the iPhone Notes feature to sync with the Mac OSX Mail Notes (and ToDo) features in this 2nd generation iPhone? The iPhone would make a great PDA with this additional feature.

Surely someone out there will make an app to do this. I know there are ToDo apps out there, but one that syncs with the native Mac ToDo and/or Notes features would be ideal.

Maybe iPhone 2.1 will have this... mmm... what do people think?

Yes that would be a good thing and it should be coming in a future update, probably not 2.1.

They would have it, if they could.

Until then, I just email notes to myself (one way).

This is indeed a major frustration!
I used Notes all the time on my iPod touch... and had heard that whilst they didn't sync on the touch they would / did on the iPhone.

I can't believe that Apple missed this!
No sign of a good app yet though - I've been watching...
I thought Evernote would come close - but you can't edit Notes on the iPhone version that were created on Evernote.app

Tried using To Dos, via Mail folders, etc... all to no avail.

I'm hoping Apple fix this in the next update! Which is why they haven't let a developer put on in the App Store yet?

Well, it's frustrating to me. I have Tasks and Notes in my Outlook, but not on my iPhone. Apple needs to know that if they want to go truly enterprise they need these functions.

I notice that 'notes' is an item that can be synced in mobileme - but it doesn't seem to work. Possibly part of the 'outage' of mobileme that has been ongoing - happening?

Evernote email today indicates soon we will be able to using Evernote!!!

Another exciting couple of weeks here at Evernote. Who says things
slow down in the summer? In addition to revising all of our major
versions in the past couple of weeks, we're also closing in on the
quarter-million-user mark! Here's a shortlist of recent updates:

- Evernote Web adds rich text editing: bullets, colors, and styles
- New web clipper Firefox and Flock extension (more on this below)
- You can edit text notes on Evernote Mobile Web (iPhone coming soon)
- Added the ability to change the title of a note during web clipping
- Tons of great stability improvements and bug fixes on Mac and Windows

Update: iPhone Evernote v1.2 seems to allow me to edit Notes both on iPhone and Mac now!

As discussed in another thread by Madone you can get Notes to sync with your iPhone, but they only sync with the Notes folder in the Mail app on the iPhone (just like on your Macs Mail).
Unfortunately there seems to be no way to get these Notes into the actual Notes App on the iPhone.

Surely it would be easy for the Notes app to be changed to read the notes in the Mail app. Maybe its possible to write a small application that keeps them in sync for example?

Here is Madone's post:
Is there a To Do app that syncs with Mail to do?

I'm still also playing with Evernote as well... haven't decided which is the best/easiest option for me yet. I think the Evernote option is the way to go at the moment - as the Notes (via Mail I can't seem to edit from my iPhone)... whereas the Evernote option allows me to.

Only problem is Evernote is via their web server - so less secure.

Evernote is awesome. It syncs over the air, recognises text in photos, spotlight support....

Take a photo with text, and you can spotlight for it on your mac... All without plugging it in!

Evernote seems very slow though on the iPhone. It seem that everything you do with it requires a round-trip to their server. It would be a much better app if it stored your notes locally and sync'd in the background instead of going to the website for every button click - its essentially just a web page. Good app though given this...

This method is only for Jailbroken iPhones..

The only real "best" way so far to sync iPhone notes to your mac is by a program called

"iPhoneNotes"
V1ru8 iPhoneNotes

It was developed for the previous firmware, but incidentally (and thankfully) it works on the new firmware 2.0 still. In some ways, it's not the most ideal way being a third-party app that you have to use outside iTunes. To be honest i don't really sync with it that much. I'll just often "back them up" to the computer so incase i do a restore i can sync them back on.

Worth a go though in my opinion, best workaround so far.