Ionut Alex has a look at the newest revision to Google Notebook, Google’s oft-overlooked note-taking product, which has just left beta and gotten some improved design and AJAX features. He’s detailed a lot of changes, including the easy click to add a new note, auto-saving, and other things. The coolest new thing has to be the ability to create a Google Maps noting all sorts of cool places, like this one. This is a feature native to Windows Live Maps, but its nice to see the Google Notebook team giving Maps a new feature.

What is the real point of Google Notebook? In a way, it’s the Notepad to Google Docs’ Word, the lighter note-taking app for when you don’t want to load the much more involved Docs word processor. Still, this could be better solved as a subset of the Docs application, perhaps sharing a codebase and document store, and of course, branding. Even if Google does nothing to integrate Docs and Notebook, they should at least rename it Google Docs Express or Google Docs Notebook.