IPhone – What’s the default Notes account setting used for on the iPhone

This happens if you also have your iPhone setup to sync to outlook via a microsoft exchange server.

The key here is to setup your "default account" to also work the same way when you are manually adding contacts to your iPhone.

Under Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Contacts -> Default Account you can select an account to have your contacts created in when you create a new contact.

"outside of a specific account" refers to your exchange account setup.

If you have any issues where contacts created on your iPhone don't sync correctly with your exchange account then you should change the default account to point to your exchange account.

more info and discussion about this (as well as potential sync issues with exchange server) can be found here.

Hope this helps.

What is interesting, is that both of the places you mentioned are redundant. You cannot have "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" > [iCloud name] > "Notes", Off, while "iCloud" > "Notes" is On. If one is on, and you have an @icloud.com (or @mac.com style), the other will automatically be in agreement.

So in short, set one, and other will be set.

This is probably because, Apple provides Settings.app > iCloud for users who haven't chosen to set up an @icloud.com (or equivalent) email address. For users who have chosen to set up that email, the settings become redundant.

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Other email accounts under "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" may have the option of notes, in which case it syncs notes you create in the Notes.app with your email accounts (often found under "Notes" somewhere).