Power users will appreciate the ability to draw or scribble on web content and clip web pages easier.

And, since they’re add-ons, you won’t need to go into the Menu in order to access them, just drag the screen to reveal the right sidebar.

These add-ons don’t replace the Skitch and Evernote apps themselves, so you still need to have them installed.

The Samsung Galaxy Note came to mind when I first saw this news as there are built-in apps on that phone/tiny tablet that do the same things. Even if your phone doesn’t come with a fancy stylus, you can have a little Notetasticness in your life.

Dolphin is a popular browser around here and my favorite of all the browsers available for Android, partially because of the add-ons. I’m not a big fan of Evernote, preferring SpringPad for my note-taking needs. Skitch is a handy little app, especially when you need to take screenshots.

The team behind Dolphin Browser promises that more excellent and exciting add-ons are coming later this year. For now, the Evernote and Skitch add-ons are available via the Android Market.

Evernote and Skitch Now Available As Dolphin Browser Add-ons is a post by K. T. Bradford from Gotta Be Mobile.

Among other new features, Penultimate now has what it calls “serious Dropbox integration” and Evernote support.

You can now link your Penultimate notebooks to Dropbox, which provide a good way to automatically back up your notebooks and digital notes and also send notebooks directly to your Dropbox account.

The Evernote integration will come in handy for those who might like to search their digital notes. Linking Penultimate to Evernote through the App allows you to send the notes or notebooks to Evernote. Once there, Evernotes OCR takes over and you can search through those digital notes in Evernote.

You can also start new “workflows” by opening pages or notebooks in other Apps in other Apps on your iPad, as well as paste copied images into a Penultimate page. Copied Ink can also be pasted in as well.

If you’re a Penultimate user check out the update. If you haven’t given Penultimate a try yet, the Apps is $.99 and worth the buck to check it out.

iPad Inking App Penultimate Makes Some Important Additions in New Update is a post by Warner Crocker from Gotta Be Mobile.

Now Evernote has released Skitch as an iPad App that allows you to have essentially the same functionality on that device. It’s a free App. You can crop an image, dress it up with text, boxes, circles, arrows… you know the drill. There is also an Android version of Skitch available as well. It’s been available for some time.

If you’re looking to capture something off of a web page, you browse to the page you want from within the App, click the camera button and you have the visible portion of the web page to work with. You can then crop and annotate as you see fit. You can essentially do the same with your photos, maps, or screenshots you’ve taken from your iPad.

You can also share an image via Twitter, save it to your Camera Roll, send it via email, or send it to Evernote.

There are certainly plenty of photo annotation Apps out there for the iPad and iPhone (word is there will be an iPhone version in the future.) So, choosing one over the other is really matter of personal preference or which one has the right tools for you to accomplish the task at hand. For Evernote users, I think Skitch will prove one of the popular choices given its simplicity and even if you don’t have an Evernote account it is a handy simple tool for simple annotation.

Evernote Releases Skitch for iPad is a post by Warner Crocker from Gotta Be Mobile.

Our staff came up with their favorite apps and then we checked to be sure they would work on the Kindle. The apps below include entertainment, social networking, games, reading productivity and utility apps. Many of these apps will not cost you a dime, one of them will cost you exactly a dime, and some will set you back a few bucks. They’re worth it. We think these are the best apps for the Amazon Kinde Fire right now.

Entertainment Apps

The built-in entertainment apps for watching Amazon Instant videos and listing to music in your cloud drive only go so far. These other entertainment apps fill in the gaps.

Pandora – Free

Listen to free streaming music on your Fire.

With Pandora you can stream free Internet music to your Kindle Fire, freeing up much-needed space, which is an important consideration thanks to the anemic 8GB of storage Amazon included. I like that I can create my own station of music based on my tastes. That way I get variety but still only the songs I want to hear. You can also upgrade to a paid service with no ads for $36/year.

hulu PLUS – Free with $7.99/month subscription

Watch recently aired TV shows and some movies.

Even though Hulu PLUS is a bit limited, I love the ability to catch up on an episode of The Office that you missed because you weren’t home, or your cable went out last Thursday. If only the other networks would get off their 20th century butts and either join the hulu party, or make an app like it.

With Hulu PLUS you don’t get some great shows that can be streamed via a computer, like The Simpsons. You do get enough to make it worth $8/month. You might even find a movie worth watching, but I doubt it. Still it’s a must have app if you’re a subscriber.

Netflix – Free with an existing Netflix subscription

Watch movies and TV shows from the large Netflix library of Instant Queue videos.

I’ve found some great shows that I never would have watched if it weren’t for Netflix, including Downton Abbey and Mad Men. Having access on the Fire means I’m not tied to a TV and don’t have to even turn on the set with only 14 snowy cable channels in the cheap hotel we stay at while visiting the in-laws. Plus you can discover something in the app and add it to your queue for later watching on the TV at home.

AllRecipes.com Dinner Spinner – Free

Keep track of recipes and discover new cooking adventures.

Like most recipe apps, this one keeps all of your recipes and offers you some new ones to try. You can search by ingredients and cooking time. You can share them with others via Facebook, Twitter and email. One of the cool things is the discovery feature, which shows you a new recipe by shaking your Fire. Random ingredients will fall into place giving you an interesting way to find new combinations for meals.

Reading Apps

You could just settle for reading Kindle books or periodicals with the built-in reader, but then you’d be missing out on some great content with nice features.

Comixology – Free with in app comic book purchases

Read comic books on your Fire.

You can read many of your favorite comic books right on your Kindle Fire. The app handles the advancement from frame to frame really well. You can get 500+ free comic books or purchase others within the app. Publishers include Marvel, DC, Image, BOOM Studios and more.

Zinio – Free with subscriptions to magazines through the service

Access to hundreds of magazine subscriptions through the Zinio service.

Zinio had a bad start on the iPad. I really hated it and couldn’t wait till I could shed my reliance on the horrible app for magazine reading on the device. Since then the company improved it, making it faster, more stable and easier to pick up in your magazines where you last stopped reading. The Fire app works as well as the iPad app finally does. You can get a large selection of magazines through the Zinio app on your Fire.

ezPDF Reader – $2.99

Read and hear your PDFs in a more powerful app than what’s built into the Fire.

ezPDF Reader handles PDF files better than anything from Adobe. The organization screen is useful and the app looks nice. You get some cool additional features like the ability to play embedded multimedia content – video and audio – from within the app. If you want the app to read to you, you can save time by getting your reading done as you drive to work. For those documents that don’t really fit on the 7″ screen use the re-flow feature to reformat the PDF so it fits better.

Bible – Free

Read the best selling book of all time along with friends.

This piece of software offers not only the Bible but a social component as well. Read along with friends or even strangers. Record your thoughts and read theirs. Share verses on Facebook and Twitter and keep track of your reading progress using one of the dozens of simple reading plans.

Utilities

A tool like the Kindle sometimes needs some hand holding to work fluidly. These utilities will make your experience better.

Exchange by Touchdown – Free with $12.99 Premium version

Access your exchanger server email, contacts and calendar.

With this app you can access your exchange server content – email, contacts and calendar. The free version works for 30 days, after which you have to buy the Key (which you purchase in the App store as if it was a second app). Install it after installing the free version. With the app you can not only access email, contacts and calendar, but also remotely wipe the content if you every lose your Fire. It doesn’t work with POP3 or IMAP email, but you can use Google servers in exchange form.

Watchdog Task Manager  - Lite version and $3.49 Premium version

Keep track of running tasks and in order to keep the Fire running well.

Watchdog monitors the running tasks on your Fire. If things start to slow down, fire it up and see what’s eating up all of your memory and kill that app for a while. You don’t really need to just shut down everything unless a particular app is problematic. That’s why this task manager works better than the other task killers that just shut down everything.

ES File Explorer – Free

See what files are on your Fire and move them around to where you want them.

For most people the Fire handles your files well, but on occasion you want more control over things. Maybe you want to side load an app not in the app store or you want to better organize some images or music. ES File Manager lets you do all of that with ease. As you’d expect you can cut, copy and paste files. You can rename files and folders. You can also install APK files from within the app. The background can be skinned to show an image, just like the nice holiday picture in the screenshot above.

Calengoo – $2.99

Add a nice Google Calendar capable app for your Fire.

Calengoo gives you two things that Amazon won’t: a calendar app for the Fire and access to Google Calendar. You don’t have to use Google Calendar, but that’s kind of the main idea here. It has day, week and month view. You can color code calendars if you have more than one. Adding and managing appointments is pretty easy.

Games

Angry Birds – $4.99

Crush those horrible pigs by flinging angry birds at their fortresses, wasting hours with fun.

Just in case you’ve been hiding out on a deserted island for the last two years, the Angry Birds game involves using a sling shot to hurl these different birds at strange structures with pigs in them. The goal: knock down the structures popping those fat piggies. It’s loads of fun and one of the most addictive games you can buy for the Fire or any mobile device. Rovio, the app creator, made a killing and keeps releasing various themed versions of the app, including this one designed for the Fire.

Random Mahjongg – $1.99

Match Japanese themed tiles in  a timed game.

This version of Mahjongg is beautiful and soothing with some peaceful sounding music. You match the tiles which are stacked in various random patterns. Once finished you move on to another random pattern until you can’t clear any more tiles. You get some do-overs each game and a chance to shuffle the tiles if you get stuck but want to keep going. You can also play a version where you just go till you can’t match anymore revealed tiles and time yourself.

Cut the Rope – $.99

Slice through a rope holding candy so that it can drop into the mouth of your cute monster.

The story: a box shows up on your doorstop with a lovable little green monster named Om Nom.  Your job is to feed him, but all he wants is candy. The game: On each screen you have a piece of candy attached to ropes. You slice the ropes by swiping with your finger. At first it’s so easy you wonder why anyone would bother, but soon the obstacles and timing get harder and eventually you’re addicted.

Fruit Ninja – $.10

Slice fruit as fast as you can without cutting the bombs which blow you up.

A slew of fruit starts bouncing across the screen and your job as a ninja is to slice them before the fall off the screen. You get more points for slicing more than one fruit at a time. Simple enough, until the bombs start showing up. Cut one of those and you’re done for. You can play one of three fun modes: arcade, which is fast paced; classic, where precision is more important than speed; and Zen which is for those who want to calm down instead of getting all fired up.

Productivity

The Fire may not be the best tool for getting work done. If you have it with you, it might be useful to quickly change a few words in a document before you fire it off to your boss. You might need to keep track of your schedule or keep some quick notes. For these kinds of short tasks, the fire can be useful and these apps will help make you produce things in a quick instant.

QuickOffice Pro – $9.99

Quick edits of Office files on the go.

With QuickOffice Pro HD you can work with Microsoft Office 2010 files and save them to Evernote, Catch or share them online via Facebook, Twitter, or Scribd. Import documents from one of may file sharing/syncing services like DropBox and SugarSync. You can create or edit files. You can work with text or format some slides and spreadsheets. I’ve used a few different such apps on Android but this is by far the best.

Evernote – Free

Access your notes and create new ones which sync to the cloud and other devices.

For those of us who use Evernote extensively, it becomes an extension of our brains. I store all kinds of data in my Evernote account which I can access from my smartphone, my computer, and now my Fire. You can create and edit notes. You can access things you’ve done on other devices like snapshots of documents or audio recordings. Evernote has rich text formatting so you could use it to work with simple documents as well. All of your notes are organized into notebooks with tags for easy searching.

Social Networking

If you’re a social kind of person you can use your Fire. The tablet comes with Facebook built-in if you can call an icon that links to the Facebook website being built into a device. Here are a couple of other useful social networking apps.

TweetCaster Pro – $4.99

Tweet and read tweets with this useful and attractive Twitter client.

A bunch of Twitter clients populate the Amazon App Store, but I like Tweetcaster the best. It has all the basic features including automatically loading your feed and letting you retweet, reply, follow, block and report tweets or users. You can temporarily hide verbose tweeters, like you might want to do with me while I’m watching the Packers or NASCAR. You can color code your own tweets and replies to easily find them in the feed. Plus it handles not only Twitter but Facebook as well, letting you cross-post your updates to each service or just one of them.

FriendCaster Pro for Facebook – $4.99

Facebook for the Kindle Fire.

Since the built-in Facebook “app” really just takes you to the Facebook website, here’s an app that handles some of the most useful Facebook features within the app. Read your friends and refresh it by pulling down. In the pro version you won’t see ads and has Gmail integration. You can track messages, list of friends, check ins, events, pages and groups.

20 Must Have Apps for the Kindle Fire is a post by Kevin Purcell from Gotta Be Mobile.

I love meeting people, but I am horrible with putting names and faces together. From tech writers at CES to the students I teach and even extended family, I can’t put names to faces.

Thankfully, there’s an app for that.

The new Evernote Hello app for the iPhone looks like the perfect solution to helping me remember everyone I meet. best of all, I can ask the person to enter their information, include context about our meeting and pull it all together with a photo.

Evernote believes that the Hello app will help you improve your memory of people because it focuses on the three ways our minds remember the people we meet.

• Faces: What do you look like?
• Time: When did we meet?
• Context: Why did we meet and who else was there?

Look over to the right. Do you see the nice layout of faces in this app? This is perhaps the biggest reason I want to use it. If i see someone I know I should know, I can quickly scroll through a collection of faces to find out who is across the room.

Thanks to the acceptance of checking email at events, even while around others, I can even look someone up mid conversation if I need to.

All of these people sync to Evernote, and you can search people inside the standard Evernote app.

But, what looks to be really cool is the fact that the Evernote Hello App, the new Evernote Food app and the notes you enter into Evernote can come together to show more context based on the times and locations you entered food, people and notes.

Evernote Hello is available free for the iPhone (iTunes), no word on an Android version just yet, but I would be surprised if Evernote isn’t working on it.

Remember the People You Meet With Evernote Hello is a post by Josh Smith from Gotta Be Mobile.

Evernote is a wildly popular franchise of note taking apps and services that geeks have been using for years. For Windows Mobile users, it goes way back. Evernote has sync services that allow you to sync your notes in the cloud and share notes across devices. Pretty much every OS, mobile or not, has Evernote support.

New to Windows Phone 7.5 are better social integration, search integration, background synchronization, and pinning of notes, notebooks, tags, searches, maps, and “new note” shortcuts audio, text and photo).

The following are the major additions with 2.1

• Pin anything to the home screen:  Now you can pin the things you need right to your home screen.
• Template notes: You can create templates for commonly created notes. Awesome feature!
• Improved text editing:  You can edit notes in the same format as when they were initially created.
• New language support: There is now language support for Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, and Polish.
• Background sync: The app will complete a sync when the device is on a WIFI connection, even if the phone is locked.
• Search integration: Evernote is integrated with the Windows Phone search. If you swipe across on a search result, you will see notes in Evernote related to that search.
• More social: You can now share a note to Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live.

I will get a video up of this app in the next couple days. Stay Tuned. Very excited for this update.

Grab Evernote 2.1 from the Windows Phone Marketplace! For more info, head to Evernote’s Blog.

Evernote for Windows Phone Updated: Adds Note Pinning, Templates, Etc is a post by Chris Leckness from Gotta Be Mobile.

Clearly works similar to the mobiel Webzine and Reader options in Dolphin and Safari, but on your big screen. Clearly is a Chrome browser extension which turns your online reading into a well laid out book style page.

In short, it makes reading long articles online a more pleasant experience, even bringing multiple page articles together into one page. Check out the Clearly from Evernote video below to see how it works.

You can install Clearly in your Chrome browser for free and start using it today. I have found that it works best on longer articles that I want to focus in on while I read, more so than short news articles. The nice thing is, you click the button to launch Clearly, so you only get it when you want it.

You can also clip the article right to Evernote from Clearly, if you can’t finish reading it. Below is an example of how a page looks after being loaded into Clearly. This is huge for me, especially when reading longreads and other longform content on the computer. If only this worked on my eTextbooks, which are some odd PDF format…

Evernote Clearly makes reading cleaner in your Chrome browser.

Clearly also allows you to customize the look of your reading screen with several options including night mode and text size.

I really hope there is some type of iPad and Android tablet integration of this soon, as it is a natural next step.

Clearly from Evernote Streamlines Online Reading is a post by Josh Smith from Gotta Be Mobile.

I’ve been using the free version of Evernote, but today I couldn’t resist and bought Evernote Premium, which brings a number of extras to the table. This deal was even more enticing, because it included a free Evernote t-shirt.

The shirts come in small through XL and are available in mens and women’s sizes.

The deal is available for a limited time at Fab.com, where shirt and year of Evernote Premium are normally $45 (the same price as Evernote Premium alone).

Because Fab.com hit 1 million users, you can follow this link to get a free $10 credit that knocks your price down to $35 plus $5 handling.

After you enter your email address and create a password, click on Today’s Sales and look for Evernote towards the bottom of the list.

You can click this link to go direct to the Evernote Premium deal, but if you don’t see the $10 credit you’ll need to try the above link. The deal is only good through tomorrow at 9:59 AM Eastern. We normally try to avoid posting flash deals, but this is too nice to pass up.

Why get Evernote premium?

Evernote lists 10 reasons you should get Evernote Premium on their website, many of which I have shares below.

• Monthly upload allowance increased to 1GB
• Maximum note size upgraded to 50MB
• Access previous copies of notes
• For Android, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users, access your notebooks offline
• PIN Lock on mobile apps
• Search within PDFs
• Priority image recognition
• Premium support
• No ads

My personal favorite features are the priority image recognition, ability to search within PDFs, offline note access and increased monthly uploads.

I use the Evernote clipper to save important articles I find online, text and all, in case the link dies. It’s also where i keep software key codes, important notes, recorded audio interviews, meeting notes and much more.

Grab Evernote Premium and a Sweet Evernote T-Shirt for $40 is a post by Josh Smith from Gotta Be Mobile.

I’ve always been a pack rat. I read things, view things, listen to things, and hang on to that which I find curious and worth keeping. Somewhere in storage I have boxes of notes on legal pads from shows I’ve directed, as well as newspaper and magazine articles that I clipped along the way. When the web came around I had a gazillion bookmarks of things I found interesting, as well as boxes of paper from articles that I found worth saving and printed out. There was a time when I was the best friend of the printer ink business. When Tablet PCs came along I was able to keep my theatre notes in digital files and I thought that was a revolution. At least for me. Actually it was the beginning of a change in my pack rat habits.

I also hoard books, full magazines and periodicals, and used to have a vinyl record collection that took a small army to move. Photos? Yep. Tons of them in boxes, never organized. In fact, I’ve changed the containers for those photos over the years more than I’ve ever looked at most of them. But I still hoard.

That mini-revolution that is the digital age has changed quite a bit of that. Sure I still have the books, photos, newspaper clippings, and some of the other things stored away physically. But I’ve cut back on that as I do my hunting and gathering through digital sources.

I use a variety of tools in my digital pack ratting and this is a rundown of what is working for me now as well as some tools of days gone by. I’ve broken it down into categories.

Research

I do a lot of research as I’m working on plays, grant writing, and other things. I like to save things and go back to them when I need them. I was a big del.icio.us fan for a long time as it was a quick and easy way to bookmark something for later use. I also used print quite a bit of material into OneNote. While I still use OneNote for that, my habits have shifted quite a bit as I mostly use Apple products these days.

I actually have a three step system at the moment for saving research. It is sort of a prioritization scheme. But there’s another reason for the redundancy. The three tools I’m using the most are Evernote, Instapaper, and Read It Later. If something is a high priority it gets clipped or saved to all three. If an article or bit of info is something I plan on using in the immediate future it will go to just Read It Later and Evernote. If the material is long form and something that I will get to at my leisure it will only go to Instapaper and occasionally Evernote.

That redundancy I mentioned speaks to my pack rat gene. The three services I mentioned all store what I save in their respective clouds. Those clouds may be stable and operating these days, but just like with any business there’s no guarantee that they will be their forever. In fact there’s no guarantee that anything stored digitally or physically will last forever no matter how many steps you take to persevere them. But having info I deem important stored across three clouds gives me some piece of mind.

News Articles

Whether it be reviews, or articles I want to keep for whatever reason I use the same tools I mentioned above. I have boxes of old reviews of plays that I’ve done over the years. I also have tons of articles saved digitally in OneNote, Evernote, Instapaper, and Read It Later. Keep in mind as you store things from the web, that occasionally links and bookmarks change just like old newspapers fade in time. You might think you have that link preserved, but at some point when you need it, well, the link doesn’t work anymore. This is why I like to use Evernote and OneNote because they allow me to save articles in a PDF or a printed format. Using Evernote in Safari (about the only think I use Safari for on the Mac platform) is the easiest and best looking way to do this. By holding down the Shift key when I go to clip something I get the web page or document in the exact way it appears on my screen. I’m sure Evernote users have clipped web pages before and seen the lovely three column effect where you get the left column, followed on the page with the body of the article, followed by the right column. I find that annoying.

I also use Printopia to print articles directly into Evernote. That works reasonably well for this kind of archiving, but it is also subject to the three column effect.

Photos

Again, with redundancy as an priority here (you never know when a service will be sold or change its ways), I store photos on Flickr, Facebook, Picassa, and also locally on hard drives. More on that option later in the post.

When my mother passed away just over a year ago, I became the family custodian of the collection of pictures she had saved over the years. I have boxes (now protected) of these photos. But as I was exploring through them (many my sisters and I had never seen) I found one collection of photos that had gotten destroyed by moisture of some sort. Those photos are gone forever, but the rest are preserved. Redundancy is possible in the digital pack rat age and I recommend we take advantage of that fact when it comes to our photographic memories. Having my photos duplicated across multiple services gives me a sense of redundant comfort.

Music

At the moment I’m largely tied into Apple’s iTunes ecosystem, although I use Amazon’s MP3 service to buy most of my music. I also have a range of music and sound effects from past shows that I keep archived in addition to purchased or ripped music. I’m anxious to see how iTunes Match works since that won’t require massive amounts of uploading to the iTunes servers in the way that Amazon and Google’s music services do. I also keep my music library backed up locally as well. We’re about to go through some evolution in the next few years as Apple, Amazon, and Google compete for our music collection storage. That’s a good thing as it might allow for a redundancy option. But I also keep my music backed up locally in addition to any Cloud service I may contemplate using.

Video

My wife and I have a constant running battle about my DVD collection that rivals anything I ever had with vinyl music. She’d love for me to get rid of it, but I don’t see that happening. While I’ve been moving more towards streaming or purchasing video content digitally (see I can compromise), I don’t see myself ever taking the time to rip the physical disks I have over to digital format. That said, I do have quite a bit of digital video that I keep stored on local hard drives. And that leads to this:

Pack Rat in the Cloud? Or on the desk? Or both?

Yes, I have a lot of stuff archived in the Cloud. But I also have most of it backed up locally on hard disks. If it is important to me, I’ll actually have it on two hard disks. Am I paranoid? Probably. But just like I don’t trust Cloud services to be available forever, I also don’t trust physical media to last forever. Once a year or so, I’ll go through the process of purchasing new portable hard drives for use with my machines. I’ll copy over the archived stuff for use on the new machine to the newer equipment. The older drive will get unplugged and stored in a secure location in case I need it. The device it is replacing will then come back to my house or office as a back up to the back up. This rotation gives me some piece of mind that I always have copies of the content I think is worth keeping available in three locations, plus on whatever Cloud service I’m using at the moment.

So, what about you? If you are a digital pack rat what are your strategies for saving and archiving your content in the digital age? There are obviously other methods, Apps, and strategies beyond those I use. We’d love to hear about any you use.

Tools for the Digital Pack Rat is a post by Warner Crocker from Gotta Be Mobile.

This isn’t the first Android tablet to come with a pen, but is the first on a Honeycomb model in the U.S. It costs an extra $30, so is it worth adding to the ThinkPad experience? Read on to find out.

Stylus Design

If you’ve ever used one of Lenovo’s convertible Windows-based ThinkPad tablet notebooks, the design of the stylus should be familiar. Given that Lenovo is an old hand at this, it’s no surprise that the metal stylus is comfortable to hold and use. It’s solid and just weighty enough to feel substantive and not like a toy. The red tip unscrews for inserting or replacing the AAAA (yep, they make them that small) battery and also has a notch for the included loop.

The reason for the battery is that the stylus and display actively communicate with each other. This technology, powered by NTrig, is superior to many capacitive stylus devices I’ve tried. Not just for the responsiveness, but also because you get a fine tip. Most other styli that work with these displays have a rounded, rubbery tip like this Kensington model. They’re a fine replacement for a fingertip, but don’t give as much precision as a narrow tip can.

Though the stylus isn’t standard with the tablet, there’s a port for it on the lower back. It slides in and locks securely but is easy to get out without looking. Just above the port is the notch for the loop, in case you fear losing the pen if it’s not attached.

Basic Functionality

With the stylus you can do anything on the ThinkPad that you can do with a finger — tap, drag, flick, etc. Due to the way the screen and the pen work together, users get all the benefit of a capacitive display (responsiveness, smooth scrolling, tapping, etc.) plus the benefits that come with pen input (drawing, precision tapping, handwriting). Plus, using the stylus keeps the finger smudges away.

Whenever I pulled out the stylus to work with the notes app I usually just kept it in my hand when I moved on to other things. It’s not at all cumbersome and I never noticed a difference between it and using my finger. The ease of tapping on links in web pages without having to be really precise or zoom in alone makes it a worthwhile accessory to me.

You can’t zoom or pull off other multitouch gestures with the stylus, unfortunately. Though it would be nice if you could using the button on the side.

Near the tip of the stylus is the Active button, which triggers functions you’d normally get if you tap and hold. For instance, if you press the button then tap on the Home screen, you’ll immediately go into the edit Home screens mode. This doesn’t work in every app, though.

MyScript Notes Mobile

To take best advantage of the stylus, Lenovo bundles the ThinkPad Tablet with MyScript Notes Mobile by VisionObjects. The idea here is that users can replace their paper notebook with this app, and this is reflected in the GUI. Thus you have spiral notebooks that open up on to blue-lined pages (yes, this is the only background). You don’t have to stay in the lines for the app to work, but I found myself doing so, anyway.

MyScript is pretty robust and one of the best examples of this kind of app I’ve seen. It can translate your handwriting into text as you go along (it will wait until you pause to do the translation), or you can switch modes and just scribble, then choose to translate the text later. When in scribble mode you can also do freehand drawing. You don’t have to translate your writing into text if you don’t want to — the app will save the page as an image.

If the app doesn’t quite get the words right when translating, you can cross out whole words or letters, add in, and even divide up words and sentences. It supports up to 27 languages and dialects and works with non-Western characters in languages like Japanese and Chinese.

With my handwriting — which is somewhat messy but not a tragedy — the app correctly translated my scribbles about 75% of the time. Even when I wrote more deliberately/carefully the system wasn’t perfect. Writing quickly didn’t decrease the accuracy very much. How well this app works will depend on the individual. If you’ve got very messy handwriting, it might not be very useful for you.

One big issue with writing on a tablet like it’s a notebook is how to hold your hand. MyScript has built-in Palm Rejection for both left and right-handed users that is supposed to detect when you’ve got a palm, or edge of a palm, on the display, and ignore it. This didn’t always work.

After writing I often noticed small marks at the bottom of the page under my palm. And if I put my hand on the screen before the stylus, the app took a few seconds to figure out which it should pay attention to. Also, the app can’t control what happens if your palm brushes something at the bottom of the screen, like the Notifications tray or the quick launch icon.

Two major things bugged me about this app beyond the palm thing. First, it only works in portrait mode, not landscape. Even though this does mimic a paper notebook, I would rather have the choice. Besides, using it in landscape mode would make it easier to avoid putting my palm on the actual screen and rest it on the tablet’s edge.

Also, I’d like the option of continuous scrolling on note pages. Since the farther down you move your hand the closer you are to activating something on the lower bar, I want to keep the blank space in my notebook in the center or near the top.

Exporting notes is easy, but you can only do so a page at a time and not a whole notebook. Pages with scribbles can only export as images. Pages with text can either export as text or as an image. Notes Mobile will send the image or text to any compatible application, including Gmail, messaging, printer share, etc. I exported both image and text to SpringPad and Evernote easily, though the text had some funky line breaks in it.

I could see using this app in situations where I really need write — such as taking notes — or when I need freeform drawings. Taking notes quickly works quite well, especially if you turn off the automatic translation and just go for scribbles. There’s no lag and the pen tip is almost as responsive as an ink pen. However, I’m not ready to give up my LiveScribe pen and paper for this just yet.

FlexT9 Keyboard

With the inclusion of the FlexT9 keyboard Lenovo tried to bring handwriting recognition to other apps as well. By default, the keyboard shows normal keys with the functionality you’d expect. I like that there’s easy access to numbers and symbols via tap and hold. And, like Swype, users can drag a finger or the stylus from letter to letter to form words.

On the lower right side is a Stylus icon. Tap that and now you have a free form space to write your words instead of typing. If you’re at all familiar with Graffiti on the old Palm OS or the handwriting area on the old Windows Mobile platform you’ll be comfortable with this. However, it works more like Windows Mobile than Graffiti in that you don’t always need to create letters in one specific way.

I found this mode frustrating and difficult to use. Though I was careful to print clearly, the engine often misinterpreted my words badly. Many times it wouldn’t even get close. And the behavior wasn’t consistent. Sometimes I could write a whole sentence and only see one mistake. Then the next sentence there would be tons of mistakes, rendering it unreadable. And no matter how often I wrote, deleted, and rewrote a word, the engine didn’t seem to learn.

The keyboard does come with extensive documentation that offers some advice on best ways to write tricky letters like t. That didn’t solve all of the issues, but it’s good that the help file exists.

Though you have plenty of space to write out words, users can also write letters on top of each other to minimize hand movement. The accuracy here was about the same as writing letters next to each other.

I wondered whether it was the pen or the keyboard causing the problem, so I downloaded the Graffiti for Android keyboard. Using that, I saw more accuracy and it was rare for the keyboard to interpret the wrong letter or word. So the pen is working just fine, it’s FlexT9 that needs some tweaks.

Stylus Use With Other Apps

As I said, the stylus works anywhere in Android, so it will work with other apps. However, what you can do with the stylus depends on the features of the app in question.

For instance, in DocumentsToGo there’s no function that allows users to draw or scribble on documents, so you can’t do that even with the stylus. However, ezPDF Reader does give users the ability to draw on a document, make annotations, add notes, etc. Then pen works very well for that.

If you download Evernote and Skitch, you can create handwritten notes and drawings, which are saved as images. Evernote doesn’t do handwriting recognition, but you can export text from MyScript Notes to Evernote, as I said.

In the future, there may be more apps that specifically take advantage of the stylus in the same way as MyScript. Lenovo’s App Shop is the likeliest place to find them, as the company says that all apps you find there have been tested to ensure that they work on the ThinkPad and IdeaPad K1 tablets.

Conclusion

The stylus is definitely a worthy addition to the ThinkPad. Since it doesn’t cost too much extra, it’s worth getting from the start. Though the FlexT9 keyboard isn’t as useful as it could be in the handwriting department, MyScript Notes goes a long way to making the ThinkPad a viable replacement for the notepad in your briefcase. And more apps that take advantage of the functionality are surely on the way.

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet Review: Working With The Stylus is a post by K. T. Bradford from Gotta Be Mobile.

Currently Verizon is offering a $100 gift card to customers who upgrade from a dumbphone to a smartphone, which has led to a lot of people thinking of switching to a smartphone.

In talking with many of these users, and the writers here at GottaBeMobile, I have identified many areas where having a smartphone is a major convenience and can deliver enough real savings to cover your data plan each month.

Whether you use it for work, play or just keeping things running smoothly at home there are many benefits to smartphones.

10 Reasons to Get a Smartphone

Save Money – Having a smartphone on hand while you shop can help you save on everyday purchases, and save big on larger purchases like appliances. Not only can you read product reviews while you are in the store, you can also compare prices by scanning barcodes to make sure that you are getting the best deal.

While talking with a potential smartphone buyer recently, she shared that if she had a smartphone she would have been able to find out the features on an appliance at Sears and save $50 too.

Without a smartphone, she had to drive home after employees couldn’t provide any information about the appliance, and there she found that Sears.com had it available for $50 less. She ordered online and picked up in store. If she had a smartphone that whole process could have happened without the extra time and gas.

Savings like this add up, and could cover your data plan over time.

Finding Directions – With an iPhone or a Droid, you can get driving, walking and public transit directions on your phone without asking a stranger or pestering your family every time you go somewhere. Android phones have free built in turn by turn GPS directions, so you don’t need to bring your GPS unit out anymore. Google Maps for Android even includes real time traffic information.

Organization – No more forgetting about important events or being unorganized. The calendar and to do apps for smartphones beat those on regular cell phones easily, and thanks to app stores, you can find a solution that fits your needs. There are many which will allow you to add items and calendar entries from your computer too.

Instant Access to Business Information - No more wondering if a restaurant is good, just search reviews on your smartphone. Need to find the hours of the local hardware store? No problem. The list of places and information you can find is endless, and quicker to access than turning on your computer.

Weather at a Glance – Instead of waiting around for weather on the 8′s, or booting up your computer, just glance at a weather widget on your smartphone. You can get your current and forecast weather as well as severe weather alerts.

Settle Arguments - Need to end an argument about how many seasons of Happy Days there were before it jumped the shark? Or how many completions Michael Vick had last season? Instead of going back and forth, look up the answer on your smartphone.

Read Email Faster – Instead of deleting junk email for the first 10 minutes when you open up your inbox, you can easily tap and delete spam and unwanted emails from your phone while you wait in line.

Books, Magazines and Movies For Less – Instead of driving to the bookstore to get the newest release for $25, you can open up the Kindle, Nook or iBooks apps on your smartphone and download the latest books for less. You can do this anywhere you have a cell phone signal.

You can also purchase magazines, movies and TV shows on your smartphone. If you are concerned about reading on a smaller screen, opt for a phone like the Droid Bionic with a 4.3″ qHD display that is easy to read outdoors and allows you to read more on the screen at once than similar devices.

Deposit Checks and Make Payments – Instead of going to the bank or writing a check, you can use your smartphone to handle many of your banking needs. There are a number of apps that allow you to use your iPhone or Android camera to deposit a check from home, and any ways to send money to a friend for a group gift or a split lunch bill. See – iPhone Banking apps and deposit checks on Android with Paypal.

Don’t Ever Forget – Instead of keeping all of your receipts and other important bits of information, take a picture of them with your smartphone as soon as you get it. Then upload it to Evernote or Springpad and you’ll always be able to find the info. You can use this to remember a location, a favorite beer or wine, gift ideas and much more.

Smartphone Upgrade advice

If you want these benefits, but don’t want email to constantly be popping up and tempting you to read it, you can turn off auto sync, so that you only get new email when you want it. Another thing to keep in mind is that if you have a discount through work or as a veteran it will often carry over to the data plan, and sometimes will be bigger than your main line discount.

Money image via Flickr AMagill

10 Ways Smartphones Save You Time and Money is a post by Josh Smith from Gotta Be Mobile.

Solutions do exist for those of us who need a bridge between paper and screen for our notes, such as the Echo Smartpen. However, for that you’ll need to buy a special pen and special paper. Japanese stationery maker Kokuyo eliminates one of those needs with the CamiApp. The company creates special notebooks that work in conjunction with the app (currently available for iOS and later this month for Android) to digitize handwritten pages and import your notes to Dropbox or Evernote.

The neat thing about the app is that it can compensate for odd angles, so even if you don’t get the notebook exactly lined up in the shot, the image it generates won’t be distorted. You can also add little markers to the corner of pages that act as tags, which the app recognizes.

Some note editing is possible, though it doesn’t seem from the video below that CamiApp does any kind of handwriting recognition or OCR. You can just add markings within the app, erase things, etc. The app saves notes as JPEG files, which you can share or add to Dropbox and Evernote.

This isn’t as robust a system as the Echo Smartpen, of course, but should be useful to people who can’t quite let go of paper in this digital age.

CamiApp is available in English on the App Store and will only work with the special notebooks from Kokuyo. Amazon and JetPens sell some Kokuyo products, though not the CamiApp books yet. You can probably find them in Kinokuniya stores in the U.S.

Hat Tip: TechCrunch

CamiApp For iOS Digitizes Written Notes, Works With Evernote And Dropbox is a post by K. T. Bradford from Gotta Be Mobile.

Our sister site, Notebooks.com, recently provided a list of the best Back To School gadgets and tech as well as 5 great laptops for going back to school. In similar fashion, this is a list of great iPad apps for going back to school.

These apps listed below can help you make the grade, or even just kill a few minutes between courses.

inClass – Free

inClass is designed to keep your school work organized and on time. It costs nothing to use, but you might as well drop a buck on it to remove the annoying ads at the bottom of the screen.

inClass Keeps Your Course Schedule with Alarms

The interface looks like a student organizer with room for your class schedule, professor contact info and homework assignment lists. You can also take notes right in the app with the ability to record audio, video and pictures. You can email notes to a friend who missed the lecture, or to yourself for backup. If I were using this app, I believe I would take my notes by hand on paper and then snap a shot with the iPad 2 camera or an iPhone/iPod Touch. It only lets you type notes inside the app so no inking allowed. Despite that, I like the app.

inClass Lets You Type Notes and Record Audio, Video or Photos

If you are in class and need to open another app, you can keep the audio recording going by using the background function built into iOS 4. Double tap the home icon and open the other app and the recording still keeps capturing the lecture audio.

inClass is free in the app store and has an in-app purchase of $.99 to remove the annoying ads you see in the first shot above.

PocketCAS – lite version free, Pro version $19.99

If you are a math major, or have a somewhat advanced math class, this app will help you with simple to complex mathematic equations and formulas. The tutorials even show you how to solve them, so that you can not only check your work but also learn how to do the assignment. The mathematical keyboard makes entering these equations and formulas much easier, although the lite version is not as feature rich in this area as the pro version.

PocketCAS Helps with Complex Math

After you finish creating a graph or chart or some special equation, you can output the content to your Photo library on the iPad, email it as a PDF, print it using Air Print, or in the pro version you can send it to an external display using a projector and the dock to VGA or HDMI adapter. Hopefully, when iOS 5 comes along you will be able to send it wirelessly via an Apple TV.

The paid version is $19.99 and outputs the results via projector and has more advanced keyboard functions. The lite version is free. In the app store there are a lot of negative reviews of the lite version saying the ads are too distracting and the keyboard is not as functional.

Evernote and Evernote Peek – Free

Evernote bills itself as “an extension of your brain” and that it is for many us. I use Evernote to store notes, tax receipts, personal information, and more. As a student you could set up a separate notebook for each semester, class, or for a project. Then import content to it using email or enter it directly by typing into the app. You can also record audio and photos.

Evernote Peek Turns iPad 2 Into a Study Tool

Evernote Peek takes Evernote and turns it into a flash card system along with a magnetic iPad 2 Smart Cover. For example, if you are studying Spanish, then you could set up your vocabulary words and study them using the Evernote Peek app. You fold up the part of the Apple Smart Cover that is furthest from the magnets. There you get your question, or in this case the Spanish word. Open the cover the rest of the way to reveal the answer. Below is the company’s video demo:

Evernote Peek now also supports audio clues, which would be great for a foreign language or for studying in a group. Record the questions and listen to them and then test yourself. Get the answer by opening the cover the rest of the way.

Both Evernote and Evernote Peek are free in the App store and require a free account with the Evernote service. Remember that Evernote Peek only works with iPad 2 and the Apple Smart Cover or a cover that uses the magnetic on/off feature and folds up at the very edge.

CourseSmart eTextbooks for iPad – Free

Below I provide links to the three major e-book apps. But for textbooks, our own Josh Smith, who teaches college classes, recommends CourseSmart’s eTextbooks for iPad app. He said it has the best selection. Of course it is free and looks like most e-book apps with a bookshelf view and easy to read interface. The app includes the following list of features taken from their App store description:

• Access your eTextbooks for quick reference
• Scan for images, tables, graphs & charts
• Skim thumbnails or full pages
• Add and Edit Notes to pages as you study
• View your notes during an open book exam
• Find what you need using keyword search
• Get a true digital equivalent of your textbook

Audible – Free with $14.95 Monthly Subscription

With Audible you can listen to your text books instead of reading them. This can be a huge time saver especially if you have a commute of more than fifteen minutes to school every day. I literally drove two hours to grad school three days a week, and listening to some of my books made that productive time.

Audible gives you access to a free book or two every month depending on your subscription level. You can save up credits for a couple of months so you can get a few of your books all at once. Many books do not work well as audio books, but that English Lit novel you have to read could be a great option. Even if you only find one or two books a semester, this makes the subscription worthwhile.

The iPhone app works well on the iPad and gives access to all of your books either via download or streaming. I wouldn’t normally recommend an app that is not a native iPad app, but in this case you will likely be starting the book and then moving on to something else like taking notes or playing a game, so listening in the background means you don’t see the ugly 2X interface. That is how I use it.

The app is free in the app store.

All Work Makes Students Dull

The above apps focus on your class work, but here are a few apps just for fun.

RAGE HD Helps Take Your Mind off Studying

RAGE HD – Free this week – A fun shooter that has some nice graphics and is easy to learn is the perfect distraction from studying.

SlingPlayer Mobile – $29.99 – In the Gadget Guide at Notebooks.com I recommended a SlingBox connected to your home TV so you can get local news and sports from home. You need the mobile app to enjoy that gadget. It streams the shows from your home TV even if you get programming via a cable or satellite set-top box or a DVR. You can switch channels and schedule DVR recordings too.

HBO Go and MAX Go – Free for subscribers – These apps stream on demand movies and TV series from either HBO or Cinemax through the Internet to your iPad. Only those who subscribe from one of the approved services will be able to access the content. Students can stick it to the cable guy in college by using mom or dad’s subscription info, with their permission, to get access.

HBO and Max GO stream content from the pay channels to your iPad

iTunes U – Free

While technically not an app, but a service, iTunes U works on the iPad fine. The service provides learning podcasts from major universities all over the country and from various kinds of courses. You can learn US History from Dr. Dominic Capeci, of Missouri State University or iPhone Application Development from Alan Cannistraro and Josh Shaffer of Stanford.

iTunes U Offers Free Audio Lectures via iTunes

Go to college without going to college or just supplement your learning from these great courses, all of which are free for the download and will sync to your iPad via iTunes. You can also access them directly in the iTunes App on your iPad.

Other Obvious App Choices

Here are a few obvious app choices. We include them even though you likely already thought about them. Just in case you didn’t, we list them below:

• Amazon Kindle – Free – save money on text books by buying digital versions and supplement CourseSmart above.
• Nook – Free – if for some reason your textbook is not on Amazon, then look here.
• iBooks – Free – if for some reason your textbook isn’t on Amazon or Nook, then look at iBooks and it might be there.
• Amazon Mobile – Free – students already get free Amazon Prime memberships, so why not put their store on your iPad and save money and time?

15 Back to School iPad Apps is a post by Kevin Purcell from Gotta Be Mobile.

I use both Evernote and Skitch all the time and I’m thinking this marriage will be a happy one for consumers. Libin also stated that while Skitch is now a big part of the Evernote family, it will remain a separate App. He also says we’ll be seeing versions for Windows and other platforms, including a just released version for Android and an iPhone version is in the works. There’s also talk about major upgrades for Evernote coming soon.

Skitch can currently be had for $20 on the Mac App Store but Libin says it will eventually be free.

Here’s a link to the Evernote Blog post about this (it currently isn’t working though) and here’s a link to the TechCrunch article about the deal.

Evernote Acquires Popular Mac Screen Capture App Skitch is a post by Warner Crocker from Gotta Be Mobile.

Just like Pandora learns from your thumbs up and thumbs down actions, Zite learns which stories you like, which websites you trust and which authors you want like to read. The learning nature of Zite places it far ahead of the competition on the iPad. On top of customizing your reading, Zite also displays the stories in a nice looking format that makes browsing through stories enjoyable.

Zite now offers send to Evernote as a sharing option.

The most recent app update has added the ability to share your favorite posts with three new sources.

• Read It Later: It’s been called a “DVR for the Web.” Use Read It Later to save all of the great articles you find in Zite for future reference or for reading on a plane. Additionally, if you are a Read It Later user, you’ll be able to jump-start your Zite personalization using articles you’ve saved.
• LinkedIn: Share articles with your professional network via LinkedIn.  You can update your network, post to groups within LinkedIn, or even send an article to someone in your LinkedIn network.
• Evernote: Add a web clip of an article to your Evernote archive.

These sharing features may seem small at first glance, but the ability to add your favorite stories to Evernote is a big deal. Zite uses the standard Evernote web clipper which makes it easy to add tags, notes and change notebooks. Previously you could email the story to Evernote, but it was a pain to switch notebooks and organize your notes.

Zite demo video shows off the iPad app.

We’re excited to see these new features, and look forward to seeing how personalized magazines and news apps continue to grow and define how we consumer and remember information.

3 More Reasons You Should Use Zite as Your Personal Digital Magazine is a post by Josh Smith from Gotta Be Mobile.

Evernote Android tablet homescreen

Gone is the upscaled Evernote home screen full of unused space, and in its place is a new Evernote Android tablet home screen. Instead of a collection of icons, the new home screen gives you fast access to your notes in a beautiful image and date friendly layout. From this screen you can search, create new notes, share existing notes and even view them on a map.

Evernote for Android tablet on screen keyboard toolbar

Evernote chose an innovative way to deal with the space taken up by the on-screen keyboard, adding a quick access bar to the top of the keyboard when you are in not view.

The toolbar allows you to, “choose a notebook and assign tags; the next two allow you take a snapshot, record audio or attach a file; the last ones let you create styled text.”

Evernote Android Tablet search options.

From the home screen of the Evernote Android tablet app you can tap on the magnifying class for a drop down search box. Search allows you to access search history, saved searches and perform advanced searches from your tablet.

Evernote single note view.

The new single note view includes all the info you need on the current note as well as a collection of other notes. From this screen you can share the note on Twitter, email it or send to another Android app.

If you are keen on entering your notes on the go, you may want to pull up your notes on a map to find a specific note that is escaping you in search. Pull up the map view and notes that are tagged with a location will pop up on a Google Map with images along the right to help you track down the note you need.

The Android tablet doesn’t get all the fun to itself. Both Android Evernote apps now support rich text formatting. This means you can add bullet points, bold, italics and underlining to your notes from any Android app.

New Evernote Android widget

Another nice addition to all Evernote for Android apps is a new widget that allows you to access recent notes, quickly take a picture for a note, record a note or start a search. Fast access to taking or updating a note can mean the difference between remembering the next big thing and forgetting it because you saw a cupcake.

We are excited to see a Evernote on Android tablets. Google has had difficulties in building the Honeycomb tablet apps catalog, but additions like this add to the overall user experience. Evernote alone can’t make up for other honeycomb issues, but it is a promising addition to the app store.

Evernote Arrives on Android Tablets With Big Screen Interface is a post by Josh Smith from Gotta Be Mobile.

As you would expect, the Evernote App for Windows Phone 7 will sync to your Evernote account, allowing you to add notes and snapshots as well as access your entire Evernote history. Evernote says this app is designed to work on Windows Phone 7, “from the ground up,” calling it one of the most feature rich releases yet.

When you are in the Evernote WP7 app you will see the following panels;

• Notes: A complete scrollable note list
• Notebooks: Tap on a notebook to view its contents
• Tags: Tap on a tag to see all the notes associated with it
• Recent notes: This list lets you jump to recently viewed notes

The Evernote App for Windows Phone 7 has all the features you would expect when it comes to new note creation including the ability to tap the snapshot button to open your camera app for an instant capture.

From a note searching standpoint you will be able to search all of your Evernote notes. On the phone you can see your previous searches and save searches for fast access to common note searches. Whenever you add a note, Evernote for WP7 will tag the location, allowing you to call up your notes on a map to see where you were when you had a great idea or snapped a picture of a restaurant you wanted to try.

Other features include the ability to share your notes via email or post them directly to Facebook as well as offline access for Evernote premium subscribers.

You can find Evernote for Windows Phone 7 in the Marketplace on your phone, if you don’t see it right now, check back soon as it may take some time to show up on all devices.

Evernote for Windows Phone 7 App is Finally Here is a post by Josh Smith from Gotta Be Mobile.

Evernote Peek is basically a curiosity, which is a good thing because it is free. Essentially if you open up the first flap of your Smart Cover with Evernote Peek running you get a little quiz question.  You can connect this to your Evernote App and use the questions to create study guides, but I’m guessing folks will just have fun with this.

Evernote Peek is an iPad 2 App that Works with the Smart Cover is a post by Warner Crocker from Gotta Be Mobile.

Note the Highlighted Article and the Dark Right Sidebar

The biggest news is the Article Clip mode which can detect the actual content you want to clip on blog posts and webpages automatically. This means you get faster clips and don’t end up with a note full of extra text that can confuse searches. The Article Clip mode identifies the actual content and clips that to your Evernote Notebook. You can override the Article Clip mode by highlighting the text you want to clip, just like before. We’ve been using the new clipper for a day now and it is a big improvement over the previous Google Chrome Extension.

Evernote has also cleaned up the note clipping interface, for a more modern look that isn’t as picky about tags as previous versions have been. The interface allows you to add tags and comments as well as change the notebook you are saving too. The new look keeps the ability to browse your notes and to see all the notes you have clipped from a specific site.

The update also enables the ability to search your Evernote notes from Bing and Yahoo, in addition to Google. This is handy for finding related notes when you are searching for something. You can control this in the settings, if you don’t want to search your notes while searching the web.

Another improvement is the way that the Chrome Evernote extension will notify you of a page clip. If you are clipping a page with a lot of media files it can take some time. Now, the clipper will let you know when the clip is complete with a popup notification.

You can install the Evernote Chrome Web Clipper from the Chrome Extension Gallery. If you already have the Evernote Clipper installed it will automatically update, though you may need to restart Chrome to see the new version.

Evernote Clipper For Chrome Updated with Focused Article Clipping is a post by Josh Smith from Gotta Be Mobile.

Still on the fence about the iPad or iPad 2? Check out the fun things you can do with the tablet and then be sure to read our iPad 2 review to see how the iPad 2 measures up.

Productivity

Wunderlist – FREE

Wunderlist is a beautiful and very functional to do list that offers simple list style to do management, but also can handle some advanced features such as what’s due today, starred items and multiple lists. Wunderlist automatically syncs between the web and your other devices which allows you to have it on hand wherever you are. The app earns a spot because the Wunderlist service gets task management right in our opinion.

The Wunderlist app is free and comes with apps for the iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, Windows and the web. Tasks sync between the devices automatically with your username and password, there’s no backend setup.

NoteTaker HD 5 – $4.99

NoteTaker HD is one of our favorite note taking apps. This note taking tool has a wide range of options which earn it a top spot including the ability to use your own backgrounds, palm rejection and support for the HDMI adapter which allows you to use this as a digital whiteboard if you have a projector or HDTV nearby.

Ultimately inking on the iPad comes down to personal preference, but right now NoteTaker HD 5 takes a top spot on our tablet.

Evernote – FREE

Like having an extra brain, Evernote is the perfect app for keeping track of information on every platform you might ever use. It syncs your notes and organizes them by tags, folders and date. You can save things like pictures, audio, and notes. We use it as a portable scanner and record meetings while taking notes. If someone hands you a meeting handout, just snap a shot with the iPad 2 camera and save it in the note file. There are other apps that work with Evernote extending the services functionality too.

Games

NBA JAM HD – $9.99

NBA JAM is back Baby! If you were a fan of the NBA JAM series on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis then you will love this faithful transition which brings along all the things you loved about the original. Crazy Announcer, Check. Huge Dunks, Check. BackBoard Breaking and Big Head Mode, Check. Classic 2 v. 2 mode with pushing and goaltending, Check.

In short, NBA JAM is worth the $10 and delivers a fun and easy to play NBA JAM experience on the iPad’s touchscreen.

RealRacing HD – $6.99

This is one of the most enjoyable racing sim games on the iPad. It makes use of the accelerometer and the gyroscope if you have an iPad 2 giving you accurate steering.

The races are as easy or hard as you want them to be and the career mode allows you to progress in your skill.

Entertainment

IMDb – FREE

If you have ever been watching a movie and wondered where you’ve seen that guy playing the hero, this is the app for you. It settles a lot of arguments about whether that’s the lady who was in that movie we saw last week or not.

It also gives you info about films, TV shows and just about every actor who has ever starred in either one. You can also rate shows and movies, get local TV listings and show times, and find out who won best actor in 1987.

Movies by Flixster with Rotten Tomatoes – FREE

We love Flixster because it not only tells you about what movies are coming out this week and in the coming weeks, but it also gives Rotten Tomatoes ratings. You can learn about DVD releases and read reviews. Link it with social media accounts to share about your favorite flicks or even those you hated.

If you like to view trailers Flixster has them. You can also go back to past movies just in case you are trying to decide what to stream instantly on Netflix or Amazon.

MLB At Bat 11 – $14.99

For baseball fans, MLB at Bat 11 (a past Notebooks.com iPad App of the Week) is the best way to enjoy games if you are out of the market of your favorite team or cannot be near a TV or radio but have Internet access. The live video streaming costs extra, but there are audio feeds, stats, and news for the diehard fan.

This app is also the gold standard for how an official pro sports app should work.  The only thing close in any major sport is the Major League Soccer app.

News

Zite – Free

Zite is essentially a magazine version of Pandora. You choose your topics and can connect to sources like Google Reader, Facebook and Twitter as well. Zite pulls in related items and organizes the stories by topic so that you can catch up on news and topics you care about in a beautiful and fun interface. The Zite app makes it easy to read your news and share it with others. We only wish it had a send to Evernote button!

Zite is like Pandora because you can tell the app if you like a source, a topic or even an author to see more or less of that specific type of news or stories from that writer. Zite is our preferred way to get a good look at the news of the day.

NewsRack – $4.99

For RSS addicts, the two best apps are Flipboard and Newsrack. If you are like us and prefer the text based news app, then this is it. It syncs with Google Reader and does a great job of presenting either the text only version of an article or letting you access the full article as it looks on the web site. You can also have a hybrid of text with graphics but with the ads removed. It is a past Notebooks.com iPad App of the Week.

Photography

QuickShot – $.99

Taking pictures with the iPad 2 is fine, but getting those photos off the iPad is not the easiest thing. Apply may not have give us a good way to do this, but QuickShot with DropBox does. You take a picture and then it uploads to your DropBox online storage automatically, so long as you have Internet access. If not it will do so the next time the app is open and the iPad 2 is connected. It now will also upload photos in your camera roll so you don’t even have to take the pictures with the app. This was a recent Notebooks.com iPad App of the Week.

PhotoSync – $1.99

PhotoSync is another app that lets you offload your pictures. Unlike QuickShot it goes directly to the computer, another iPad or an iPhone. The computer has to be running a small piece of software. To work with another iOS device the app must be installed. A third way to get the pictures synced is to access the app via a web browser. The two devices have to be on the same network to work. It syncs selected pictures or all photos since the last sync. It was also a past Notebooks.com iPad App of the Week.

Social Networking

Twitteriffic – FREE

This is one of the best looking Twitter clients fo the iPad. We like it because it is stable, easy to use, and with an in app upgrade you an manage more than one account. It has all the features you would want and presents them in the best interface of all the Twitter apps we have used.

If you use Twitter on the iPad, you need to try out Twitterific.

Friendly – Free

Friendly is like the long lost friend of the iPad, which reconnects on Facebook. This free app delivers a tablet friendly Facebook interface which gives you newsfeeds, photos, notifications and more. You may even prefer this streamlined version of Facebook to the website you see on your computer.

If you have been using the Facebook website on your iPad, you need to download Friendly today. It’s a night and day improvement.

Utilities

SugarSync – FREE

The SugarSync service is a great backup and syncing tool. This is the client that works with the service. It has a file viewer built into the app so you can not only access your office docs, pictures, and PDFs, but you can also read and view them. If you sync your MP3 files, you can play those better than you can with the new Amazon Cloud Player service.

SugarSync includes 5GB of free storage, but can go higher with subscription plans or through referrals. Check out our recent Sugar Sync review.

LogMeIn Ignition – $29.99

If you want to remotely access your computer, this is the best app! It is not the cheapest, but in this category you get what you pay for. The app is simple to use, allows you to transfer files between your computer and the iPad and is absolutely the simplest remote access and control on the iPad.

We liked it so much we chose it as a past Notebooks.com iPad App of the Week.

Kevin Purcell and Josh Smith contributed to this list.

The Best iPad and iPad 2 Apps [May 2011] is a post by GBM Staff from Gotta Be Mobile.