Hasta La Gadget!

Evernote acquired the Penultimate app for iPad last year with the conspicuous goal of making handwritten notes as easy to synchronize as to-do lists and snippets from the web. After several months of silence, the newly reworked Penultimate 4 is the result. The drawing tool now treats Evernote not just as a sharing option, but an integral part of its being. While it’s possible to skip the sign-in, those who link their account get both cross-platform access to their work as well as cloud-based searches of their more legible writing. There’s likewise a simpler interface with more realistic pen input. Truth be told, however, we suspect that many of Penultimate 4’s would-be adopters will just care that the app is now free — as of today, the biggest cost is that of an optional Evernote Premium account. As long as they’re using an iPad running iOS 6, note takers yearning for the flexibility of a pad and paper in an era of cloud syncing and tablets can give Penultimate a try at the source link.

Filed under: Tablets

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Source: App Store

Good ideas are hard to predict, both before and after they are introduced as prototypes. The push-button (touch-tone) telephone was conceptually launched to the consumer market at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, 21 years after the device was invented by Bell Telephone labs. Another 20 years after the Seattle exposition, touch-tone phones finally penetrated 50 percent of American homes. A general lack of tech frenzy, and monopoly pricing control, slowed adoption. But it’s also true that the new phones didn’t solve a fundamental problem. They sped up dialing, which solved a non-essential but important user-interface problem of rotary dial phones.

Each year at CES, tech enthusiasts get a chance to glimpse prototypical ideas and guess whether they will endure. In doing so, one question should remain central: “What problem is being solved?”

Continue reading Editorial: TV gets prettier, smarter and dumber

Filed under: Misc, Home Entertainment, Household, Wireless, Sony

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These days, it seems that the art of taking down handwritten notes is dying. Why use a pen and paper when you’ve got a tablet or ultrabook in your bag that you can use to type things up instead? There is something to be said for handwritten notes, however – sometimes it’s much faster to write down something by hand, and during big shows like CES, taking along a pen and some paper ultimately cuts down on the amount of stuff you’re taking onto the show floor.

Of course, the environmentally-minded among us might be concerned with the amount of paper we use to take down these notes, but thankfully the folks at Improv Electronics have found the answer to that wasteful issue. Say hello to the Boogie Board Sync LCD eWriter, which is outfitted with a 9.7-inch pressure-sensitive LCD screen that lets you jot down notes on the fly and then share them in any number of ways. This isn’t the first Boogie Board eWriter we’ve seen, but it certainly is the largest of the bunch.

The Boogie Board Sync comes equipped with a micro SD slot, so if you’d like to stash your notes on a card and move them to your other devices later, you can certainly do that. There’s also a micro USB port for wired transfer, but if you’re a fan of going wireless, this baby also comes with support for Bluetooth. Using that Bluetooth functionality, you can send your finished note to any other Bluetooth-supported device, whether that’s a computer, smartphone, or tablet. You can also sync your Boogie Board with a second screen using Bluetooth, meaning that what you write down on the eWriter shows up on your second screen (perfect for presentations and the like). Fancy saving your note and uploading it to Evernote to refer back to later? You can do that too.

The models we saw during ShowStoppers certainly look nice, but at the moment, they’re only in the prototype stage. Though they do feel good in the hand at the present moment, we’re expecting a few things to change as we move toward the final product, which is scheduled to be released in time for 2013′s holiday season. Hopefully we’ll get to spend a bit more time with the Boogie Board Sync soon, but for now, have a look at our CES portal for much more from the show.

Boogie Board Sync 9.7 hands-on is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Refrigerators with touchscreens haven’t made much of a dent in the American home, but they’re certainly a staple at CES. Samsung’s latest entry, the rather large 32 cubic-foot four-door T9000 LCD, isn’t exactly new territory for the company. At 2011’s show the the RF4982 showed what was possible with an 8-inch display and a few productivity apps, but the 9000 adds some much needed versatility by integrating Evernote into the Linux-based OS. The connected household can quickly update a shopping list when looking in the fridge or pull up recipes to reference while milling about the kitchen. It also goes big by moving up to a 10-inch panel. Sadly Samsung has not announced pricing or availability yet for the LCD version, but the touchscreen-less edition of the T9000 will set you back a rather jaw-dropping $4,000 when it ships this spring. For more check out the PR after the break.

Continue reading Samsung debuts T9000 refrigerator with LCD and Evernote integration

Filed under: Household, Samsung

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With Apple recently releasing a list of what it considers to be the best iOS apps of 2012, we’ve been waiting with bated breath for Google to reveal its own list. The wait is over, as today Google named the best apps to land on the Google Play Store in 2012. The apps range to ones that probably everyone has installed on their Android device to ones that will be relatively unknown to the mainstream crowd, so you could potentially use Google’s list to discover your new favorite app.

Google doesn’t assign any particular ranking to these apps, so none of them are supposed to be considered “better” than the others. Some of them bring online storefronts to your device, while others are services that many users take advantage of on a daily basis. The majority of them are free to install, save for just one app on the list. In no particular order, here are Google’s best Android apps of 2012:

• Evernote
• Zappos
• Pinterest
• Grimm’s Snow White
• Expedia
• Pocket
• Ancestry
• Fancy
• Mint.com Personal Finance
• SeriesGuide Show Manager
• Pixlr Express
• TED

It isn’t very surprising to see Evernote and Pinterest show up on the list, and Zappos is a clear choice considering it seems to be pre-installed on nearly every Android device that comes through our doors. It’s good to see apps like Pocket, Fancy, and Pixlr Express get some much-deserved attention, and it seems that Google has delivered a list that’s quite diverse.

As diverse as it is, it notably doesn’t feature any games unless you want to count Grimm’s Snow White – an interactive storybook – as one. Perhaps Google will also release a list of its favorite Android games for 2012? Only time will tell, but for now, let us know if you use any of the apps listed in Google’s favorites for the year!

[via Google]

Google lists best Android apps of 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.