When choosing a notepad app for your Android, the first thing to think about is: what kinds of notes will you be taking? Are we talking grocery lists here? Are you looking for a full-on multimedia mood board? Do you need to be able to set reminder alarms? Voice notes? The choices can be overwhelming, we know. Luckily we've done some of the research for you. Here's an inside look at five of the most popular free note-takers for your Android mobile device.

AK Notepad is your basic, bare-bones notepad app. Open it up, click "Add note" and start tapping away. If you're looking to do more than that, you might want to look elsewhere, because AK Notepad is made for text notes, and not much else. It doesn't offer much in the way of formatting or multimedia, and it doesn't create checklists. However, it can set reminder alarms, and pin notes to your Home screen when you need frequent access. It also shares notes via Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Gmail, and so on. If you're just looking for a quick-draw note-taker for scrawling random ideas that don't require formatting, AK Notepad is exactly that.

Now, if you're itching for just a bit more under the hood, we highly recommend you check out ColorNote. It's perfect for all of your basic note-taking needs, and we really liked that it could format notes as checklists, which surprisingly few free note-takers can do. You can organize notes in a number of ways, including by color, which is nice. It lets you share notes, or add shortcuts to your Home screen for one-tap access, and if you set reminder alarms regularly, you'll probably love ColorNotes' integrated calendar. When it comes to basic, free note-takers in the marketplace, we think ColorNote is on top.

Note Everything straddles a line somewhere between basic and advanced note-taker. It creates text and voice notes, no problem. It even takes Barcode notes (which we would probably seldom use) and Paint notes made up of touch-powered doodles. Strangely, however, it doesn't come standard with Photo notes or Checklists. Those, as well as some other premium features, are only available with the $4 upgrade to Note Everything Pro.

And then there's Catch Notes, made by the developers of AK Notepad and positioned as the basic note-taker's bigger, more feature-rich brother. Catch Notes gives you the ability to create notes with text, voice, barcodes, and pictures from your gallery or camera. It can share, password-protect, and, for Catch.com account-holders, sync to the cloud. Overall, because of its multimedia versatility, we think it's a solid contender. However, as strong as it may be, we feel it still doesn't quite compare to the final app on our list.

The ever popular Evernote is the most powerful of the free note-taking bunch. In fact, being an accessory to the incredibly rich Evernote web service, it's a little misleading to classify Evernote for Android as simply a notepad app. In every note, you can embed voice, pictures, video, or attach files of any kind. Tag notes with a location stamp to keep track of where you were when you jotted, and of course, automatically sync to your Evernote account in the cloud. The mobile app may not offer the same kind of formatting capabilities as the full web version of Evernote, but we still feel it's the best there is at scrawling anything and everything that may be floating around in your head. If you need to capture your ideas with rich multimedia notes, Evernote really is the best.

So that's the rundown. In order to find the right note-taker, first figure out what you're going to use it for. From there, it's all about the nuances. For basic note-taking, we suggest trying ColorNote, because it does all the essentials very well, and it requires almost no learning curve. If you're looking for a lot more power, go ahead and sign up for an account with Evernote, the standard in rich multimedia note-taking.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

The open-source audio and video jukebox Miro debuts a new version today that wants to be iTunes for Android. Miro 4 for Windows (download), Mac (download), and Linux (download), adds simple and effective desktop-to-Android synchronization to the program, which also offers media file conversion, torrent management, podcast catching, and media discovery. The Android syncing features focus on music and videos and includes built-in app browsing and management via in-program access to the Google Android Marketplace and the Amazon.com Android Marketplace.

"We set the bar very high. We want to be the open iTunes," said Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, which publishes Miro and the Miro Video Converter, a separate program that also comes baked into the standard Miro. "Millions and millions of people use iTunes and they do because they accept the restrictions, like with Internet Explorer. We see ourselves as the new Firefox." He also added that Miro has "around two million" monthly users.

Except for the lack of over-the-air synchronization, the new Miro is basically the old Miro plus DoubleTwist. If you haven't checked out Miro in a while, since Miro 3's redesigned interface the feature-heavy program has gotten much easier to use. It heavily resembles iTunes, with a left nav for navigating between your audio, video, connected devices, Amazon MP3 store, and Android marketplaces. The new right nav links to recently watched videos, recently songs played, and recent downloads, while the center of the program is where your media discovery and playback happen.

Miro 4 both looks like iTunes and communicates quite smoothly with your iTunes library. Importing more than 10,000 tracks went quickly because Miro recognizes media libraries that are pre-existing on your computer. Also like iTunes and other media jukeboxes, Miro now lets you stream and share your files to other computers running Miro on the same Wi-Fi network. Basically, you use it to manage media libraries on more than one computer.

App browsing is straightforward. Click the link in the left nav for either Google's or Amazon's market and you'll be able to access full marketplace features from within Miro. The same goes for Amazon's MP3 store.

Miro 4 does not yet support Wi-Fi syncing for Android devices, although that feature is coming said Dave Glassco, President of the Participatory Culture Foundation. Also in the works is an iPad app for media streaming and playback.

Be warned that Miro's installation process not only opts you into the Bing toolbar, Bing search engine, and resetting Bing as your home page, but if you uncheck all three, Miro asks you if you're sure you want to harm their revenue stream. That's fairly aggressive for an open-source program, although this is unfortunately not new to Miro. It's not likely to change anytime soon, either.

Popular online shopping site PriceGrabber.com recently released an update to its Android app, which now gives shopaholics on the go a more feature-rich browsing and buying experience.

First, browsing through products is now a little bit easier; you can view enlarged product images, read detailed product descriptions, and evaluate product offers for new, used, or refurbished items. Also, there's now built-in sharing functionality for when you stumble on items perfect for a family member or friend. The app can share product information through e-mail, SMS, Facebook, or Twitter.

PriceGrabber for Android also introduces discount badges, which denote heavily discounted items within PriceGrabber.com's database. The eye-catching icon is sure to make it easier to quickly identify attractive buys while scrolling through exhaustive lists of products.

And finally, shoppers now have a convenient way to view inventory levels of local brick-and-mortar retailers. Find a specific item, have PriceGrabber check the stock at local stores, and even have the app navigate you there. Now that's streamlined shopping.

PriceGrabber is available for download in the Android marketplace now.

Imagine that you're searching for a restaurant or for a movie time on your iPhone, but instead of receiving a long list of links, you see thumbnail images for Web sites instead. Meet Do@ (doo-at) (iTunes download), a newly launched iPhone freebie that does just that.

With Do@, search results aren't just thumbnails for pages you have to load, they're active Web sites that you can enter, explore, and exit without losing the rest of those live site results.

Search begins with a query as usual, and when you start typing, the app supplies suggestions--not for common phrases, but for contextual categories to narrow your search. For example, type "Inception" and you'll get to pick from suggestions like "Inception @search," "@movies," "@Netflix," and so on. Type sushi and you'll see restaurant, recipe, and Amazon category types. The app launches with about 30 categories and more than 400 searchable Web apps.

There are all the usual social networking tie-ins like sharing on Twitter, Facebook, and via e-mail, and marking favorites. The app is notably rich as well, with tricks like being able to scrub through a filmstrip of visual search results, and scroll beyond a first page of results to a second, even third batch. The more you pick a site in your search results, the closer to the top of your results list you'll see it on subsequent searches (you can remove the app to downshift its importance in future attempts.) If your friends use Do@, their recommendations will also surface higher in your results queue.

Do@ also has its discovery and business angles in mind. App publishers, let's say Yelp, for instance, can choose if tapping a result will open the Yelp native app if you have it installed. Otherwise, Do@ serves up the HTML-based Web app by default. Do@ also intends to incorporate site promotions in the results stream.

Do@'s media and lifestyle focus is clear, as is its goal to revolutionize search. Unlike other apps that claim such a feat, Do@'s approach is actually innovative, interesting, and useful. That was our impression after the demo, at least, but we'll continue with real-world testing in the ensuing weeks.

There's still room for growth, as well. For example, we hope to see voice search enabled in future updates.

For all your friends with Android smartphones, Do@ plans to release a sister app for Android...sometime "in the near future."

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

For many moons I've been looking for the perfect to-do list app for my iPhone. For a while I used Producteev, which I likened to Evernote for task management. But you know what? It was overkill.

Ultimately I realized that what I need is not a Web-accessible to-do list or even one that syncs with Outlook (a key consideration last year when I asked CNET readers to name their favorite to-do list app). I need one that lives on my iPhone, offers a simple, logically designed interface, and reminds me when it's time to do something. Period.

Oh, and because I hate paying for stuff, free would be nice, too.

I think I've found a winner. SeizeTheDay is a simple, effective, and free to-do list app, one that has earned a permanent, or at least long-term, place on my Home page.

SeizeTheDay doesn't sync with anything. It doesn't cater to the GTD cult crowd or use filters, folders, or the like. It's a task manager boiled down to the basics, which is great for people like me who want zero learning curve.

Just tap the "plus" icon to create a new task, then fill in the details: name, priority, and due date (if there is one--you can also leave it set to the default "At Some Point." If you want, you can set up a reminder, add tags, and include a note.

From the Home screen you can choose from four views: Today, Upcoming, At Some Point, and View All. There's also a calendar option that lists tasks below a month view, much like the stock iOS calendar.

SeizeTheDay relies on local reminders, meaning you don't need a live Internet connection. I especially like the Daily Reminder option, which pops up a list of the day's tasks--much like a text message.

And that's the app in a nutshell. There are countless other task managers that can do a lot more, but if you want something easy to learn and free of charge, I definitely recommend seizing SeizeTheDay.

Okay, your turn: which to-do list app do you like best, and why?

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

This week we found out that Android users running version 2.3.3 or earlier are vulnerable to a security hole that could potentially allow attackers to access calendar and contact data over an unencrypted Wi-Fi network. Since around 99.7 percent of all users qualified as vulnerable, it was quite a scare. Fortunately, Google has since issued a fix that forces the affected Google apps to connect via the secure protocol HTTPS, and now everyone seems to be breathing a little easier.

In other news, Trillian 5 is out. It's got a newly designed interface and every Pro feature from previous versions, all for free. For the chatty among us who need a multiple-personality IM client, it's worth a look. Also, Google docs, the cloud-only office suite, looks like it's finally making its way offline. In an interview at this month's Google I/O event, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, stated that the company has been using it internally, and we should expect to see it sometime this summer.

Web Snapper is an app and Safari plug-in that provides a fast and flexible way to capture screenshots of Web pages. The Mac OS provides some very limited screen-capture capabilities with Grab, but Web Snapper provides many more options (especially in terms of format, and in its easy-to-use integration with Safari), and it can capture multipage vector PDFs with actual text, links, and styling intact.

Also this week, multiplatform RSS media player Miro got an update, adding support for Android phones, and the ability to buy music from Amazon within the program. Our game this week is Black Ink, the crossword lovers' companion that lets you download and solve popular puzzles from the Internet, and you can even print them out if you're a pen-and-paper purist.

Don't forget to check out this week's featured collection of iPhone apps: Classic arcade games for iOS.