With its newly designed user interface, Norton Mobile Utilities makes it a bit simpler to manage your Android device's performance. The four main modules are all reorganized, and it's easy to jump into any function, right from the get-go.

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But version 2.0 doesn't just come with a prettier face. The updated app now offers a few premium paid features that Android users are sure to find interesting. For the $9.99 upgrade fee, you can get an automatic task killer, customized battery saver profile, data usage tracker, and more.

Norton Mobile Utilities Lite is free to download on Google Play. The in-app upgrade costs $9.99 and gets you all of the premium features.

Chrome 21's score on Google Octane v1, which replaces the V8 benchmark.

Although speed is a major factor in browser choice, many people don't want to know why their favorite browser is fast -- they just care that it is. But the standards and tests used to determine how we measure a browser's speed can be varied, so Google has set out to further define the playing field.

This doesn't appear to be a case of the tech giant stomping all over open standards, though. Octane v1 is a revamp of Google's V8 benchmark and adds five tests to the eight current ones, the company said today in a blog post announcing Octane.

"The V8 benchmark suite has served us well for the past three plus years, but something we noticed is that the Web is advancing much faster than imagined," Stefano Cazzulani, Google's project manager for V8, said on the phone with CNET from Germany. V8 is Google's custom JavaScript engine that it has bolted to the Chrome browsers' HTML-rendering WebKit engine.

Octane is the evolution of V8, said Cazzulani. "V8 will still be there, still interesting, but the new [tests] are where we are focusing fo... [Read more]

Adobe Muse users now can drag a contact form into their Web page design and customize it. (Click to enlarge.)

Illustrating one of its selling points for its software subscription plans, Adobe Systems has updated Muse three months after it first released the tool for designing and publishing Web pages.

Adobe released Muse along with the Creative Cloud subscription service, which lets people use the full panoply of Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) software along with some online services including Web hosting, Web fonts, and file synchronization. Part of the Creative Cloud sales pitch is that Adobe will update its components as new features arrive, meaning that subscribers get new abilities without having to wait for CS7.

The new version of Muse now works for Japanese speakers and lets users add contact forms and direct file-download links to their Web sites. "This is just the beginning of work the Muse product team is doing to bring more extensive content management capabilities directly into the product through tighter integration with our site hosting ... [Read more]