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Notes & Tags attempts to provide a unique experience that builds on the platform used by note-taking apps like Evernote. Unfortunately, it does not offer enough new features or tools to go above and beyond Evernote, and because both are free, it's hard to recommend this new app over the former if you are already using it.

The app is very basic. It opens to a note-taking screen where you title and create a note. You can add tags for each note that will then be used for searching and organizing your notes. Each note can be e-mailed or … Read more

It's entirely too easy to end up with multiple contacts for the same people on your smartphone, and a huge pain to go through them all and weed out the discards. It's worse when up-to-date data is spread over more than one saved contact. Merge+ for Android is a free app that can find and merge multiple contacts on your Android phone or tablet. With a super-easy, three-step process, Merge+ makes it easy to merge and update redundant contacts across multiple apps, accounts, and archives. Merge+ is compatible with Android 2.3.3 and above; we tried it … Read more

PicChar Lite is a unique app in many ways. Designed as a photo editing tool, it serves only a single function: transforming your photos into text-based images. The effect is very cool, but the actual use of the app will vary depending on how much you need images consisting of thousands of tiny letters.

The idea is simple. Take a photo (or grab one from your photo library) and PicChar will transform the image into a collection of different colored text that forms a mosaic of your image. The animation of this happening is mesmerizing and the final effect is … Read more

Busy users may need an efficient way to track their tasks. TodoPlus for Mac has all of the functions necessary for organizing to-dos, but the cluttered interface makes it difficult to use.

Download and installation of this free program completed quickly, as did initial set up. No technical support was available and the tutorial was of little help. After moving through the tutorial menus, TodoPlus for Mac began to slow the test computer down, lengthening the time spent switching between different menus. The program's main interface has a cluttered row of buttons along the top of the window. Users … Read more

Texas hold 'em may not enjoy the popularity that it did only a few years ago, but it is still the most popular card game in America, with hundreds of tournaments, Web sites, and apps devoted to it. There are quite a few apps that attempt to bring that experience to the app store. Texas Hold'em Poker 100K by ASH is one of the most popular and for good reason: it manages to bring the feeling of a high-stakes game of poker to the iPad in a way that few other games have managed to do.

If you've … Read more

Jukebox Free is designed to provide a free and easy tool for creating playlists and running them on your iPhone without accessing the music app. It has limited features to do so, however, and because it doesn't interact with the Music app directly, there are issues with DRM that severely limit its usefulness.

The interface for Jukebox Free is easy to use. It opens with a blank screen and a play bar at the bottom. To add music, you press the + button in the top- left corner and it will go to your Music app and start pulling songs … Read more

The selection of flash cards and other education tools for infants and toddlers on the App Store is extremely large. There are thousands of apps that promise finely-tuned learning experiences for very young children, and for good reason -- the iPad and iPhone are perfect for this age group. But not all apps follow through on their promises. Baby Brain Flash Cards Series 1 manages to fall somewhere between both extremes, offering a wealth of options but a poorly-crafted interface and lack of direction that makes it hard to manage as a parent.

When you open the app you are … Read more

The camera built into the iPhone is a powerful tool, but the software it comes with is fairly limited. Point and shoot -- simple enough. So there are plenty of apps on the App Store that provide additional tools and features that make it possible to get more out of your device. For those that need to tag their images with GPS coordinates, there is Eagle View Photo Capture, a new app that makes it very easy to do so.

The app is easy enough. There are four buttons on the bottom bar when you open the app: Camera, Save … Read more

Android photo editing apps come in all shapes and sizes, but few can call themselves "all-in-one." Fotor Photo Effect Studio tries to hold that title, but comes up a little short in one category. The photo-editing and filtering features are fine, but the app's camera is too unstable to be used.

This app lets you take, edit, and filter photos in the same app. Sadly, the app's camera produces some shockingly bad images. Despite having a cool zoom feature, the photos come out as a pixelated mess more often than not. You don't have to … Read more