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Adobe Systems on Friday introduced a new Photoshop app for Android users that lets them edit photos from their phone, as well as access their online photo collection on Photoshop.com.

The app comes just shy of a month after the release of the company's application for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch users, which quickly became the top free application in the App Store and grabbed a million downloads within a week of its release.

The version for Android shares the same, simple editing UI as the iPhone/iPod version, both of which let users make edits by sliding their fingers across the screen and undo any changes made. It also features some very basic photo editing tools like crop, rotate, and image flip, as well as controls for adjusting exposure and tweaking color tint and saturation. Android users even get one new tool that iPhone/iPod users don't even have yet, which lets them straighten a shot against a grid.

Photoshop for Android looks similar to its iPhone/iPod sibling, but has a few less editing effects.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Here's the bad news though: Android users are getting a slightly-less featured version than those who use it on iPhones or iPods. The Android version is missing a whole menu full of filter effects, which can be one of the most enjoyable aspects of using the app. It's also missing the sketch tool, which can add a neat cartoonish effect to photos.

Snap this to jump straight to the app.

There is one feature that could make up for these omissions though, and that is the inclusion of an auto-uploader that can automatically send any photo you take on your Android device to Photoshop.com's cloud storage. Users just need to turn the option in within the app, and it will do it whether they have the app running or not. The only downside to this, is that just like on the iPhone/iPod version, you can only enter the Photoshop app's editing mode on photos that are stored locally.

Photoshop for Android can be found right now on the Android Marketplace. We've also included the app's barcode so you can hop right to it without having to type anything.

Watching ice cubes melt is much more fun when you speed it up. iPhone app Timelapser lets you do it right on your phone.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Time-lapse movies can be a complicated affair, and quite often involve either a lot of special equipment, and/or post-processing skills. For just a buck though, you can use the recently released Timelapser app (link opens in iTunes) to turn your iPhone into a tool that can do this time-bending filming technique using nothing more than the onboard camera.

Timelapser's interface tells you how long your movie will be, and how many shots it's taken.

(Credit: CNET)

Depending on what model of phone you have you can use the app to take a picture anywhere from every three seconds to once per half hour. All the while it grabs each frame and stitches it into a movie that's saved on the phone, and that can also be e-mailed to friends.

Of course if you really want to cook with gas, you'll need an iPhone 3GS, which lets you speed up how fast the phone can take shots. Alas, with my lowly 3G I was limited to taking a shot every six seconds. Owners of the original iPhone have to step it down to eight seconds.

The app has a wealth of settings that let you pick things like how large the video's resolution is, how many frames per second it should be, and how long you want the delay to be before it starts shooting. This can be useful if you're propping up your phone somewhere and need time to set up your scene. Users can also use the app just to take a series of photos one after another which get saved in your phone's camera roll.

As I noted when I checked out the IP Camera app, which can turn your iPhone into a networked security camera, the very best way to use this app is with one of Apple's fancy docks. You can also just prop it up with whatever you may have laying about the house, but with the dock you get the benefit of... Read more

A fresh installation of Windows offers users a chance to get things clean and tidy from the beginning, but it also means a lot of work reinstalling applications you may have had on an older build.

If you've planned ahead, you can go out and download all the installers you think you'll need, then put them on a thumb drive or a disc. Or you can skip all that work and use Ninite (formerly Volery), a very simple tool for Windows that will go out and download all the latest versions of the software you pick from its directory, then combine all of those installers into one self-running .exe file.

The best part is that you don't have to touch a thing, as it installs each application. Every installer is already set with the least intrusive configuration, which means that it's installed to the application's default folder and comes without any superfluous add-ons, such as browser toolbars, companion software, or language packs. And when it's done running, you just delete Ninite's .exe file.

Ninite stacks up Windows application installs and runs them without requiring that you to pay attention to what each one is doing.

(Credit: CNET)

In my test run, I only had one problem with the installation, and it wasn't Ninite's fault--it was Windows'. I was letting Ninite do its thing, and Windows rebooted my computer to install its own updates. The nice thing is, you can relaunch the .exe file, if something goes wrong, and it will determine which programs it's already installed and skip both the download and the install. That's definitely something I'd feel safe sending to a tech-challenged friend or family member (note: most Web mail services won't let you send an .exe file. You can, however, use many online storage services like Box.net, Dropbox, and MobileMe to get it done)

Of course, one of the biggest drawbacks with Ninite's system is that you're limited to its selection of software picks. And if you're a control freak, you can't go in and make small tweaks to each installation while it's happening. Otherwise, it's an utterly fantastic way to get a quick start on a new machine, or offer up application recommendations to friends and family who just got a new machine with Windows 7 on it.

(via Download Squad)

(Credit: Sony Computer Entertainment America)

Sony Computer Entertainment America on Thursday announced that a new 250GB variation of the PlayStation 3 Slim will be available beginning November 3 for $349.99. The PS3 hardware will otherwise remain the same as the 120GB flavor of the Slim, which costs $50 less. The console maker will also continue to sell the physically larger, previous model of the PS3 which comes with either an 80GB or 160GB hard drive.

The extra 130GB of storage in the 250GB model gives PS3 owners more room for downloaded movies, game installs/saves, music, and photos. According to Sony, "more than 600 million pieces of content have been downloaded from [the] PlayStation Network as of September 2009." (Note: "content" could be anything from 5MB themes to HD movies which can take up gigabytes of storage.) For most though, the extra storage will keep users from having to offload these files onto external drives when they run out of space, or manually replace the included hard drive with something bigger.

The increase should not be a surprise to most gamers though. It's coming just in time for the holiday season where console makers stand to sell more hardware than at any other time of year. Also, at the Tokyo Game Show last month, the company announced a special 250GB version of the console to coincide with the release of Final Fantasy XIII. Shortly thereafter it said Australia would be getting a 250GB variation of its own. There had also been purportedly leaked shots of holiday bundles acquired by blog Engadget, depicting 250GB versions of the consoles with games like Uncharted 2, which was just released this week.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft was expected to release Twitter, Facebook, and Last.fm apps for the Xbox 360 as part of a system software update that went out back in August. It was decided that the apps should be delayed for a fall release, but CNET got a sneak peek of the apps on Wednesday from Ron Pessner, Microsoft's general manager of games for Windows Live.

The company is still mum on an exact release, despite marketing materials on the U.K. Xbox.com site briefly pointing to a November 17 debut. Pessner confirmed that the new apps were indeed set for November release, but he could not provide a hard date. In the meantime the company is releasing a public preview ahead of time for a select group of users who sign up to be a part of the beta test (you can sign up here).

What we saw of the three apps was impressive but in many ways extremely limited compared with their desktop counterparts. Microsoft has had to shoehorn the three Web apps into a system with a control scheme that does not implement a mouse, keyboard, or Web browser. Instead, all three make use of the Xbox 360 controller and the on-screen keyboard, or an attached USB keyboard (or Microsoft Chat Pad accessory which you can buy for $30).

This lack of the usual top-to-bottom controls found on each service's Web sites changes each experience considerably from what users are familiar with on their computers and mobile devices. This is made even more noticeable by the fact that the Xbox 360 still does not have a built-in Web browser. Never before has this been an issue, but stop and think for a second: are Twitter and Facebook as useful, or as interesting if you can't click on any of the links? We don't think so.

That said, there are some definite things to look forward to when the software update drops next month. Read our early impressions after the jump.

The preorder has long been a staple of the video game retail industry, and with good reason. You get a customer to purchase a game ahead of its release in return for a small trinket. The hope is that buyer will keep coming back to the store, and in turn the store can provide more accurate supply numbers to the publisher and thus ensure an adequate stock. It's also been a great way for retailers to sit on that cash long before ever handing over the product.

What has made this more interesting over the years is how far some retailers and game publishers have gone to get people to come to them, and them only. This arms race has lead to some great, and some not-so-great, trends in preorder goodies. Here are five of the best and five of the worst in the last couple of years.

The best

1. Getting the game before its release date

What is easily the holy grail of preorder goodies is getting the game ahead of its official street date. Very few games have ever done this intentionally, though. This usually happens only when a retailer mistakenly sells the title without knowing there's a specific release date, or when games are shipped by mail and the snafu is committed by the shipping company.

In the case of Call of Duty: World at War, which was released last November, GameStop sold the title a day ahead of its official release to those who had preordered it. According to Planet Xbox 360, the game retailer went directly to FedEx's shipping facilities to pick up the game ahead of its slated delivery time.

Also, customers who prebought Mythic Entertainment's Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning got to build their characters and start playing on the game's servers four days before the game launched--if they bought the collector's edition, while preorderers of the standard edition got a two day head start. The same went for those who preordered Pirates of the Burning Sea, who got to start playing the MMO 15 days ahead of people who simply bought it on its release day.

2. Free games

Coming up just short of getting the new game early is publishers who offer a copy of one of their previous titles free of charge. That was the case for Rockstar games, which through Valve's Steam online game store gave PC gamers who preordered Grand Theft Auto 4 a free copy of GTA: Vice City, a title from earlier in the GTA series.

Preorderers of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts on Xbox 360 got a free code for the original Banjo-Kazooie game on XBOX Live Arcade a whole two weeks before it was officially released to other gamers.

Lionhead studios gave preorderers of the Xbox 360 version of Fable 2 a free (normally $10) Xbox Live Arcade title that let them play some of the title's in-game minigames ahead of the release, as well as put any gold they earned to use in the game once they got it.

Earlier notables include: Preorderers of Red Alert 3 getting a free Red Alert 2 download, and the Zelda: Ocarina of Time disc that came with the Zelda Wind Waker for Gamecube, which had been one of the top games of the year four years prior. Nintendo went through the effort of porting it from the previous generation's system to the GameCube, as well as throwing in a more difficult variation of the game that had previously been unreleased in the U.S. just for those buyers. Now that's cool.

3. Getting the "better" edition of the game, free of charge

The "limited" editions of games almost always cost more, and come with a few extra goodies like a download code from extra in-game content, or a spiffy case with things like concept art books and soundtrack CDs.

This time last year, Ubisoft surprised gamers who had preordered the latest Prince of Persia game with a free upgrade to the limited edition, which featured a making-of featurette, digital art book, and the soundtrack. It certainly wasn't as lavish as some other limited-edition packages, but it was free.

Developer Arksys did the same thing earlier this year with its 2D fighter BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. Prebuyers who purchased the normal game ahead of time got upgraded to the limited-edition free of charge, which included a video strategy guide and two-disc soundtrack with close to 50 tracks.

The Fitbit clips onto pockets, belts, and bras.

(Credit: CNET)

For the past week I've been inseparable from a small bit of black plastic hooked onto my left pocket. It's not a cell phone, or a security card for work. Instead, it's the Fitbit, a high-tech pedometer with a neat trick--it tracks your daily and nightly activities, then sends that information to the cloud wirelessly.

The $99 device was first unveiled at last year's TechCrunch50 show in San Francisco, but the company only began shipping out its first pre-orders last week. I've spent the past seven days using it to track my daily activity levels, as well as my sleeping and eating habits.

Unsurprisingly, it hasn't moved me to make a dramatic shift in the way I live my life, but it has given me a benchmark of how active or inactive I am on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. In other words, you can be a non-gym rat and still get a multitude of uses out of this, but it will always be more beneficial for highly active people.

The hardware

(Credit: CNET)

The Fitbit itself is a clip, and almost symmetrical except for a button on one of the sides. This is the only button on the entire device that controls what you see on its small, but very readable OLED display. Each time you click it, it cycles through how many steps you've taken, how far you've gone in miles, how many calories you've burned, as well as your current activity level which is displayed as a flower; the taller it is, the more active you've been.

Compared with some other pedometers from companies like Omron, Sportline, and Apex Fitness, many of which feature onboard clocks, stopwatches, and "trip" meters, this may seem a bit anemic. But there's more than meets the eye. The device tracks things like duration of activity, and what time of day you're doing it--two things that can be seen back on Fitbit's site once it syncs up.

The Fitbit can be stashed in your pocket, on your belt, or anything else you can clip it on. (Fitbit's product manual mentions something about bras--I didn't get to try that out.) It then uses a three-dimensional motion sensor--like what's inside of Nintendo's Wii remote--to track your movements.

Besides tracking steps, caloric burn, and distance, the Fitbit can be used to monitor sleep duration and habits. This requires users sliding the Fitbit into the included cloth wrist wrap, then holding the Fibit's one button for a few seconds before going to bed, and then again when they wake up.

I found this an easy habit to pick up and build into my normal routine, though worth noting is that the included strap's velcro is basically glued on, and can be accidentally removed quite easily. I also had one night of sleep where the device came out of the strap, forcing me to fish it out of the bed the next morning.

Once you've held the button for a few seconds to start the sleep cycle, the device then waits for you to stop moving to begin its count. It also keeps track of any movements during the night, like if you sleepwalk, start waving your arms around, or get up to go to the bathroom. This information is tracked on Fitbit's site, including how "efficient" your sleep was, which is a percentage of how much time you spent sleeping versus how long it took you to go to bed and how many times you became "active."

Software and Webware

While the Fitbit can be used as a pedometer in the traditional sense, installing software on your computer lets you sync it up with Fitbit's site. To do this you have to make use of a special base station which comes with the Fitbit, and is the only way to both charge it, and check its battery level (which is rated at 10 days between charges).

Last week's Picasa software update from Google brought with it a neat trick--facial recognition. But it wasn't the first free consumer photo-editing software to find faces. In January, Apple unveiled the latest version of iLife, which included an updated version of iPhoto that could detect and recognize faces in your photos. And this time last year, Microsoft released an updated version of its Windows Live Photo Gallery desktop software that could find faces inside of photos, though it couldn't (and still can't) recognize who's in them.

So, how do these three stack up? To figure that out, we put them to the test. Using 500 sample photos on fresh installs of each program, we tracked around how long each of the tools took to process all the photos, as well as some notable hits and misses from each.

To be fair, our results may not scale, or match the experience you will have. For one, we're using a test bed of photos that's almost entirely 12-megapixel JPEG files, whereas some people may be shooting smaller or larger files that may be in different formats and contain large groups of people--something that can slow these programs down. You're also likely to have a whole lot more than 500 photos sitting around on your computer; we certainly do.

Note: Adobe's PhotoShop Elements software (for Windows | Mac), which also includes a facial recognition feature was not included in this roundup since it's a paid application. Technically iPhoto is as well, but we included it since it comes free on all Macs.

The apps and workflows

iPhoto

iPhoto is the only product of the bunch that's Mac-only. It comes bundled with all new Macs, but the latest version (which includes face detection) must be purchased as a software upgrade if you've got iPhoto '08 or lower. We've included it in this roundup as a free product since it comes bundled with all new Macs.

Face scanning in iPhoto happens automatically, but it's largely a manual process, requiring users to "train" the system to recognize certain faces. The program took around nine minutes to scan through our 500 test photos and when it was done it didn't offer up any suggestions of photos with faces in them.

Instead, users are required to click on a photo with a face in it and hope the program picked it up. If it has, users can simply type the name in--which will auto complete if the person is in your Mac address book. If someone's face was not found, but you can see it in the photo, you can manually contain the face inside of a box, then tag it with their name.

iPhoto's system offers up suggestions of faces it thinks belong to certain people.

(Credit: CNET)

After you add names to just few photos, iPhoto's system begins to piece together others that look the same--although it doesn't learn as fast as it does for photos where it already found the faces. In my testing, it only took two photos to get it to offer up some more suggestions. If those suggestions are correct, continuing to add them was just a matter of a few clicks.

iPhoto's system for doing this isn't perfect though.... Read more

Evernote is giving its Windows desktop application a huge face-lift on Thursday. The new version of the writing and archiving tool has more in common with its Mac counterpart, borrowing features like thumbnail previews and a three-pane view that lets users quickly hop through notes they have saved in one of their Evernote notebooks.

The change may be jarring for some longtime Evernote users who have only used the Windows version, but for people like me, who use clients on both platforms--on a daily basis, the unification is welcome.

Old versus new versions of Evernote compared. Note that the new version has a thumbnail view. (Click to see full size.)

(Credit: CNET)

There are some peculiarities though. At first glance the already anemic text editor is missing a few buttons that were found on the old one. Options such as indenting, or adding a bulleted list are still there, but now they're nestled into a right-click contextual menu instead of being buttons as they were before (and still are on the Mac and Web versions). In their place are the simple, but screen real estate-sucking, buttons for printing, e-mailing and deleting any note you're working on. Though unlike on the Mac, this group of options cannot be minimized. On a big, wide-screen monitor this isn't a big deal, but on smaller screens it means you have less room to view your work.

What makes up for that, is spell check--a long-overdue inclusion. Whatever you're writing gets the spell check treatment as you type, just as it does in versions of the program on other platforms. This may seem like a really minor addition, but if you're using Evernote as a primary text editor, this is important.

Evernote's Ink feature lets users draw out notes.

(Credit: CNET)

Also quite cool, is a more easily accessible canvas mode made exclusively for Windows users with tablet PCs, which lets them more easily create hand-drawn notes. Users who don't have tablets could previously also access the feature by holding Ctrl+9 when in any note, although now it's its own type of note. Worth noting is that these notes cannot be seen on the current version of the Mac software, something that will be added in a future update.

All in all, this is a good update with some big changes that may take some getting used to for folks who haven't used the Mac version. Because of the many changes in this version, the Evernote 3.5 update is being released in beta, instead of an automatic update within the software. Windows users of the current version can download it from Evernote's site.

Correction: This article originally misstated the newness of the ink writing feature as well as the software's capability to index handwritten notes. Users who don't have tablets could previously also access the feature by holding Ctrl+9 when in any note, although now it's its own type of note.