APP OF THE WEEK: A SEARCHABLE FILE FOR YOUR NOTES As long as people are making lists and checking them twice, it's a great time to look at the organizational tool called Evernote. The app is available in a free or premium version for iPhone, Palm OS, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and, soon, Android. Evernote collects notes in written form, as photos or as audio notes, and makes them searchable in many ways. Each entry is logged by time, date and location, and you can add a title and search words as tags, as you would on a blog. The app even uses optical character recognition to read type on photos, so you can search pictures for words. The free version of this app allows the user to upload 40 megabytes of material a month. The premium service, which is $45 a year or $5 a month, allows 500 megabytes of uploads. Premium users can also use more kinds of files, like Word or Excel, and can convert scanned documents to PDFs. IPhone users reported some text-editing problems, which the company said had been fixed. Overall, Evernote belongs on the list titled 'nice.' -- ROY FURCHGOTT A MUSCULAR LAPTOP THAT DEFIES THE LIGHTWEIGHT TREND With netbooks and ever-slimmer notebook computers attracting the most consumer attention this holiday, Dell apparently believes there's still room for workhorse PCs, even if -- at about nine pounds -- they defy current fashion. Enter the Precision M6500 'mobile workstation.' Workstations are just that: monster-spec machines intended for high performance and powerhouse applications. Dell's just-released package, priced to start at $2,750, is structured around an advanced Intel Core i7 quad-core processor -- among the first mobile PCs to use that chip -- and a 17-inch LED backlighted screen, 1920 by 1200 pixels. There's a gaudier variation, the Covet in hot copper orange ($4,220), that makes the Apple MacBook Pro look like the Fisher-Price version. While the base version is loaded with only 2 gigabytes of memory -- not nearly enough for a computer with this potential -- it will accommodate up to 16 gigs in four memory slots, a feature normally found on desktops, not on laptops. The nine-cell battery should perform strongly, although its life on the road depends on how the PC is configured. -- STEPHEN WILLIAMS SOME NEW iMAC DESKTOPS ARRIVE WITH ISSUES Apple's reconfigured iMac desktop -- a bright, shiny, wide-screen example of a home computer -- works beautifully ... unless it doesn't work at all, or arrives out of the box with a cracked display. Some reviewers and, judging from a survey of some Mac forums, some users, are encountering issues with some new models. The review team at Engadget, for example, found that their new Intel Core i7-based iMac would not boot up. (The 2.8-gigahertz Core i7 processor is sold as a $200 built-to-order option, and isn't generally offered on machines sold at Apple retail stores.) And TechNews.AM reports that some customers who ordered the Intel Core i7 received cracked display screens, commonly with the damage near the bottom left corner, speculating that the problem might be due to inadequate shipping packaging. The defective products are being replaced by Apple. This may give pause to some consumers who have been eyeing the iMac's gorgeous LED-lighted display and searingly fast processor. But many people have had another problem with the latest version of the iMac -- particularly the newest model with a 27-inch display. It's so big, it's hard to find a place in the house where it will fit. -- STEPHEN WILLIAMS A WAY TO PUT YOUR HOME MOVIES ON THE WEB FOR ALL TO SEE Peer deep into the recesses of that closet in the hallway, and you'll probably find a pile of old VHS home videos from the 1980s. You may even have thought about converting them to digital, but haven't gotten around to it. A new company called Pixorial (pixorial.com) aims to change that by providing a simple way to convert, edit and share old videos online. Mail Pixorial your VHS tapes (or several other sorts of analog video media) and they will digitize them for $15 each and also put them on a password-protected part of the company's Web site. There you can use Pixorial's simple editing tools to cut the master tape down. Once it is edited, you can share the video as you would a photo stream on a photo-sharing site. A hallmark of the service is that it offers a collaborative viewer in which your friends and family can watch and comment on specific scenes of videos in full resolution. If you're looking to liberate and share your old-format videos, take a look at the Pixorial service. Act quickly, and you can whip up some truly personal gifts for the holidays. -- RIK FAIRLIE 