Liane Cassavoy, Sean Captain

Campers who need an all-in-one survival tool have the famed Swiss Army Knife. And business folks who are looking for an all-in-one productivity survival kit have B-Folders 3. This handy tool is more of a suite than just a utility, and what it lacks in user-friendliness, B-Folders 3 more than makes up for with its performance.

B-Folders 3 uses a three-paned interface that makes it easy to navigate through all of the info you have stored.B-Folders 3 includes a laundry list of features: It's a bookmark manager, a contact manager, a journal, a notepad, a password manager, a task manager, and more. How to access all of these features isn't immediately apparent when you launch the desktop application. But once you click through B-Folders 3's three-paned interface, how to access its feature set becomes more apparent. It uses a tree-like folder structure, so you can move up through its levels easily. The left panel provides an overview of your B-Folders database, where you'll see a list of all the folders you've created. The center panel is where you add new items. Clicking on the big plus icon at the top of this panel brings up a list of available features: you can choose to add a new folder, note, task, journal entry, etc. You create the actual entry itself in the third panel, where you enter the information you want to store, as well as any notes on it.

RadarSync's PC Updater 2012 offers an easy-to-use and comprehensive solution for updating your PC's drivers. The application quickly scans for and identifies the out-of-date drivers lurking on your computer, and makes installing the newer versions a cinch, but getting PC Updater running takes a little longer than it should.

RadarSync PC Updater's interface is attractive, but a bit bland.The delay is due to all of the extras that RadarSync offers you while installing the software. I declined its invitations to install a Babylon toolbar, to change my default search engine to Babylon.com, and to change my home page. Then, I opted out of its suggested installation of an app called "I Want This." Ditto for an app called "We-care," from Save the Children. And ditto for an app called "ComplainApp." By the time I was able to run PC Updater, I'd almost forgotten which app I'd initially wanted to install.

The power of an Android phone or tablet already makes a desktop PC, or even a laptop, seem a little old-fashioned--but you can enhance your smartphone or tablet even more. Here are six applications that allow you to use your desktop computer to get more functionality, and more fun, from your Android device.

DoubleTwist

You can complain all you want about the closed nature of Apple's software, but you can't deny that the marriage of iTunes and iOS is as cohesive as it gets. This desktop-mobile connection is missing from the Android experience--until you install DoubleTwist. Once you install this free desktop application, it automatically finds the music, photos, and videos you have stored on your computer (yes, even those in your existing iTunes library) and organizes them for you, letting you browse your collection by artist, album, playlist, and more in its tidy interface. You can sync these multimedia files to and from your Android device via USB.

Today's smartphones have bigger and better screens than ever before. But, while a 4- or 5-inch screen may feel roomy on your mobile device, it's probably less than a quarter the size of to the screen that your laptop or desktop boasts. If you'd like to use all of those inches for viewing and controlling your Android phone, meet AirDroid, a handy mobile application that allows you to take complete control of your Android device via your computer's Web browser.

Sick of composing SMS messages on a tiny screen? AirDroid lets you do it from your Web browser.To use AirDroid, your two devices must be connected to the same Wi-Fi network. You download the app to your mobile phone from Google Play. Launch the app, and it does most of the work for you, creating a link between your phone and your Web browser. AirDroid lets you choose how to complete the connection between the two devices, and provides all the guidance you need along the way. It offers up two Web addresses that you can use to complete the link; one is an IP address that makes a direct connection, while the other is web.airdroid.com, which will link the two once you've entered the supplied passcode. Alternately, you can use the AirDroid app on the phone to scan an on-screen QR code that appears on web.airdroid.com, which will also complete the connection.

If you ever feel like you're drowning in all of the information that social networks like Facebook and Twitter provide, you're not alone. That's where Bottllenose can help: This free online service helps you make sense of all the information that social media delivers. But its own feature set is so dense that it may overwhelm you at first, too.

Bottlenose's Sonar view makes it easy to see which topics are popular, and how they are related.Bottlenose takes all of the information that you get from social media--it supports Facebook, Google Reader, LinkedIn, and Twitter--and groups it into a series of streams. The streams, which are listed in a panel on the left side of Bottlenose's neatly-organized Web-based dashboard, are organized by the type of information they contain. "All" contains info from all your social networks, while "Inbox" lists messages and updates directed at you. Other streams include Private, @Mentions, Notifications, Suggested for You, and Popular. Bottlenose also includes several Filters, which are pre-defined streams that find information based on the content type, such as News, Tech News, Entertainment News, Videos, and more,

Change is never easy, especially when it's one of your favorite services making the changes--and forcing them on you. But, if you're one of the many Twitter users still lamenting the loss of the old-style retweets in the new Twitter, you don't need to be sad any longer. Classic Retweet, a simple Firefox add-on and Google Chrome extension, can return you to the glory days of Twitter's retweet feature, allowing you to append your pithy comments to everything you retweet

Classic Retweets tags the original author in your retweet, and lets you edit the text.Once you add Classic Retweet to your browser, you'll see it appear as a new option in Twitter's action menu, which appears below tweets when you mouse over them. In addition to Twitter's standard options--expand, reply, retweet, and favorite--you'll see an additional option: "Classic RT."

Facebook is a lot of fun...until you realize that much of the information posted there could be found by someone you might not want to see it. Like your boss, or potential boss. Your mother, or your potential mother-in-law. Ever wonder how your Facebook page might make you look to someone else? NetworkClean can show you: This free service scans and monitors your Facebook account, alerting you to any problems lurking there.

NetworkClean's dashboard gives you an overall look at the state of your Facebook account.Currently in beta, NetworkClean is a tool that's designed to be run on your own Facebook account to manage your own Facebook reputation, similar to Reputation.com, which offers both free and paid versions of a comprehensive Internet monitoring service. NetworkClean offers many of the same features offered by tools that are designed to monitor the Facebook use of younger children, such as MinorMonitor and SocialShield, and could conceivably be used in the same way, but isn't expressly designed for this purpose.

See that cell phone next to you? Unfortunately, you're paying too much money for it--every month. If overpaying for what you need sounds like a bad idea to you, stop doing it. We've assembled 12 simple actions that you can take to reduce your cell phone bill, so that some of the cash you now spend for service--maybe even half of it--remains in your possession. So check out our tips, and use one or more of them to save big bucks on your bill.

Covering the Basics

1. Find the right plan for you: Carefully review how often and in what ways you use your phone. Ideally, you should do this before signing a cell phone contract, but of course it can be difficult to know exactly how you'll use your phone until you spend time with it every day.

It's that time of year when mosts of the Northern Hemisphere is starting to warm up to the idea of being outside. Going for a run in the fresh air sounds appealing, but don't lace up your shoes just yet. Spending a few more minutes at your computer (or in some cases, your mobile device) can help you choose the best route and make the most of your workout.

MapMyRUN

If you took a little bit of Twitter and added in a big scoop of enthusiasm for running, you'd end up with something a whole lot like dailymile. This is a workout planning and tracking service that's heavy on social networking features.

Dailymile's cool graphing features let you see, at a glance, how many miles you've covered.Dailymile is free to use: You can sign up for an account with your email address, or by linking your Facebook or Twitter account. Once you're logged in, you can begin creating and tracking workouts, and exploring dailymile's social features. You can track a variety of activities, including running, cycling, swimming, walking, and more, and can add your distance and time, and can rate how you felt. If you're not sure of the distance, you can use the embedded map to track your route, which is a nice touch Rival services, such as MapMyRUN and FriendFit, require you to create the workout first, before logging it. Having the map integrated is a nice touch. So, too, is the fact that dailymile's maps follow the curves and bends of the mapped roads as you create your route. FriendFit also offers this feature, while other services, such as MapMyRun and WalkJogRun, don't offer it by default, instead requiring that you manually adjust your route to follow the road.

Working out is hard work. And all too often, so too are the fitness services that are designed to help you map and track your workouts. But not FriendFit: This social network-meets-fitness logging and mapping service offers plenty of practical features for fitness buffs of all levels, but manages to make using them a whole lot of fun.

FriendFit makes it easy to see your recent fitness activities at a glance.FriendFit is a free (ad-supported), cloud-based service that connects with your Facebook account. If you don't use Facebook--or if you simply want to keep the two services separate)--you can create a FriendFit account in a matter of minutes. And once you're logged into the service, FriendFit is a breeze to use. You can log fitness activities, plan group activities, and map workout routes from FriendFit's attractive home page.

If you're looking to get in shape, you could simply lace up those sneakers and hit the road for a quick jog. But, if you want to get more out of your workouts, you could put a little planning in first. That's where WalkJogRun can help: This cloud-based service offers several useful tools for planning and tracking your workouts, no matter how experienced you are.

WalkJogRun lets you see the distance and elevation of the routes you map online.Like free rival MapMyRUN, WalkJogRun lets you map out routes to calculate your distance and calories burned, and lets you search through routes created by other users. This crowd-sourced feature offers a great way to find new routes. I was pleasantly surprised to see a couple of routes created by a neighbor, which allowed me to discover new routes to vary my regular routines. (You can hide the routes you create from strangers and friends with the service's privacy controls. And doing so can be a good idea: I quickly realized that most of my running routes started at my house, so a quick look at them could reveal quite a bit about my usual whereabouts. If you'd like to share your routes with only folks you trust, you can send them via email or post them to a friends-only Facebook account.