Instagram (for iPhone)

Pros Impressive photo filters, now adjustable. Addictive photo-sharing community. Selective focus/tilt-shift effect. Video shooting and sharing. Video filters and some editing. Private sharing to other users. Easy and powerful photo editing.

Cons Reduced resolution means photos can't be enlarged for a closer look. No ability to reframe photos shot in app. No re-ordering of video clips. Bottom Line Instagram finally adds basic photo correction tools like brightness and color saturation, yet it remains incredibly simple to use and a continuing social phenomenon.

By Michael Muchmore, Max Eddy

With the release of version 6, Instagram adds new tools that make it a for-real photo editor instead of just a casual tool for fun photo embellishment. You can now not only adjust basics like brightness and contrast, but also shadows and highlights, sharpening, color temperature, and saturation. Of course the app won't replace Lightroom for serious photographers, but the tools bring Instagram into the ranks of true photo editing software. And don't forget: What made Instagram such a hit isn't so much its photo editing prowess but rather its social chops, which the app retains in spades. The combination of the old social network and the new tools results in a greatly improved Instagram experience. Instagram is our Editors' Choice for social photo editing and sharing on iPhone.

New Image Adjustments
Veteran Instagram users won't be jarred by any interface redesign this time: The new features fit comfortably within the old Instagram interface. You still snap a photo by tapping the big camera button at bottom center. The Lux lighting tool gets a nice improvement in the new release: Now it picks an automatic setting, rather than completely leaving its adjustment up to you. You can actually see the slider control zipping across to this best-guess setting. Of course, you can then slide it back and forth to taste. It's not a traditional brightness adjustment, however; it's a combination of contrast and color saturation. Previously, it was no help for dark photos that you actually wanted to brighten up. That's no longer a problem.

The real power tools come into view when you tap the new wrench icon. This reveals choices for honest-to-goodness image adjustments, including brightness, contrast, color temperature, saturation, highlights, shadows, and sharpening. Each tool's slider shows a number between -100 and 100, indicating how much of the effect you've used. Tilt shift and leveling, which formerly lived in Instagram's main editing screen are now subsumed among these wrench tools. We like this because folks who don't want to bother with that level of fussing never need to even see these tools.

Filter Adjustments
The same set of 19 familiar filters, like Mayfair, Sutro, and Hefe remains unchanged in the latest version of Instagram. In more photo app reviews than I can recall, I've mentioned that photo app X lets you adjust its filters, unlike Instagram (the latest of these was Mobli). Well, that changes with the new version: Finally, you can adjust filters' strength. This is a huge improvement.

You make the adjustments by tapping the filter icon a second time and moving a slider control back and forth. At first, the slider is set all the way to the right at 100 percent. Sliding it leftwards simply reverts the appearance closer to the original, unfiltered photo. To view the completely unfiltered image, you hold a finger down on the square image. The second tap also give you access to the filter's frame. The result is that these updates not only add many more capabilities, but they also actually leave the already sparse main interface even less cluttered.

Instagram's 19 effect filters range from simple B&W to retro film styles to techniques like cross processing. A great infographic about many of the filter's derivations can be seen at 1000memories.com. PCMag has also published an intriguing infographic called What Your Instagram Filters Say About You, which shows, surprisingly, that the most popular filter is no filter at all! We alternate between finding the artistic/retro filters appealing and pretentious. There are definitely cases where our more pedestrian images have gotten a boost in interest thanks to a filter.

Instagram Direct
Instagram Direct—the app's one-to-one photo sharing feature—plants a tray icon right at the top right corner of the app's home screen. Tapping this opens your inbox for directly shared Instagram photos and videos. Listed in the same place is media you've shared directly to others, but that's not really a cause for any confusion, since you'll see your username and picture for stuff you've shared out. You have the option to share any photo or video after you've finished editing it.

When using Direct, you can choose a contact—or any of Instagram's 200 million-odd users—who alone will get the photo or video. You lose the ability to tag people or add the shot to your Photo Map when you share directly. If the intended recipient is not one of your followers, he or she will have to agree to receive images from you. Once the recipient checks the box, that person won't have to authorize images from you again. Thankfully, you can easily block Direct images from specified users.

The feature is well-implemented, but we don't believe most people think of Instagram as a messaging app the way they do Snapchat or WhatsApp. After you've taken the time to gussy up a photo, sharing it with just a few people seems anticlimactic—after all, one of Instagram's biggest draws is seeing how many "hearts" each of your photos gets.

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Skype 5 (for iPhone)

Calls to standard phones costs 2.3 cents a minute or $2.99 a month unlimited. By Michael Muchmore

The iPhone Skype app (free) was long overdue for an update. Though it's had interim releases, it hasn't been truly redesigned since the days of iOS 4. The new version adds not only a fresh look, but also faster performance, easier group chatting, and better notification control. There's really no single communication service that offers everything Skype does. Plenty of other services such as Tango, Viber, and even Facebook Messenger—have some of Skype's capabilities, but none offers as complete a package.

Though it's mostly associated with free peer-to-peer video calling, Skype also offers voice calls to regular phone numbers (including mobiles and landlines) as well as to other Skype users, group calling, group video, video and voice messaging, text chatting with file exchange, SMS out, screen sharing…the list goes on.

Skype is also available for any platform you can think of: Android, Blackberry, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, and many smart TVs. Maybe that explains why the service recently passed two billion talk minutes a day among its 300-million-plus users. You can even get an incoming phone number through Skype that works with standard mobiles and landlines. The newly redesigned Skype app for iPhone supports most (though not all) of the service's capabilities in a highly usable, intuitive design.

Getting Started with Skype for iPhone
To create a Skype account, you can either fill out a form requiring name, email, country, and language, or you can just use your Facebook or Microsoft Account credentials (such as an Outlook.com account). You don't need to enter credit card info to sign up, but if you do, you can avail yourself of things like cheap calls to regular phones (either using pay-as-you-go Skype Credit or a subscription), SMS messaging, and low-cost access to public Wi-Fi hotspots. Unlimited calling plans start at $2.99 a month and pay-as-you go is 2.3 cents a minute for the U.S, but SMS messages are actually a bit pricey at 11.2 cents each.

Interface
As with the previous Skype iPhone app, there's no true home page. Instead, you swipe through three main views to start communicating—People, Recent, and Favorites—or check out your own profile page from its icon at top right. I usually leave the app on the Recent view, since that's where I can keep up with ongoing interactions. Navigation between each section is more elegant than in the previous version, which snapped from view to view with no visual transition. Now they slide back and forth smoothly and naturally.

If you need to find someone from your list of contacts, People is the place, and Favorites offers large tiles for easy access to the most important people in your world. Sitting steadily at the bottom of all these screens are two buttons—one for the dial pad and one for chat.

The design of the Profile page is more pleasing and cleaner than in the older version, but it doesn't include a couple of helpful entries that were formerly present. For example, there are no longer entries for your Skype Number (the number that people can use to call you from standard phones). Nor do you see the status of voice messages, call forwarding, or Skype Wi-Fi. The last is a separate app that lets you use your Skype Credit to pay by the minute for access via millions of public hotspots, such as those Boingo hotspots you find at airports.

Call and Video Quality
I can sum up call quality in Skype pretty quickly: It's been in the lead for years, and just seems to keep getting better. I made test calls in the app from New York to the West Coast and to Japan. I found in my testing (and regularly find in my frequent personal usage) that Skype's voice quality is actually superior to what I've often gotten on a mobile call. And video, though highly bandwidth dependent, looks reasonably clear, even over mobile connections. It's not quite as sharp as Apple's FaceTime, but the difference is slight, and FaceTime requires that both parties have Apple equipment. After a Skype call, the app asks you to rate its quality, so any problems are reported to the company.

Group Chat
It's hard to believe the iPhone Skype app didn't have group messaging before this update. Starting a chat session with either one or multiple users is now possible from any page of the main interface (Recent, Favorites, or People). You can include photos inline in chats, but I still find the emoticon selection lacking compared with Facebook Messenger and the stickers in WhatsApp. If chat group members go offline, they see any new messages the next time they're online. You can also now leave a multiparty chat whether you or another user started it, and you can see a list members of a large chat on a separate page.

Speed
A big claim for the rebuilt Skype iPhone app version is that it's up to five times faster than the previous one for some actions. When I tried opening each version of the app on my iPhone 5, I noted that the new version took 2 seconds to open, whereas the old one took 4 seconds. When signing back in after signing out, however, I didn't see a real difference. In other words, I personally haven't experienced any fivefold speed multiplications, but the app is definitely faster in some regards.

Notifications
Notifications in the latest Skype for iPhone get some welcome updates. First, the service's underlying notification system now spares you from seeing the same unread messages or missed calls as new events on multiple devices once you've addressed them on one device. And app interface updates now let you choose whether to receive any combination of push, in-app, and audio notifications for chat.

What's Missing                                                   
As I mentioned earlier, the Skype iPhone app doesn't support every Skype feature, and there are features you'll find in competing apps that you don't get in Skype. One example is Viber's ability to move a call from your mobile app to your desktop or tablet, something that would be most welcome in Skype. As for standard Skype features, the app doesn't support group video or initiating group voice chat.

Skyping With the New iPhone App
The new iPhone Skype app is limited compared with the vast possibilities offered by the Skype service as a whole, but this very limitation gives it a welcome simplicity. The app does the things you're most likely to want to do on your iPhone and does them well, in a pleasing design, and with speed and fluidity. Could it be more powerful or feature-packed? Sure, and the designers tell me more features are on the way. If your people all have iPhones, you may just want to stick with the built-in FaceTime app, but for full-featured VoIP, video calling, and messaging that works across all platforms, Skype for iPhone is an easy Editors' Choice.

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Brother HL-L8250CDN

Pros Fast. Excellent paper handling for a micro or small office. Ethernet port.

Cons Graphics and photos are both subpar for a color laser, although still suitable for most business use. Bottom Line The Brother HL-L8250CDN color laser printer offers excellent speed and paper handling for a micro or small office.

By M. David Stone

While the Brother HL-L8250CDN ($349.99) matched the Editors' Choice Xerox Phaser 6500/DN in our speed tests, and it offers better paper handling, its output quality can't match the 6500/DN. But if you're looking for a color laser printer for a micro or small office or workgroup, its speed and paper handling are enough to make it worth considering as your office workhorse.

Like the Xerox 6500/DN, the HL-L8250CDN offers a 250-sheet paper tray and a duplexer (for two-sided printing) standard. Instead of a single-sheet manual feed, however, it includes a 50-sheet multipurpose tray. And if you need more capacity, you can add a 500-sheet second tray ($249.99) for a total of 800 sheets. The Xerox printer's maximum capacity is only 500 sheets. Although both printers offer suitable paper handling for moderate- to heavy-duty printing for a small office, you won't have to refill the trays as often with the HL-L8250CDN.

Setup and Speed
The HL-L8250CDN is a little too big to share a desk with comfortably. It measures 12.3 by 16.1 by 19.1-inches (HWD), and it weighs enough, at 34.8 pounds, that you might need some help moving it into place.

Setup is typical for color lasers. I connected the printer to a wired network for my tests and installed the driver on a system running Windows Vista. One key difference between it and the Xerox 6500/DN is that the HL-L8250CDN installs to print in simplex (one-sided) mode rather than duplex by default. That gives it a faster speed than the Xerox printer on our official tests, but only because printing in duplex takes longer.

Brother rates the printer at 30 pages per minute (ppm), which is the speed you should see when printing a text document or other file that needs little to no processing. On our business applications suite, (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) I clocked it at 6.6ppm, making it significantly faster than the Xerox 6500/DN's official speed of 5.4ppm. However there's a metaphorical asterisk that goes next to the Xerox printer's speed.

In my unofficial tests with the Xerox printer in simplex mode, it came in at 6.5ppm, which means the two printers are actually tied for speed. (A 0.1ppm difference in our tests isn't significant.) As another point of reference, both printers are a bit faster than the Samsung CLP-415NW, at 6ppm.

Output Quality
The HL-L8250CDN's output quality overall is best described as good enough for most business use, but far short of impressive. Text quality is typical for a color laser, although it's at the bottom of a very tight range where most color lasers fall. It's not quite suitable for high-quality desktop publishing, but you shouldn't have a problem with it for anything else, including printing with smaller fonts than most business documents use.

Graphics quality is a touch below what's typical for a color laser, which still makes it easily good enough for any internal business use. Most people would consider it good enough for PowerPoint handouts and the like as well.

Photo quality is good enough to print recognizable photos from Web pages and such, but most photos in my tests had obvious quality issues, including banding, posterization (shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually), and visible dithering in the form of both graininess and dithering patterns.

Also worth nothing: If you connect the printer to a network, you can print through the cloud and from mobile devices over a Wi-Fi access point on your network.

If you need good quality for photos and graphics as well as for text, you're better off with either the Editors' Choice Samsung CLP-415 for light to moderate use, or the Editors' Choice Xerox 6500/DN for more heavy-duty printing complete with duplexing. That said, if what you need is a medium- to heavy-duty workhorse color laser, but graphics and photo quality aren't crucial, the Brother HL-L8250CDN's speed and capable paper handling make it worth considering.

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Western Digital My Cloud Mirror

Western Digital has added a new NAS device to its relatively young lineup of personal cloud storage devices, which include the My Cloud and the My Cloud EX4. Feature-wise, the My Cloud Mirror ($399.99, as tested), falls between the two—it has one more drive than the single-bay My Cloud and two fewer drives than the EX4. The My Cloud is the entry-level storage product for consumers; the EX4 is for business users; and the My Cloud Mirror is targeted at those who want dual-drive mirroring for extra protection of critical data. It's a powerful NAS option for everyday users, although boosting the default memory from 512MB to 1GB would make it even more robust.

Specs
My Cloud Mirror looks identical to the My Cloud, except that it's fatter because it houses an extra drive. The device ships in 4, 6, or 8TB storage configurations. (But mirroring cuts the storage capacity in half.) By default, the drives are set to mirror each other—a configuration known as RAID 1. With mirroring, a complete copy of your data resides on each disk. If one hard drive fails, you still have your all data on the remaining drive. For more on how RAID works, read RAID Levels Explained.

Hardware specs include a 1.2GHz processor and a rather measly 512GB of RAM—one of my few gripes about this NAS. Synology's comparable DS712+ ships with 1GB memory. On the other hand, Synology's NAS is pricier, at $500—and that's without disks.

The My Cloud Mirror has three LEDs on the front panel: one for power and one for each disk's status. The rear panel has a Gigabit Ethernet port and two USB 3.0 ports that support external hard drives (but not printers).

You add hard drives in a fairly unique way: from the top of the device. In most NAS devices, the drives bays sit horizontally and you take them in and out of the back plane from the front of the NAS. With the My Cloud Mirror, on the other hand, you open the drive bay at the top by lightly pressing down a release button. A bracket holds the drives in place. To remove drives, you unscrew the bracket and slide a drive out by a plastic tab attached to each bay. The tabs are a bit flimsy, but they're effective in removing the drives.

The vertical drive setup works well for keeping the device cool. Even after days of uptime during testing, the device and the internal drives were barely warm. It also runs extremely quietly, another plus for users who want to keep the NAS on their desk.

Setup
You get a quick installation guide that shows how to connect the device to a network. It then instructs you to go to a URL to download the setup software to install on a desktop. Mobile users can connect their gadgets to the same network as the NAS and then go directly into the Web-based setup (the URL is also in the guide).

Both methods lead to a wizard-based setup that checks to make sure the NAS is properly connected to your router. The wizard also allows you to set up your personal cloud—a hallmark of Western Digital's NAS products—for making your data accessible from anywhere.

Next, you install the Western Digital My Cloud applications. Doing so on the desktop places a series of shortcuts on the desktop. One takes you into the NAS interface, one lets you access the automatically created public share folder, and another takes you to your personal cloud. The fourth is for connecting with WD's Learning Center, where you can watch videos and read documents about the My Cloud Mirror.

Clearly, the setup is designed for home users and those new to working with storage. I'm not quite sure why the rather bloated desktop software is needed, though. You should just be able to type in a URL and fire up the setup wizard no matter what type of client machine you're on. Most users should do just fine by following the guide.

Interface and Features
Western Digital has a consistent interface across all of its My Cloud NASes, and even its My Net routers, which is a very good design decision. The interface is clean, modern, and filled with big toggle buttons for enabling and disabling features and services. It's an inviting, easy-to-navigate UI. You scroll through large icons across the top of the screen to get to different areas in the UI including shares, backups, apps, users, and more.

There is one difference between the My Cloud Mirror's UI and that of the original, single-drive My Cloud—the RAID settings. The My Cloud Mirror lets you set up RAID 0 and 1, JBOD (just a bunch of disks; i.e., no mirroring), and disk spanning, a configuration in which data is written across both disks, allowing multiple drives to act as one single volume.

Besides helping you configure RAID, the UI tells you the state of your RAID array, letting you know if it's healthy or has some sort of problem. One issue I find puzzling with RAID in this device is that Auto-Rebuild is disabled by default. If one of the disk drives in the mirrored set fails, you can replace it with a new drive. Auto-rebuild will rebuild the mirrored set, restoring your data in the process. Auto-rebuild capability is a key feature of mirroring and it's unclear why WD would have it off by default (although it's easy enough to turn on).

The My Cloud Mirror also offers support for most of the basic NAS functionality: remote access and sharing with the My Cloud service, streaming with UPnP and DLNA, creating and managing users and groups, and more. iTunes and ISO image mounting are also supported.

You can, of course, map drives via your operating system to shares on the NAS. There is also some Web file management offered, but it's limited. If you go into Web File Viewer in the Apps section of the interface, you will see all of your folder shares. About mid-screen on the right side of the interface are a number of icons: Copy, Upload, Download, Rename, and a few more.

You can only use these icons to execute commands on files within folder shares, not on the folders themselves. For instance, when I single-clicked on a folder to highlight it, the icons remained inactive. Once I opened a share, the icons were active, and I could execute any of the icon commands on any file I selected within the folder. I would prefer the option to select a folder so I could quickly rename, copy or delete it from this section of the interface. Instead, I have to either go into the Shares settings in the UI, or use the mapped drive through Windows Explorer to rename or manage files.

A few features are absent that some users might miss. There's an option for Remote Backup, and the instructions within the interface state you can back up to another My Cloud Mirror or another device, but it's not clear anywhere if you can use RSync to back up to the original My Cloud or My Cloud EX4 NASes.

I also don't understand why the USB drives can't support printers. I suppose it's because wireless printing is becoming more commonplace, but customers should have the option.

There is also a lack of any reference within the interface to using the My Cloud Mirror as part of a video-surveillance solution. NVR (Network Video Recording) is a key feature on other two-bay NASes including the Iomega StorCenter ix2-dl.

None of these are huge problems with the device (unless you absolutely must have them), but I'd love to see these features added in a future iteration.

Performance and Mirror Recovery
The My Cloud Mirror proved to be among the best-performing two-bay NASes I've tested. It averaged a write speed of 66MBps and a read speed of 58MBps. The only NAS that had better performance in this class is Synology's DS712+, which clocked reads of 79MBps and writes of 88MBps. I presume that the extra 500MB of RAM in the DS712+ boosts its performance.

Western Digital My Cloud Mirror Performance Chart

Western Digital's newest NAS recovered from a simulated drive failure like a champ. First, I ensured that I had Auto-Rebuild enabled in the RAID settings. Next, with the NAS running, I pulled the drive from the second drive bay. The interface immediately called out the drive's health with a big, red caution error. Next, a pop-up appeared, informing me that "The system is busy. Please wait until the system LED turns solid blue before inserting another drive."

The LED on the front panel turned blue a couple seconds later. I popped a new drive of equivalent capacity into the second bay, and, a minute later, I saw in the Storage settings that my RAID array was being re-built. In fact, during the rebuild, I had access to all of the data on the NAS and was even able to stream a movie from the device. That's definitely a no-hassle recovery process.

Top-Notch Consumer NAS
The My Cloud Mirror has even better potential for adoption than Western Digital's original My Cloud. At $399 for 4TB of storage, it's a great deal, and for less than $600 you can pump the storage capacity up to 8TB. Furthermore, the unit offers data redundancy via RAID, in addition to the excellent private-cloud and backup options found in the original single-drive My Cloud. The result is a superb NAS for home and SOHO users, although storage gurus may miss a few features. Western Digital's My Cloud Mirror is all-round well-designed and easy-to-use, making it a clear Editors' Choice for consumer and SOHO NAS devices.

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Nike+ FuelBand SE

Pros Sporty, sturdy, and comfortable design. Displays time, steps, calories burned, and "fuel" on band. Wirelessly syncs over Bluetooth. Neat group features. Lets you isolate and name special activities. For iOS and Android.

Cons Slightly pricey. Doesn't track distance, stairs climbed, heart rate, skin temperature, or sleep. No auto-detection for specific activities. "Fuel" is murky in meaning. Mobile app exhibited some bugs. Bottom Line The Nike+ FuelBand SE fitness-tracking bangle looks sporty and feels comfortable, but it's priced higher than other devices that measure more meaningful data.

By Jill Duffy The market for fitness trackers—those modern day equivalents of 1980s pedometers—couldn't be more exciting. Wearable technologies help us get more exercise, or at least become more mindful of how sedentary we are so we can start to make a change. The Nike+ FuelBand SE ($149), from the international sports apparel giant, is the second generation of the Nike+ FuelBand series, and it does a decent job of tracking your daily activity and displaying it to you when and where you want to see it.

The bangle is the same form factor as its predecessor, only now with eye-catching accent color options. A few new features and improvements make the SE better than the original FuelBand, but the competition is certainly fierce, and the FuelBand SE's moderately high price makes it $50 more expensive than many of the best trackers on the market, namely the Fitbit One. The Fitbit One simply does more and costs less. Two other Editors' Choice trackers, 
Basis Carbon Steel Edition and, for runners, Garmin Forerunner 15 cost a bit more than the FuelBand SE, but they also include heart rate monitoring (a built-in optical HRM with Basis, and an optional chest strap with the Forerunner), which is huge. Plus, if you're really athletic and workout a lot, you definitely want a device with a heart rate monitor.

Nike measures all your movements regardless of the type of activity, and translates them into "fuel," a unit of measure that Nike invented that I find highly reminiscent of Weight Watcher's proprietary "points." Fuel is a murky concept at first, although it becomes more relevant over time as you get comfortable with how much fuel you earn in an average day, or how much fuel your friends earn. If you prefer tracking calories expended and steps taken, the Nike+ FuelBand SE does indeed allow you to add those metrics (via the iPhone or Android app) so that they'll light up on the dot matrix display on the bracelet any time you want. But you can't see distance traveled, and it doesn't track how many flights of stairs you climb, either, which the Fitbit One does. Want to see your heart rate? The FuelBand SE also can't help you there, as mentioned. In my eyes, you'd buy the Nike+ FuelBand SE if you absolutely love its design. And it's spectacularly sporty and chic. But for capturing a lot of data, you're better off with another product.

Design
The simple matte black rubberized FuelBand SE is a hard bangle with an LED dot matrix display. It snaps into place beneath a little Nike swoosh logo. The Nike+ FuelBand SE currently comes in all black, or black with an accent color—yellow, magenta-pink, and orange. They come in three sizes (S, M/L, XL), and helpful guidelines on Nike's site steer you toward the right size based on height, weight, and sex. Each band comes with two different-sized extender links, so even within each size, there's some wiggle room.

Also included in the package (the packaging itself looks as elegant as anything you'd buy from Apple) is a USB charging cable and sizing tool.

The display, which is super retro-chic, works with an ambient light sensor that detects environmental light and adjusts the brightness automatically. Even in strong sunlight, the FuelBand SE's readouts are totally legible.

Hidden beneath the Nike logo that fastens the band is a connection point that plugs into a USB charger, which also uploads data from the band to your Nike+ account via a Windows or Mac computer.

I like the design quite a bit, really. The simple bracelet doesn't look like much at all, and the accent colors give it a hint of style (I opted for magenta-pink). I really hate fitness gadgets that stand out too much, such as the unsightly and highly visible BodyMedia Fit Core armband ($179.99 plus $6.95 per month). The FuelBand SE, on the other hand, blends right in with casual attire.

The sole button on the SE is practically flush with the rest of the band—not even visible at a distance. Pressing the button lights up the LED display, where you'll find the current day's data: fuel, calories, steps, time, and "hours won" (hours when you were active for at least five consecutive minutes).

The band is water-resistant, but not waterproof. There's no need to panic in a rainstorm, but you should remove it to swim.

Nike+ FuelBand SE in Action
I picked up my band on a Friday morning and started tracking my activity immediately. One new feature on the SE is the ability to record special activities, such as runs, bicycle rides, soccer games, or anything else you want. To activate this feature, you press and hold the button until "START" appears on the band, then press the button once more to begin recording. It's almost like a stopwatch feature, except that when you upload your data to the Nike+ Web account or app later, you'll be able to name this activity and add notes to it, such as the intensity level.

This new feature is a huge step in the right direction, but it doesn't go nearly as far as a recent firmware update for the Basis watch, which now automatically detects the difference between a run, walk, and bicycle ride. The Basis even displays on the watch itself which activity it's sensing and how much time it has recorded for it so far.

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