The free software offers the typical filters that are common in many photo apps, but also makes it simple to adjust image attributes in real-time: brightness, contrast, saturation and more. Snapseed’s interface is the touch-friendly secret sauce, however.

You choose attributes by sliding up or down on the display while moving left to right boosts or reduces the chosen effect. Advanced users will enjoy the software’s Selective Adjust feature, which focuses on your specific choice of object for modifications: You can easily adjust the color of a background, for example, without affecting other image elements.

Samsung was in the news this week with details and a video overview of the Premium Suite software update for its Galaxy S III. The company’s best-selling smartphone will gain many of the useful features already found in the Galaxy Note 2, including the unique multi-window support. This function supports two mobile applications running simultaneously on the display, enabling true multitasking features on a mobile device.

A companion device for the Samsung Galaxy III, as well as a few other recent Galaxy phones, debuted this week as well. The Samsung Muse is a 4 GB MP3 player that looks like a small stone. There’s no display on the device, just a clip, headphone jack and touch buttons to control playback.

What makes the $49 Muse interesting then? It gets music from a phone, not a PC. By connecting the Muse to a supported handset that has the free Muse Sync app installed, users can sync audio files to the player.

This may not sound too impressive, but it represents a subtle yet important change to mobile device dependence on computers. Android phones have always been considered “cloud devices” that don’t require a PC to be used. The Muse illustrates how portable music players can cut the PC cord as well, even without any radios for connectivity.

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Other Android tablets at or below $200 all run earlier versions of Android, which were developed for smartphones. While it’s nice to see Archos push its products forward, the addition of Honeycomb may not help boost sales, given how poorly Honeycomb tablets have sold this year. The interface isn’t quite intuitive or effective; something that led Google to recently debut Android 4.0, which I personally think provides a far better user experience.

In addition to using Android 3.2, the Archos 70b hardware improves in several ways over its predecessor:

• 1024 x 600 resolution capacitive touchscreen, compared to 800 x 480
• 512 MB of RAM, double that of the Archos 70, but what I’d consider the bare minimum
• 1.2 GHz processor vs the 1 GHz chip in the old version

For the same price, Amazon’s Kindle Fire offers a dual-core processor, although it’s clocked at 1 GHz. It too uses 512 MB of RAM, and from a general hardware perspective, is very similar to the Archos 70b, which trumps the Fire with a microphone and webcam.

But I don’t think Amazon has much to fear from the newest Archos tablet, because it offers two key features the Archos doesn’t have. First is an intuitive user interface, making it easy to navigate and use the tablet. And second, Amazon offers an impressive ecosystem for books, magazines, movies, and music.

For someone looking to get a low-cost tablet with Google’s own Android 3.2 interface, the Archos should appeal. In particular, tech-savvy folks that prefer to hack around with a standard Android tablet might be interested at this price. For mainstream consumers though, I’d expect many more to embrace a $199 tablet from Amazon over one from Archos.

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