The web has become so complex that reading simple content on a typical page often feels like an exercise designed to test your powers of concentration.

Between banner ads, pop-ups, sidebars, “Click to continue” links, and similar standard web page features, the important content often gets lost.

Evernote now proposes an answer.

I have been using Evernote for a long time. It is one of the new generation of innovative web services – to me, in the same family as other favorites like Dropbox and LastPass – where new features come fast, and new features are often incredibly useful.

There’s a free service that you can get started with, a premium service that offers a lot of additional (compelling) features, and a smart team of tech people behind it who are quickly innovating in order to keep solving real customer problems.

One of those recent innovations is the Evernote Clearly extension for Chrome. You can get started using it right away. Very simple. And it’s also available for Firefox.

What Evernote Clearly Does

On the one hand, Clearly gives you a very simple way to transform a page laden with ads, sidebars, and other textual distractions, and replace it with a very clean, text-only version of the primary content. They do a great job of picking out what the primary content is on any given page.

By itself, using this tool to make reading on the Internet easier would be well worth the trouble of installing.

What Else Evernote Clearly Does

But the Evernote folks were smart. They also added a simple button that will clip the simplified page and send it to your Evernote account.

That does two things:

• For people with an existing Evernote account, the clipping feature makes it super-simple to put the data into Evernote.
• For people without an account, the extreme usefulness of the browser extension is a great brand advertisement for the company.

Get lots of people using your handy browser extension, and a good percentage of them just might eventually end up being your paying customers on the related Evernote web service.

Do you have any experience using Evernote Clearly? Is it useful to you? Do you have a similar tool that you prefer?

I am far from an expert when it comes to hardware, and keeping up with the latest specs on gadgets. In fact, a large part of the goal of Geek-in-Law is to find ways for “normal” people to make good technology decisions without spending all your time researching CPUs and memory. One way to do that is to point you to blogs and websites which do that work for you.

Here’s some information from the AndroidGuys blog, where the author very clearly shows why you should pay at least a little attention (and a little money) if you want to get a decent Android cell phone.

… decide now if that $29.99 Android phone with specs from 2009 is worth it.

- Why to never “just go with the free one”, AndroidGuys

Read the full post – trust me, it’s informative and a quick read.

There are lots of areas of technology where I, in fact, do recommend that you get the “free option” or the “cheapest thing out there.”

But your cell phone is going to come tied to a two-year contract commitment, and it’s probably also going to be very noticeable if you skimp too much on the hardware. I wouldn’t recommend going nuts with it, but then again the recommended Galaxy Nexus in the post I linked to only costs about $200 (according to the post). That’s about what I would expect to pay. I think it’s a good deal.

Any thoughts? Have you had a good or bad experience with an Android device lately?

… if you’re writing applications for end users, you have to remember that you’re writing for an audience that has been traumatized by bad experiences.

- Paul Graham, Founders at Work (Jessica Livingston)