Papers 2.0 (edit 30-11-2011, papers version 2.0.9.3)
First of all i'm not going to do an in-depth review of this piece of software, i will just point to an amazingly good review on arstechnica (REVIEW).
Papers2 is mac-only. Not a big of a deal but i like software to be multi-platform. And it's not free but a free trial is offered and big student discount is available (and that's fantastic, every sowftware house should do big discounts for students.)
What i'm going to do is to point out pros and cons in the every day usage.
First: the interface is gorgeous, I mean really gorgeous. It's a mac perfect UI, very easy to work with and very pleasant.
The color coding feature is just an immense point in favor of this software (in my present thesis I have to deal with copper and silver, copper is red silver is grey: super east to find immediately the article I'm searching for).
All of those nice features comes with a cost though, papers 2 is not as fast as mendely for instance.
It's not overly heavy or plainly sluggish it's just not lighting fast wich is a drawback.
Every thing works as pointed out in the aforementioned review. Bur I've found two major drawbacks.
First: bibtex. If you use M.S. World ( and you shouldn't) you don't care about bibtex but if you are using latex then papers2 requires to export every time your library there isn't a sync to bibtex feature.
Second: THE CLOUD. Papers livfe is a nice touch but it's too much social (think sharing with colleagues) and not enough cloud. There isn't the option to access your papers from another desktop's browser.
If you can live with this two drawbacks, and you have a mac, then papers2 is just a joy to use.
edit 30-11-2011 h 3:22 GMT, papers2 has been updated to 2.1 they report a massive speed improvement. My evaluation period has ended though so i can't report on that !!