Los Angeles: Google's new music service offers a lot of eye candy to go with the tunes. The song selection of around 18 million tracks is comparable to popular services such as Spotify and Rhapsody, and a myriad of playlists curated along different genres provides a big playground for music lovers. The All Access service represents Google's attempt to grab a bigger piece of the digital music market as more...
12:55 PM, May 23, 2013
Los Angeles: Until now, my problem with social music services has been this: Following friends doesn't really turn up much music I actually want to hear. We didn't become friends because we share musical tastes, and too few of them are using the services I'm trying out. Twitter's new music service solves this problem. It helps that it's free. With it, I'm able to sneak a peek into the musical...
01:23 PM, Apr 20, 2013
Los Angeles: I've been conditioned just like any other consumer to expect certain things from certain companies. When it comes to tablets, I expect Apple's to look and feel amazing, Google's to seamlessly blend online services such as Gmail and search, and Amazon's to have easy access to its online store. So when Microsoft came out with its first tablet computer, the Surface, I wanted and expected a machine that...
02:01 PM, Nov 03, 2012
Santa Monica: Buying movies and TV shows to watch on the Kindle Fire will be a lot more appealing now that Amazon's tablet computer sports a much more vibrant screen. The screen in the Fire's new HD models is such a major improvement that I can't see why you would purchase a regular model, even if it means saving $40. The HD models were among the new devices Amazon unveiled...
01:02 PM, Sep 08, 2012
Los Angeles: Samsung's new music service tries to combine four things into one: an all-you-can-listen plan like Spotify, a pay-per-song store like iTunes, an Internet music storage service like iTunes Match and a radio service like Pandora. That's a great premise at a great price: At $10 a month, Music Hub promises an affordable, ad-free listening experience. In practice, though, Music Hub can make your head spin. There are some...
01:55 PM, Aug 23, 2012
Los Angeles: Microsoft seems to have gotten the design and form factor right with its new Surface tablet computer. But the user interface, not so much. That's an odd conclusion to make about a device from a software company that usually lets others do the manufacturing. Still, that's how I felt after feeling the heft of the device, examining it from all sides and making a few swipes at the...
06:21 AM, Jun 20, 2012
Los Angeles: Syncing music from your iPhone or iPad across computers has got to be one of the least enjoyable experiences in Apple's computing ecosystem. The advent of iCloud was meant to lift the headaches of this cord-reliant process into the upper atmosphere and usher in what the late Apple guru Steve Jobs called the post-PC world. The main problem until now: You can have different songs on different computers...
08:43 AM, Oct 20, 2011
Los Angeles: Apple Inc.'s new music-discovery feature, Ping, is a potentially useful addition to iTunes. With it, you can see what songs your friends are buying and recommend some of your favorites to them. It's great that Apple is finally incorporating elements of Lala.com, which offered similar social-discovery tools until Apple bought the startup in December and shut it down a few months later. And if people use Ping to...
01:37 PM, Sep 09, 2010
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