By Michael Brown - Source : Tom's Guide

It’s too bad that news of today’s software update for Microsoft’s Zune digital media player is destined to be buried under an avalanche of iPod coverage, because Microsoft has come up with a genuine music-discovery innovation.

A new feature called “Buy from FM” will enable Zune users listening to the Zune’s built-in FM radio to tag, purchase, and download any song they’re listening to while they’re connected to a wireless network. If the Zune isn’t in range of a Wi-Fi hot spot, the device will queue the tracks and download them when the player is able to connect to a network. Microsoft tells us the “Buy from FM” feature uses Radio Data System and RT+ data feeds within the FM broadcast frequencies to identify song and artist data.

Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace gives customers the choice of purchasing and downloading albums or single tracks, or paying a monthly subscription fee of $15 for a Zune Pass that allows them to “rent” as much as they can fit on the player. Any downloads that haven’t been purchased become inaccessible once the customer cancels their Zune Pass subscription. The Zune can’t play music purchased from other online music sources, including iTunes and Rhapsody.

Zune Marketplace subscribers can share music via the Zune Card, a real-time playlist consisting of each customer’s favorite and most recently played songs that’s accessible from the Zune software or from a network-connected player.

Several other new Zune features are more similar to what other service providers already offer. The new Personal Picks algorithm embedded in the Zune software, for instance, is very much like the Pandora and Last.FM music-recommendation services. Personal Picks analyzes the music you listen to and recommend new artists, albums, and tracks that share similar attributes. Microsoft is also introducing a series of channels programmed by experts from magazines such as Billboard and The Fader, as well as deejays from KEXP public radio. This feature reminds us of similar offerings from Slacker and RealNetworks’ Rhapsody services.

The new features will be available to existing Zune owners via software and firmware upgrades on September 16. Microsoft also announced new models (including a 16GB flash player that will sell for $200 and a 120GB hard-drive model that will go for $250). Prices for the existing 4- and 8GB flash models will drop to $130 and $150, respectively.

A word of caution to consumers thinking of buying music from Microsoft: When online music services who have relied on Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM scheme have exited the market (including Yahoo Music), they’ve left their customers in the lurch. People who thought they owned the tracks they purchased can no longer play those tracks because their licenses can’t be renewed. Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace uses an entirely different DRM scheme, but if Microsoft ever decides to leave this market, the consequences for its customers will likely be the same. Fortunately, Microsoft also sells tracks in MP3 format without DRM.

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By Marcus Yam - Source : Tom's Guide

Rejoice, iPhone users. Steve Jobs announced on Tuesday morning an upcoming iPhone software update that promises to make things better.

It’s unquestionable that when the iPhone 3G launched, the version 2.0 software that arrived alongside it brought to the entire ‘touchscreen’ family a whole new world of capability thanks to official Apps and the App Store.

With the expanded capabilities and the added hardware complexity of the iPhone 3G, version 2.0 software wasn’t quite as stable or snappy as the first-generation releases. Apple hopes to fix all present iPhone issues found in firmware 2.02 with the release of 2.1, set for release this Friday.

“This is a big update, it fixes lots of bugs,” said Steve Jobs during the Apple event on Tuesday morning, according to Engadget’s liveblog. “Fewer dropped calls, big battery life improvements. No crashes with Apps. Backing up is faster.”

Jobs’ listing of the improvements contained in the new software appear to address all the major complaints that iPhone users have with the current device.

For one, fewer dropped calls hints at improved 3G reception, which has been a particular sore spot for those using the iPhone 3G – and expecting it to live up to the 3G part of its name. Those who do get to use 3G, however, find that battery life becomes abysmal when on the faster network.

Apps crashing has been a particularly annoying bug, and one that Steve Jobs personally promised in an email would be fixed in September. Users who have had to sit through iPhone backups to iTunes that would often last hours will also be pleased to learn that the process should be faster, but just how much faster is unknown.

Software version 2.1 will launch this Friday to all iPhone owners and iPod Touch users already on version 2.0. iPod Touch owners who are still running version 1.x will have to pay $9.95 for the new software.

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By Tuan Nguyen - Source : Tom's Guide

See pictures of Apple’s vibrant new iPods.

Apple today unveiled a brand new iPod Nano. The new ultra-portable music player is essentially the same size as the first and second generation Nano but now has a wider aspect ratio screen, full aluminum metal body and a full glass screen.

The new Nano body also has rounded edges, making it feel ultra slim in the hands, and looks quite elegant for a music player. The motif of the new Nano definitely takes some queues from Apple’s MacBook Air and iPhone 3G.

Within the Nano itself, Apple has now integrated an accelerometer, allowing horizontal viewing of album in Cover Flow mode. The Nano also uses the accelerometer to enable or disable shuffle mode — simple shake the Nano in your hands and songs will shuffle. Our take on this is that it’s a novel way to enable shuffling, and time will tell how well the unit will work this way for those on exercise machines or those who jog with their iPods strapped to their arms.

Also included is a voice recording feature. The new iPod Nano will automatically enable voice recording when it detects a microphone attached. No microphone is integrated into the body of the Nano itself.

The user interface for the new iPod Nano also brings along cues from the iPhone and iPod touch interface.

With battery life, Steve Jobs indicated that the new Nano will be able to sustain 24-hours of continuous audio playback, and deliver 4-hours of continuous video playback — just enough for 2 average movies. At this point, we’re hoping that the new Nanos will have high quality batteries that don’t flake out after a few months of usage. The battery itself is non-user replaceable again.

The new Nano will sell for $149 for the 8 GB model and $199 for the 16 GB model. Jobs indicated that the 8 GB model will be available today.

Jobs also unveiled the new iPod Touch, which essentially is the same as the current iPod Touch, except with a revised body. The new Touch is thinner than the current Touch and also has a curved shape much like the iPhone 3G. The new Touch also has a steel body design and now features an integrated volume control on the side, a build in speaker Genius playlist creation, which creates custom playlists based on your listening style. Apple has also integrated the a built in Apple+Nike! receiver, for those who use the Nike sports accessory. All other features remain the same.

Also being introduced is a new pair of headphones, that are supposedly superior to the current white ear buds iPods are so famous for. The new headphones are in-canal type phones and come with not one, but two drivers: a woofer and a tweeter. Like the iPhone headset, the new headphones also come with an in-band volume and playback control nub and features a built in microphone to work with the voice recording app on the Nano.

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By Steve Seguin - Source : Tom's Hardware

While the economy may not be doing too hot right now, the maker of the Blackberry is doing great.

Canadian-based Research In Motion (RIM) has taken large strides in capturing market share in the smartphone market this year, despite some heavy competition. According to Reuters, RIM has sold 5.6 million smartphones from April to June this year, an increase of 3.1 million from the year before. RIM’s Blackberry devices have been considered in the past to be enterprise-focused, however in recent years Blackberries have found their ways into more and more consumer hands.

Although Finland’s Nokia was still easily the global market leader in the smartphone market, in the last year it had witnessed a 3.3 percent drop, down to a 47.5 percent share. RIM on the other hand had nearly doubled its market share in the last year, up to 17.4 percent. Trailing in at third was High Tech Computer (HTC), having managed to more than double its sales in the last year with 1.3 million phones. Apple’s global market share of smartphone sales fell from 5.3 percent to 2.8 percent in the first quarter as it prepared for the launch of its iPhone 3G.

The global smartphone market as a whole has slowed due in part to a weak economy, with global smartphone sales growth nearly halved since the first quarter of the year. The growing success of RIM could stem from the continuing need of corporate devices, while consumer spending may have tightened. Many users of older Palm devices, for example, may be looking to retire their Treos in favor of a Blackberry, a market Apple has failed to capture with its iPhone. As RIM continues to grow into the consumer smartphone market, releasing new designs and features, Apple has stumbled with its attempt to capture a corporate market of its own. Apple’s MobileME service for example was off to a rough start with down times, missing emails and improper billing requests that even had Steve Jobs saying it was "not up to Apple’s standards."

While the Blackberry’s tactile keyboard may be giving RIM an advantage in the corporate environment, touch-screens are a hot feature in the consumer market right now. With the release of Apple’s iPhone 3G, its expected Apple should see a consumer market share increase for the year’s third quarter. With RIM expected to release its own touch-screen device in the near future, rumors saying mid-November, and Nokia’s flagship N96 now shipping, the consumer smartphone market looks to get a bit more exciting.

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By Jane McEntegart - Source : Tom's Guide

Google announced today that it will divide the amount of time before it anonymizes users’ data in half, meaning your search data will now only be associated with your IP address for nine months before being made anonymous.

Over the years Google has said that the information stored about users’ searches is instrumental in the innovation and development of new products and up until 2007 Google stored user data for as long as it felt the information was useful. The company last year introduced a deadline of anonymity for all stored user data and announced that after 18-24 months, it would anonymize the search logs.

Google today announced that the 18-24 month deadline has now been reduced to just nine months following pressure from regulators in the European Union and the United States. However, just because Google has shortened the retention period, that doesn’t mean the search giant is happy about it.

In an official blog post Google said that aside from being an essential ingredient for innovation, retention of user data was also necessary to improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam. The blog went on to say that when Google began anonymizing after 18 months, it knew it meant sacrifices in future innovations but that further reducing the period before anonymizing would “degrade the utility of the data too much and outweigh the incremental privacy benefit for users.”

The blog finished on a glum tone. Signed off by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel; Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy Counsel; and Alma Whitten, Software Engineer, the three stated that while they were glad it would bring improved levels of privacy, they were “concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data.”

Read the full blog here.

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By Jane McEntegart - Source : Tom's Guide

Google’s Chrome is cutting itself a nice little slice of the market share Microsoft Internet Explorer’s market share, reports ComputerWorld citing U.S.-based tracking company Net Applications.

Chrome has been the talk of the playground and while a lot of the coverage over the last week or so has focused on bugs, patches and fixes for said bugs, speculation as to what Chrome will mean for Google’s support of Mozilla’s Firefox, there’s been little data to show how popular Chrome has been with users.

When you consider the fact that the browser has only been out a week, any data should be taken with a grain of salt. When a new product emerges, particularly something users can get for free and are under no obligation to stick with, you’re always going to see a migration of users eager to try the new and compare it to the old before making a decision.

It’s for this reason that we expected to see a bloated user base for Chrome. Last week Net Applications said Chrome hit 1.48 percent of the market share before stabilizing around 1 percent. While this week’s numbers are a little lower than that (According to NA, Chrome is currently at 0.7 percent), they’re nothing to be ashamed of, especially since Google seems to be taking those users solely from Internet Explorer.

"IE took the entire market share hit from Chrome," said Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Applications’ executive vice president of marketing, told ComputerWorld. That coupled with the fact that Vizzaccaro says the rest of the alternative browsers all had gains as well is not good news for IE.

Read the full story on ComputerWorld.

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By Steve Seguin - Source : Tom's Hardware

HP announced Monday its EliteBook laptop can achieve up to 24-hours of battery life.

One fundamental requirement for a good laptop is good battery life. On Monday, HP announced it had reached an astounding 24-hours of battery life with its EliteBook 6930p laptop. While just last month Dell had announced its Latitude laptop had reached 19-hours of battery life, it looks like HP wanted us to know it could do one better. The all day battery life HP promises does not come cheap however and there is a strict laptop configuration HP states that is needed to achieve the feat.

The 14.1-inch EliteBook 6930p has been designed to a military standard supposedly helping to defend it against bumps, drops, spills, vibrations, extreme temperatures and high humidity. The laptop is not the lightest laptop around though, starting at 4.7-pounds and still needing to achieve the all day battery life the laptop must be configured with an optional Intel 80 GB SSD drive, an HP Illumi-Lite LED display that will not be available until October, an optional ultra-capacity battery, Windows XP and updated software drivers.

HP claims with the 24-hour battery life of its laptop, business users can now easily use their units non-stop on the world’s longest scheduled commercial airline flight, linking Newark Liberty International Airport and Singapore Changi Airport, an 18-hour and 40-minute flight. One could also take more than 10 trips on the EuroStar train between London and Paris, approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes in each direction, before needing to recharge. For those laptop users stateside, 24 hours of battery life would be enough for a car passenger to continually use their laptop while making the trek from Maine to Florida.

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By Jane McEntegart - Source : Tom's Guide

Google has announced that the company will endeavor to bring archives of printed news from around the world online.

If this sounds familiar to some of you, it’s because Google started working with several publications a couple of years back in an effort to index their already digitized archives. Yesterday’s announcement takes this initiative to a whole new level as Google itself attempts to digitize as much content from print archives as possible.

According to the AP, Google has said it will foot the bill for copying the archives of any publisher that wants to take part in the initiative as long they permit Google to display the content for free. Participating publishers will reportedly receive a cut of the revenue generated from advertisements displayed with the archives.

When Google began indexing digitized archives in 2006, all archives were searchable via the Google News Archive. According to the official Google blog, content scanned by Google will appear alongside the already-digitized material from publications like the New York Times as well as from archive aggregators, and will be marked "Google News Archive."

According to the Washington Post, which was part of the original digitized archives initiative in 2006, Google will launch the service with millions of articles already scanned and will be continuously updating them.

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By Jane McEntegart - Source : Tom's Guide

It’s going to be a long day for Apple as the company’s Let’s Rock event kicks off in San Francisco. Speculation as to what Apple is announcing in the way of iPods and iTunes is going off the charts, not mention whether or not Apple can pull off the launch after the whole MobileMe, iPhone debacle.

Apple has announced new or revamped iPods in September for the last three years running so the rumours were flying well before Apple announced Let’s Rock last week.

Digg Founder, Kevin Rose, started things off and while the blogosphere has been going nuts with predictions and forecasts for Tuesday, it’s mostly been the same stuff rejigged. So what’s expected from Apple? We’ve heard all the rumors about a whole new Nano, small changes to the Touch as well as 2.1 software and iTunes 8.0. However, one of the things we’re more interested in, is the speculation surrounding the almost inevitable price cuts across the iPod lines.

When Apple launched the 3G iPhone for $199, there were plenty of happy campers. The company sold 1 million units in the first weekend and this was thanks, in large part, to the huge drop in price bringing the iPhone out of the elitist price range so commonly associated with Apple, down to a more affordable price for the masses.

However, unfortunately, at $199 the iPhone makes buying an iPod Touch for $299 and a separate cell phone, seem a little pointless, even with the AT&T price plan. Amid all the excitement back in June about a $199 iPhone, we were left scratching our heads at the notion that an iPhone would cost the same as an 8GB Nano.

In hindsight, Apple may have been trying to give the iPhone an extra shove in the right direction. Now that the phones are pretty much walking out of the shop by themselves, the company can drop the prices of the iPod to better compliment the price of the iPhone.

While there’s not as much happening here as there was back in July (the MobileMe change over, the 3G iPhone’s launch in 20 countries and the release of 2.0 were all lumped together in one big monster Apple launch), the possibility of a new iTunes has some people worrying there could be another “rocky” launch ahead.

We’re pretty sure Apple hasn’t lost the knack to launch one product at a time. Even if the company did announce that the revamped iPods, 2.1 and iTunes 8.0 were to launch on the same day, the demand for the new Nano and slightly modified Touch won’t mirror the demand for the iPhone by a long shot, which should make for a calmer launch. As for iTunes? There hasn’t been any major problems with iTunes in the past, at least nothing that matches the magnitude of the problems MobileMe brought about so, it looks like it’ll be mostly smooth sailing.

Stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted on the day’s events.

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By Jane McEntegart - Source : Tom's Guide

Yahoo! and AT&T today announced the move to make Yahoo! the default search engine on AT&T cell phones.

Starting today all web-enabled AT&T handsets will allow customers the option of using Yahoo!’s oneSearch search engine while surfing the web on the go.

“Our customers want mobile search to be convenient and intuitive, and Yahoo! oneSearch is an important step for us in delivering that level of experience to them,” said Michael Bowling, vice president of Converged Services, AT&T.

While it’s good news for Yahoo!, it’s not as great as it seems. AT&T has been in the news almost constantly over the last two years and a partnership with a company that’s receiving so much coverage almost definitely falls under the “any publicity is good publicity” umbrella. However, it’s rather unfortunate for the search engine that most of the AT&T news out there over the last couple of years has been directly related to the iPhone, which happens to be the only AT&T handset Yahoo! won’t be appearing on.

The deal is very much Yahoo!’s bag as opposed to AT&T. Not only is the company launching oneSearch on the U.S. telecommunications company but it has also signed deals with as many as 60 carriers worldwide.

According to Reuters, rival search engine Google is in talks with Verizon wireless (currently second to AT&T in the U.S. market) to become the default web search application on its handsets.

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By Jane McEntegart - Source : Tom's Guide

A North Carolina city will today succeed in being the first town to switch off analog television in favor of digital broadcasting despite bad weather over the last couple of weeks.

In preparation for what will be a national switch to solely digital broadcasting, Wilmington, North Carolina’s four commercial network affiliates stopped broadcasting an analog television signal at midday today, the Associated Press reported. However, for the residents of Wilmington it seems such a switch couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

Weekend weather reports for North Carolina predicted heavy storms and a hurricane. While preparations for the digital switch have been going on for months, many people are no doubt unprepared and have no alternative to analogue TV in place.

While normally, this may not present a huge issue, the fact that many people will be relying on the networks for weather reports and updates on the forecasted storms and hurricane could mean people will be left out of the loop.

A similar guinea pig test was done on a small town in England this time last year and worryingly, surveys showed that with just 100 days to go until the switch 6,000 out of an estimated 25,000 households had yet to switch their television for digital friendly equipment.

The digital switch for the rest of the U.S. is scheduled for completion by mid-February 2009.

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