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Trying Out a Revamped Myspace

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 23:02:26 +0000

Thanks to the popularity of Facebook, it’s easy to assume that all social networks are designed primarily to connect friends with one another. But many of these networks—think Twitter, Yelp and LinkedIn—aren’t focused on that. Instead, they provide information from strangers, business contacts and group postings on a variety of topics. Myspace is now also shifting in this direction after Facebook decisively overtook it as the most popular social network.

Last month, the company rolled out a revamped version of Myspace, which is owned by News Corp., publisher of the Wall Street Journal. I’ve been testing it to see what has changed and if it’s worth using. Its interface is cleaner than the old version of Myspace and I found it easy to navigate. It’s also inviting for non-members or people who’ve long-since given up on Myspace. But I can’t definitely say I like it enough to add it to my large list of social networks.

[ See post to watch video ]

Step one of this site’s rehab was a new focus. Myspace (myspace.com) was redesigned to serve as a source of information about entertainment. People who use it can follow five categories—TV, music, movies, celebrities and comedy—that include more than 100,000 topics. News about these topics comes from sites all over the Web and is arranged on users’ home pages to show loads of information at a glance. A Discovery tab at the top of the page shows content related to trends on Myspace makes suggestions based on a user’s preferences and taste. A spokesman said the Myspace topics can be expanded, but for now, if you’re fonder of, say, books, theater or hard news, Myspace won’t be a good fit.

Step two for Myspace included making nice with its old competitor. It now works with Facebook Connect to pull in people’s Facebook “likes” and interests, which automatically generate customized Myspace pages for new users.

The final step of the Myspace redesign was its emphasis on music. The site still contains one of the largest Web music catalogs that plays full versions of songs for anyone who visits Myspace. New versions of band profile pages look more organized. And all artists with band profiles will have ReverbNation’s FanReach email product integrated into their profile to help them create targeted email campaigns for fans.

Was Myspace’s rehabilitation worth the effort? I’ve been using it for a week and it has taught me a lot more than I knew about things I care about. I had no idea that one of my favorite TV shows, TNT’s “The Closer,” recently said that 2011 would be its last season. Nor did I know that Anthony Bourdain blogs about his role as a judge on “Top Chef Masters.” These items and others appeared on my Home page after I performed the process that the Myspace site refers to as a Facebook Mashup.

The Facebook Mashup does a few things automatically for you, in addition to generating a Myspace page filled with topic-related news. A playlist is created in the Music section of your page that contains artists whom you “like” on Facebook (or whom you indicated while setting up an account). And the Videos section of the Myspace page will reflect your tastes in a list of Followed Channels related to your Facebook preferences.

The Home page can be seen in one of three views—List, Grid or Play—and icons at the top of the screen let users toggle among these views. My favorite was Grid View in the Full Grid View format, visible by clicking a small box at the top of the page.

Some of the content displayed on my Home page was mixed up. For example, a tile representing the story about Mr. Bourdain’s blog (originally posted on Celebrifi.com) displayed with it a photo of actor Tom Cruise, who wasn’t mentioned in that post. Another Tom, Tom Colicchio, chef and a “Top Chef Masters” judge, was mentioned in the post, but that doesn’t explain the mix-up.

Anything that falls into the 100,000 plus topics of Myspace’s realm can be found via a search box in the top right corner of the page, but this box is confusingly labeled, “Search People.” Though Myspace still allows users to search for and friend one another, the label on this search box is puzzling, given the greater reach of the site.

You can watch video content from Hulu.com (of which News Corp. is part owner) without jumping to a new page. And videos also come from other sources like TMZ and the NFL.

Users can earn recognition badges—icons that show up on their page—for their involvement on Myspace, and can become curators of topics, awarded on the basis of users’ involvement and how much other people respond to their activity.

This week, a Myspace mobile app was launched in Apple’s App Store, and an Android app is due out next year.

Myspace successfully reinvented itself in a way that could very well get people using it again, but Facebook’s more personalized social network may be more valuable than a rich library of entertainment content.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Microsoft Reaches for the Sky With Its Kin Phone

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 05 May 2010 04:03:44 +0000

Finally, after years of churning out corporate-centric smartphones, Microsoft has designed a homegrown, cool and truly consumer-focused mobile device. It’s called the Kin (kin.com), and it comes in two versions, Kin One and Kin Two. Both will be available exclusively from Verizon Wireless (VZ) and in stores on May 13 for $50 and $100, respectively, after a $100 mail-in rebate and two-year contract.

[ See post to watch video ]

For the past five days, I’ve kept the Kin One with me at all times, using it for social networking, texting, emailing, phone calls, Web browsing and capturing photos and videos. This 3.9-ounce gadget is about the size of a large makeup compact. It has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a 2.6-inch square touch screen that responds to gestures like swiping, pinching, double tapping, dragging and dropping. Friends who handled it each had the same first impression—that it felt sturdy in the hand. (The Kin Two, which I used but didn’t test as extensively as the Kin One, looks more like the iPhone, but with a cleverly hidden, slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It offers 8 gigabytes of storage, a 3.4-inch touch screen and the same new software features as the Kin One.)

Pop-Up Clouds

The Kin One has several fun features. It makes all sorts of funky sounds when different buttons are pressed, and it displays content in clever ways, like text messages that pop onto the screen in dialogue bubbles. The home screen, called the Kin Loop, is a colorful collage of photos and status updates from social networks including Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. A finger swipe to the left from the Loop home screen shows the device’s apps, while a swipe to the right displays a photo collage of favorite contacts. A round dot at the bottom of each screen, called the Kin Spot, gives people a place where they can drag and drop almost anything to save for sending later.

The real wow factor of the Kin starts when you get back to your computer. By logging into kin.com with the same username and password used to set up the Kin, you’ll reach Kin Studio, an online repository for activities performed with the device, laid out in timeline style. This includes photos and videos, which are automatically synced to the Studio about five minutes after they’ve been captured—with no extra steps on the user’s part. It shows phone calls, text messages, and contacts. All of this content is viewable by month, week, or day.

Magic Moment

The first time I opened Kin Studio felt like magic. An entire website was created to hold my Kin’s content, yet I had done absolutely nothing extra to put it there. I’m the kind of person who never plugs her mobile device in for syncing, so this over-the-air backup is ideal for me. I saw photos that I didn’t remember taking and enjoyed watching videos captured with the Kin on a larger computer screen.

The Studio is a huge plus for the Kin in two respects. For one thing, if someone loses a Kin, its content is still saved on this site. More importantly, because all photos and videos are automatically stored online, the uploading from the device has already been done. When photos or videos are shared from Kin, the phone triggers the Web-based Studio site to do the sending—a great use of “cloud computing.” This takes pressure off the already overloaded cellular network and lets people quickly send several photos or videos at once. This also helps to conserve the device’s four gigabytes of storage, since only a thumbnail of a file resides on the device.

Microsoft’s $50 Kin One

But for a device that focuses on social networking, the Kin falls short in some respects. Twitter fans will be disappointed that it can’t retweet updates or direct message other Twitter users from within a tweet; instead, they must use a clumsy, manual process. Likewise, photos dragged into the Spot for sharing can’t be shared through Twitter. Kin owners using Facebook won’t know if friends have made comments about one of their status updates without going through three steps to read a screen displaying comments.

Also, this device’s 5-megapixel camera with a flash is supposed to do a good job of capturing photos and/or videos, in dark areas (like bars or clubs), but it produced fuzzy, hazy shots in normal and low light. It was significantly inferior to my BlackBerry’s 3.2-megapixel camera with a flash. The videos captured on the Kin looked better.

This is only the first version of Kin software and a Microsoft (MSFT) representative says that the company plans regular, over-the-air updates. These include two significant updates before the end of this year, in addition to a maintenance update that a company representative says will improve photo quality.

Apps on the Kin are currently limited to those bundled on the device—like Facebook, music and photos—and it won’t have third-party apps this year. Farther down the road, the Kin platform will merge with Microsoft’s Windows Phones and all the devices will have access to a common app marketplace.

The Kins uses Kin Studio for online device backup.

Two-Day Battery Life

The Kin’s battery life estimate is two full days with normal use, making life easier for the type of person who forgets the device’s charger for a weekend trip. In my tests, it lasted from a Saturday morning until a Monday night without needing a charge, and though I only made a few short calls on it, this was still pretty impressive.

I had some trouble getting used to the Kin’s keyboard software. Typing wasn’t a problem, but its lack of autocorrect capabilities was. None of the first letters in my sentences were capitalized, and shortcuts like hitting the spacebar twice to type a period don’t exist. Nor are words corrected as you go: typing “youre” won’t automatically become “you’re”; “i” won’t become “I”; and so on. A Microsoft representative says this is intentional because so much slang gets autocorrected the wrong way, but it only made more work for me, which was annoying.

I carried my little Kin in a pocket or purse with no problem, and enjoyed reading the continuous stream of social-networking updates on the Loop. I selected nine friends as my Favorites, which automatically used their Facebook profile photos to create a small representative tile for each person on one screen. A two-finger touch on the Kin’s screen lets you rearrange tiles according to your preference. A small, silver button below the touch screen works as the back button.

I enjoyed grabbing content—like someone’s Facebook status, a photo or a website opened in the browser—and dragging it into the Spot. I did this by holding my finger on the item until a tiny icon representing it seemed to bubble up from the screen, and then I dragged it to the Spot dot at the bottom of the screen.

Goofy sound effects indicate when the item has been dumped into the Spot. By tapping the Spot, options for sharing appear, and thanks to the Studio, several items can be dumped into the Spot and then shared at once with no problem. The Spot works to share photos to Facebook, MySpace or Windows Live, and it can share videos to Facebook and MySpace. Using SMS, MMS, or email, the Spot can send photos, videos, websites, Web-search results, location, feeds, status messages, and tweets.

Searching the Web

I liked using the Kin’s browser. Its URL bar doubles as a search box and uses Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Double tapping on the browser screen automatically zooms in on a Web page, and pinching two fingers on the touch screen zooms in even more.

Up to 10 email accounts can sync with the Kin, including POP or IMAP accounts and one Microsoft Exchange email account. For now, contacts will only sync for Hotmail and Exchange users.

Music can be pulled onto the Kin by syncing the device with Microsoft’s Zune software or by using the Mac Sync program to sync iTunes playlists—as well as iPhoto libraries—to the Kin. A Zune Pass, which costs $15 for one a month or $45 for three months, enables over-the-air streaming and downloading of tracks and is offered as a 14-day free trial for Kin buyers.

Though Microsoft’s Kin One has some polishing to do on its camera and on its social-networking tools, it’s a uniquely attractive device that’s a pleasure to use. I only wish all mobile devices had worry-free backup websites like the Kin Studio.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

For the iPad, Apps With Their Own Wow Factor

Katherine Boehret — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:01:46 +0000

In the days since the launch of Apple’s iPad Saturday, there has been an explosion of apps to run on it—3,000 and counting. They are mostly free and incorporate new ways of navigating one of the largest screens on a mobile device that relies solely on touch technology.

On this large canvas, people work differently and apps can behave differently depending on which way the device is turned. Apps can (and must) incorporate creative ways of navigating—in addition to the usual multi-touch gestures like flicking, two-finger swiping and pinching. Thus, although it runs most of the 150,000 apps already available for the much smaller iPhone and iPod touch, the iPad is spawning a new type of tablet-specific app.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I’ve been testing some of these iPad apps that give users novel ways to interact with the device. These are designed to take advantage of a larger touch screen by using things like fly-out menus, multi-panel layouts, 3-D images intermixed with text and newspapers that can be read almost as easily as their paper counterparts.

Since most of us haven’t used apps like these or a device like this before, many apps install with brief tutorials on how to navigate them. It’s obvious that the makers of these iPad apps are still tinkering with what works best for a large touch surface. And ads appear in several digital newspaper and magazine apps. Unless otherwise noted, the apps listed below are free.

News

Multi-tasking isn’t yet possible on the iPad, but the NPR app allows people to do certain things simultaneously. While browsing news stories, a player in the bottom portion of the screen lets you listen to programs, interviews or songs. I played Jakob Dylan’s “Women and Country” song while reading an article about NCAA basketball. Content can be saved to a playlist for future listening.

The Marvel Comics app

The Wall Street Journal app’s home page displays a horizontal row of newspapers representing the past seven days’ editions and a “Now” edition, with late-breaking news, all of which can be read when the iPad isn’t online. These editions are designed to use the full screen to display easy-to-read newspaper layouts and videos that play right within the articles. A finger swiped from the top down skips to a different section of the paper, while pinching any screen with two fingers returns to the home page. And you can save articles and sections. The WSJ iPad app also can access saved data from a WSJ.com account.

The app is free to download but requires a subscription for full access, which costs $4 a week or is free for a limited time to existing online or print subscribers.

The New York Times (NYT) app is called Editors’ Choice and looks like a roomier version of the newspaper’s iPhone app. Five icons at the bottom of the screen instantly jump to different sections of the paper, or you can flick a finger across these screens to page to more articles. It doesn’t require a subscription.

The USA Today app brings the Gannett Co. (GCI) paper’s color-coded blue, green, red and purple sections to the iPad. Its popular charts of information (called “Snapshots”) pop out from the bottom left of the screen and include polls that can be voted on using the device. The USA Today app looks less like the print edition of the paper and more like a list of news points with color photos beside each. This list can be scrolled with a simple finger flick up or down.

Magazines

Digital magazines on the iPad seem to be experimenting with different payment methods. Rodale Inc.’s Men’s Health, for example, is a free app and includes previews of magazine issues, but then it charges $5 to download the actual issue. Bonnier Corp.’s Popular Science app costs $5 up-front and includes an issue that must be downloaded within the app.

Popular Science really uses the iPad’s larger surface in creative ways. Instead of just letting you page ahead with each finger flick as if reading a regular magazine, you can read articles by flicking a finger down or across a screen. In some articles I read, images appeared to be floating in the background behind text. Two fingers flicking up from the bottom of the screen show shortcuts for a table of contents and previous magazine issues.

Music

Pandora’s iPad app makes good use of the device’s screen real estate by showing artist information, now-playing details, album art and a list of personalized radio stations all on the same screen. I found myself more likely to read about artists on the iPad than on my smaller iPod touch. But like many Pandora users, I like playing music in the background as I work on other tasks, and this isn’t possible on the iPad because it doesn’t allow third-party apps like Pandora to multi-task.

Entertainment

Scrabble app

The Marvel Comics app displays stunning, large illustrations and moves you across the screen to see them as if the comic is one continuous strip and there’s no division between one screen and the next. A finger swipe moves you ahead in a guided view that jumps you from one character’s dialog cloud to the next in the correct order. This app is a free download and a handful of free comic books come with it, but each additional book costs around $2.

Scrabble for iPad costs $10 and includes options for playing with friends by passing the iPad back and forth, and an additional free app enables connecting an iPhone or iPod touch to the iPad to use these smaller screens as tile racks. You can play against your Facebook friends or the computer, and things like “Best Word” and an option to shuffle tiles make the game a little easier to play for some. Scrabble will even play your iTunes music in the background while you’re dragging tiles onto the board using your finger.

With Real Racing HD, you see a 3-D view of racetracks and steer a car by leaning the iPad in the direction you need to turn (a built-in accelerometer senses where you’re moving the iPad). I played this $10 game while sitting in the back seat of a moving car and got a bit dizzy since the race is so realistic.

Education

A great example of how the iPad can be used for education can be seen in an app titled “The Elements: A Visual Exploration,” developed by Touch Press. This costs $14 and displays the periodic table of elements stretched across the screen. Selecting one element brings it forward and spins a dazzling image of it so you can see all sides of it. A link to the Web pulls in real-time information about that element.

iPad apps like The Elements: A Visual Exploration, above, make good use of the larger touch screen.

Others

Apple’s (AAPL) iBooks and Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle are two terrific e-reader apps that bring digital books to the iPad. There’s a strong argument for using the Kindle app, since books bought through it can be accessed on a variety of platforms in addition to the iPad, all in sync right where you left off reading, while iBooks are currently limited to the iPad. But the books in iBooks are displayed in an arresting way, with animation that resembles real pages turning.

Pages, Keynote and Numbers are Apple’s versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel and they cost $10 each. When installed, these programs can convert documents from Microsoft’s (MSFT) formats and let you work on them. They present rich, PC-like features controlled by touch. Pages, also lets you convert the documents back to the original Microsoft format.

TruPhone and Skype will make calls over the Internet using the iPad when you’re online, and in one test, this worked relatively well.

The Houzz Inc. app is a digital look book for interior-decorating ideas that’s updated with current images of decorated houses. It displays large images of decorated rooms across the iPad’s screen, allowing you to search and save certain looks for offline access or sharing with others.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

More iPad Coverage »

A Clicker To Watch TV Online

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:43:07 +0000

Finding TV shows online can be a major hassle. If you can remember which network hosts the show, you then must hunt through a maze of listings of several other television shows on that network’s Web site to find it. The show you want to watch might not even be available since many networks rotate only a handful of recent episodes online at a time. And if you do finally find the correct episode, you may be required to download a special media player to watch it.

Some services make this process a little easier. Hulu holds episodes from 1,200 television shows, but is still missing many. Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes Store offers over 50,000 episodes, but unlike network sites or Hulu, it requires viewers to pay to download and watch them (though they are commercial-free). Video search engines like Truveo browse the entire Web, returning an often-overwhelming number of results. And while YouTube is the king of Web video, it can too easily return a search result that isn’t a complete and genuine episode of the show you’re seeking.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I’ve been testing Clicker, a free Web site that aims to be the TV Guide for all full episodes available to watch on the Web. It searches over 1,200 sources, so it can index some 400,000 episodes from 7,000 shows. Results include television programs as well as “Web originals,” or shows that are native to the Internet and are of broadcast quality. Clicker either plays the video on its site or links you to where this content is shown on another hosting site—like NBC or Hulu. If a show isn’t available online, Clicker tells you so you don’t have to keep hunting all over for it.

I like Clicker and found it to be a quick resource for finding all sorts of shows online. In many cases, it directed me to find the episodes I wanted to watch and saved me the hassle of less efficient searching. It also suggested shows I might like and offered a playlist where I could subscribe to receive episodes as they became available or save available videos to watch later.

Clicker makes descriptive pages about each show

Though it has a search box, Clicker feels more like a directory than purely a robotic search engine that relies mainly on algorithms. In fact, Clicker created a descriptive page for almost every show, and these pages can be edited or created via user submissions, which Clicker will review before posting them to the site. And because it’s focused on TV shows or Web originals, it won’t clutter your results with kids’ birthday parties or cats on skateboards.

The site is still rather new, so it has some kinks to work out—like links to videos that didn’t actually play if, for example, they were pulled by the network. But these were rare, and for the most part, if a video wasn’t available, a clear, brief explanation was displayed at the top of the page. Also, if Clicker sends you back out to a network’s site and that network uses a special player for videos, you’ll still have to download that player.

Filtering Results

Clicker’s program pages contain a description of the show, and a way to filter results by season, airdate or popularity. And the site shows the actual airdate of each video—something that not many other sites do. A column on the right side of each page displays several related shows, like the suggestion of “Modern Family” for fans of “How I Met Your Mother”; and “Roswell” and “Dead Like Me” suggested for people who like “Heroes.” In December, these recommendations will become even more personalized.

Some of Clicker’s sources include NBC, Fox, ABC, PBS, the Food Network and Web original content (i.e. “The Onion”). It also can search movies and music videos; the movies can be watched free in some cases, or paid for via Amazon’s (AMZN) Video on Demand or Netflix (NFLX) Instant Streaming. In January, Clicker plans to incorporate shows and movies from iTunes, using Apple’s pay-and-download method.

Clicker is especially handy when you’re looking for a show that isn’t where you think it should be. “Seinfeld,” for example, is on TBS rather than NBC, where it originally aired, and only nine episodes are available at once before they rotate out and are replaced by nine more. “Friends” is found on theWB.com, rather than on NBC’s site. “Damages” isn’t available on its network site, FX; instead, it can be found at Crackle.com, another video-hosting site. It’s easy to understand why people settle for missing an episode rather than trying to find a show online.

Clicker finds over 400,000 television and Web-original episodes so you can search less and watch more.

Clicker also comes in handy when you’re querying something or someone you need to learn about. By typing in a term like “Thanksgiving travel,” I get news results from NBC’s “Nightly News with Brian Williams,” the “CBS Evening News” and the Associated Press. I also get tips for traveling during this busy time of year from an AOL Travel online video, as well as a 1968 episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies” called “The Thanksgiving Spirit.”

Clicker isn’t the site to use if you want to find the hot video clip that everyone is watching. When I searched for “Whitney Houston” the morning after the American Music Awards, the most recent video I found was the singer performing on “Good Morning America” in September—not the one showing her singing during the awards show the night before.

But the fact that Clicker can find Whitney Houston on “Good Morning America” is useful in itself. A search for Warren Buffett’s most recent appearance on the “Charlie Rose” show can be conducted in a similar manner—either by typing his name into the box at the top of the page or by opening the show’s page and searching within that show for anyone who has appeared as a guest. Performing a search within a show like this anywhere else is nowhere near as easy as on Clicker.

Playlist of Your Shows

Clicker can be used as a TiVo (TIVO) of sorts if you create a username on the site or simply sign in using Facebook Connect, which I did.

Users can make playlists where they can add just one episode, all episodes, or new episodes to this list—subscribing to receive all new episodes in the playlist as they become available. I added episodes of “The Amazing Race” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” to my playlist. This list can be accessed anytime, and it’s helpful for people who don’t have enough time to watch a show that they found. In December, email and Facebook notifications will be added to tell users that new episodes are in their playlists.

If you spend a lot of time in front of your computer and find yourself searching all over the Web for the TV shows you’d like to watch, Clicker will be a huge help. And even if your show isn’t available, you might find something similar—or better—in Clicker’s recommendations.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

His Ipod Is in Denial

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:09:44 +0000

Napster: Don't Hold Your Breath Waiting for Our Awesome New iPhone App

Peter Kafka — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:40:20 +0000

Best Buy’s Napster wants you to know that you can now buy music “over the air” and beam it directly to your phone. Yawn.

What about the company’s awesome new iPhone app, the one that will let you stream music directly to your handset? You know, like the one that Apple (AAPL) just approved for Spotify, the superhyped service you can’t even get in the U.S. yet?

Don’t hold your breath says Best Buy (BBY). That Napster app is not coming anytime soon. And neither are apps for Google’s (GOOG) Android platform or Research In Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry. And it’s because of those darn music labels. From a press note the company sent out this morning:

One of the most common questions Napster receives is, “When will you offer an iPhone app?” Well, Napster has created an iPhone application that allows subscribers to stream music on-demand to their iPhone—including personal playlists, albums and radio stations. You can imagine the company is also looking at streaming applications for several other mobile platforms as well (Blackberry, Android). However, due to the high licensing fees for streaming to a mobile phone, Napster has not yet submitted the iPhone app to Apple for approval or attempted to bring the application to market.

Now that’s an interesting approach–something akin to showing off a shiny new sled in a toy store window below a sign that reads “Not coming soon, not our fault.” Or that bank ad where the jerk takes the truck from the chubby kid.

I also don’t know if Napster’s explanation tells the whole story: Best Buy/Napster and the big labels already have an agreement that lets the company stream unlimited music to your PC for $5 a month. Just how much more would the company have to charge to accommodate the fees the labels want for mobile streaming? I’m supposed to talk with Napster folks later today, and if there’s anything I can pass along, I will.

UPDATE: A little clarification from Napster president Brad Duea. His company’s position is that it doesn’t want to move about its $5 a month price, and that it would have to do so in order to offer streaming.

Why would it have to do that? Duea won’t spell it out. But henotes that RealNetworks’ (RNWK) Rhapsody, which has submitted an streaming music app to Apple, charges $15 a month for “on the go” service it already offers, and assumes it will charge the same for a service that works with the iPhone. Similarly, Spotify charges the equivalent of $16 a month for its premium service in the UK.

Of course, it’s possible that RealNetworks or Spotify will try subsidizing some of the cost for a mobile app in order to grab market share, and offer their iPhone/mobile services for something closer to Napster’s $5 fee.

Another Music Start-Up Sued: EMI Takes Grooveshark to Court

Peter Kafka — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:59:37 +0000

Digital music start-ups seem to come in two flavors these days: Those being sued by the major music labels and those with expensive licensing deals they can’t afford.

But for some reason, plucky Grooveshark, which runs a very nice, free streaming music service, has stayed out of both of those buckets until now. I’ve confirmed that EMI Music Group is suing the site–whose motto is “Play any song in the world, for free!”–for copyright violation.

The label filed suit against Gainesville, Fla.-based Grooveshark in a New York court on May 8. I don’t have a copy of the complaint yet, but if you feel like sharing, hit me at peter@allthingsd.com or use the blind tip box here. No comment from EMI, but Grooveshark sent me a very long statement, which I’ve printed at the bottom of the post.

The takeaway: Grooveshark says it was working on a licensing deal with EMI and now finds itself in court instead. The company does refer to deals with “many artists, labels and publishers,” but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t have deals with any of the other three majors–Warner Music Group (WMG), Universal Music Group, or Sony (SNE)–either.

Grooveshark started out as a peer-to-peer file-sharing start-up in 2006, and has since morphed into a streaming model. When I talked to marketing VP Joshua Bonnain in May, he told me the company was primarily funded by friends and family–most of the company’s employees are either students at or graduates of the University of Florida, he said. But he also said the company had received a “substantial investment from a large party” that he wouldn’t identify.

Bonnain said the site, which generates at least some ad revenue, planned on splitting half of it with the copyright owners of the music it played. But I was never clear about how that was going to work since Grooveshark doesn’t have deals with the majors. Then again, Bonnain didn’t tell me that the company had been sued a few days before we talked, either.

In the music world, negotiations don’t preclude suits and vice versa; Warner was, at one point, suing iMeem, but then became an investor in the site. Same thing with Universal and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace. The only real question I’ve had is why the big guys haven’t gone after Grooveshark yet. I’ve been asking label folks about the start-up since November and I’ve only gotten shrugs for an answer.

Anyway, as I said, it’s very nice service, and it would be a shame if the labels can’t figure out a way to work with it or help it survive. But the odds of that happening, based on the unpleasant history of digital music start-ups to date, are very low. So enjoy this themed playlist I created with the site’s help, which features music from all four majors, while you can. Grooveshark’s statement is below.

For the past year, Grooveshark has been in talks with EMI Records and other copyright holders to negotiate licensing agreements for the use of their content. We are pleased to announce that over the past few months Grooveshark successfully concluded mutually bene?cial agreements with many artists, labels, and publishers that we hope to be a template for other such agreements with additional copyright holders.

Recently, EMI Records chose to abandon the template we’ve built with the help of other major copyright holders and opted for their traditional intimidation tactic of ?ling a lawsuit as a negotiating tool. We ?nd the use of this negotiating strategy counterproductive, as Grooveshark has been willing to conclude an agreement with EMI Records that is economically sustainable for both EMI Records and a start-up company the size of Grooveshark.

Grooveshark is run by a group of young and passionate musicians. We love music, we make music, and we believe that the use of all music should be paid for. We adopted this core philosophy at our inception and to date have concluded agreements with hundreds of record labels, major US performance rights organizations, and thousands of independent artists who support Grooveshark’s business model. (See: Grooveshark Artists)

As musicians, we support the rights of copyright holders and strive to sign sustainable agreements with all content owners, ensuring that all artists get paid– or we agree to remove content from our system in accordance with our DMCA Takedown Policy. We hope that EMI Records eventually follows the lead of the many forward-thinking labels we are already working with, who would rather get their artists exposure and a fair share of our revenue than block content access and force customers to illegal networks.

We understand that the economy of the digital music business is in a state of ?ux, and we hope to help ease this transition by providing the required new tools and services that lead to the next generation of the music industry. We respect the ownership rights of the major labels and publishers, and our core mission has always been to compete with piracy by offering a service that is genuinely better than what illegal networks offer, while also ensuring fair payment to copyright holders. Our next important step on our road to success is to conclude a mutually bene?cial agreement with EMI Records that is sustainable for both EMI and Grooveshark.

Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff: How to Make Money While Music Becomes "Demonetized"

Peter Kafka — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:31:16 +0000

As a longtime music executive and talent manager, Irving Azoff has had to find a way to work with everyone from inebriated rock stars to David Geffen. But he’s never had to placate Washington, D.C., before. But that’s what Azoff needs to do in order to pull off the deal of a lifetime: A merger between his Ticketmaster (TKTM) Entertainment, which dominates the ticketing business, and Live Nation, (LYV), which dominates the live concert business.

When Azoff isn’t busy trying to convince people that the merger doesn’t violate antitrust regulations, or running his ticketing company, he manages the careers of everyone from the Eagles to Christina Aguilera. Note the one thing in the music business he doesn’t spend time on: selling recorded music.

Session Highlights

[ See post to watch video ]

Live Blog

Introduction: Legendary Eagles survivor Joe Walsh, looking very much worse for wear, shows up via video to talk about his longtime manager. “Irving is the only manager that I ever knew that said to David Geffen ‘pffft,’ and he’s still here.” Also: “He’s a friend of mine….All the guys in the Eagles love him. He has a beautiful house that we bought him.”
Irving notes that Joe is now sober.
Irving rattles off his management empire: 16 management companies, handling everyone from Miley Cyrus to Willie Nelson. Country, classic rock “where the tour money is.”
Kara: Where’s the music business going? Irving: Obviously, with the “demonetization of recorded music,” everyone got into a woe-is-me attitude, but I’m enthusiastic. “Narrowcasting” of the industry has created new stars, and live business is good.

Irving: Music labels have always been slow to react to technology, and a lot of people in this room profited from that. Basically the record industry sat around and tried to protect an old model.
Kara: Could the business have reacted differently? Irving: Yeah, suing your customer is a bad idea.
Kara: Will there be record companies in the future? Irving: Yes. They have 100 years of content. They’ll be more like publishing companies, where they are a repository of rights.
Kara: How do you feel the technology business has treated the music business? [Apologies for gap, technical issues]. Eagles have generated about $400,000 in Apple (AAPL) iTunes royalties. Which is about what they get for a couple live shows.
Irving: Overall, the state of music industry is promising. Was fallow for a bit, but there’s a whole new generation of singers, songwriters, performers. “You never know where it comes from.” In terms of the business, there will be more companies than the four big labels that dominate today. “It will be a great time for entrepreneurs….It’s not over, but it’s warping into 2.0, 3.0.”
Kara: What does a music executive have to do to survive? Irving: You have to take chances. They can’t complain about the iTunes deal. They have to embrace new technology, and I think they are, and it’s easier to get deals done now.
Kara: What about these little digital companies like Playlist and iLike, which Ticketmaster owns a piece of? They can survive, and they’re excellent marketing opportunities. But they’ll have to find other ways of making money. Can they? “I don’t know.” Advertising? “I don’t know.”

Onto the merger. Irving lays out the case. Everything revolves around live music, and they’re the biggest player in live music. It’s really the promotion piece, and the marketing piece, added to Ticketmaster. Without that, Ticketmaster wouldn’t survive. “Any of you guys can write a program that does what Ticketmaster does….I’ve been there a couple of months and I have gripes myself.”
People’s gripe with Ticketmaster isn’t with what we do, it’s demand issues: People want tickets to attend sold-out shows, so we have unhappy customers. Plus we’ve been the “collection agency” for a whole bunch of fees. “But the decision is ultimately made by the act.”
What about criticism to the merger from the likes of Bruce Springsteen? “Everything we do revolves around what’s good for the artist and what’s good for the fan. That’s our new model.”
Not really an answer, Kara points out. Irving: “I would say that Bruce is uninformed about the potential of what this could be.” [Maybe someone could tell Jon Landau.] For instance, we could be bundling new songs along with tickets. “The business traditionally resists change,” so complaints about the merger are nothing news. And there’s plenty of competition: Phil Anschutz competes with us and he’s worth more than the combined market cap of both of these companies. Warner Music Group’s (WMG) Edgar Bronfman Jr. says he’s in the ticketing business, etc.
Discussion of TicketsNow, a StubHub-like “secondary market”/scalping business owned by Ticketmaster. Irving has said that in the past that he wouldn’t have bought it. Would he sell it now? Maybe.
What are the prospects for the merger? “Very optimistic” that it will get done between now and end of the year.
Back to griping about prices and availability: “People in the music industry, we’ve had a horrible record of shooting ourselves in the head.” We haven’t done enough dynamic pricing for tickets, and we should, and that will help make people happy. But these issues are fundamentally the artists’ responsibility. They decide what tickets we sell, and at what price.

Where is the music business going, overall? Who’s your favorite? “It’s like asking what’s your favorite kid.” Internet makes things very exciting, distribution is opening up. What about the industry suing customers? I think that’s a “very small issue.” We do need to protect intellectual property, and the people who make it.
Q&A: Esther Dyson wants to know what Ticketmaster/Live Nation will do with all the data they collect about customers, etc. “Any artist that calls up and says I’d like the email list of the people who came to my show, we’ll make that available.” But with regard to pricing, etc., artists and their management are not being sophisticated about how they use data. And we have to keep the press from chastising artists that use dynamic pricing.”
Q: Not clear what the question is. But seems to be about using an auction model from the get-go. “Auctions are falling into real disfavor at the moment….We’re finding that people don’t want to spend the time to participate in them.” They just want to know that this VIP package costs this much.
Q: What do you think about subscription services? “I’ve always thought subscription was an incredible model.” But tricky to pull off with labels, publishers, unions, mobile guys all trying to figure out how to split the money.
Q: Do you have specific advice for classical music artists? The great thing about the Internet is that you no longer have to be popular with everybody to have a career. Classical should flourish in this era. Build a base, get in front of people, have people like you live. “That’s been true in 1966, and that will be true as long as there is music.”
Do your artists like Twitter? Some do. “Very useful” but other artists “refuse to get a mobile phone.”

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

A Facial-Recognition-Based Playlist?

Marisa Taylor — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:56:50 +0000

Some day, your cellphone might be able to read you as well as your best friend or significant other, though not if you have a poker face.

Sony Ericsson filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trade Office earlier this month for technology that would allow a device to create MP3 playlists based on a user’s facial expressions.

It may not work out for the strong silent types, but the premise of the technology is that a cellphone would take a photo of the user’s face, analyze his facial characteristics and tailor a playlist to suit his mood.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Littlest iPod Packs In Songs and Finds Its Voice

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:02:05 +0000

In these days of economic distress, it’s nice when technology companies add innovative features to the products at the bottom of their price ranges. So it’s notable that Apple’s cheapest iPod, the oft-forgotten Shuffle model, is getting smarter.

In fact, the latest iPod Shuffle, announced Wednesday and available now for $79, is the first portable music player I’ve tested that announces what’s playing. Push a button and it will tell you, in a computerized voice, the title and artist of whatever song you’re hearing. Keep holding that button and it will recite a roll call of all your playlists, allowing you to select among them. In my tests, this worked as advertised.

[ See post to watch video ]

In addition, this new Shuffle is almost impossibly small. The company has moved the playback and volume controls off the device and onto a small, convenient module built into one of the earbud cords. That allowed Apple (AAPL) to severely shrink the player itself, which, like the two Shuffle models before it, lacks a screen. Apple claims it’s the world’s smallest music player, smaller than a AA battery or a house key.

The result is an iPod that contains four gigabytes of memory and holds 1,000 songs — twice the capacity of its $69 predecessor — yet is just a little blank rectangle of aluminum, available in silver or black. It’s a mere 1.8″ long, 0.7″ wide, and 0.3 inch thick — including a stainless-steel clip that’s built into the back for attaching it to clothing or backpacks.

This player is so small and thin that it reminds me of the popular “Saturday Night Live” skit in which an actor playing Apple CEO Steve Jobs shows off a series of tinier and tinier iPods culminating in a final fictional model that’s invisible. I actually dropped the new Shuffle while testing it and it took a couple of minutes to locate it behind a table leg.

After using this new iPod Shuffle for a few days, I can say that I like it. It does a good job at playing back music, podcasts and audio books. I found the speech function intelligible and helpful, and the earbud-mounted controls convenient and easy to master. And its tiny size and weight of about a third of an ounce make it an especially good choice for people who use their iPods while exercising.

Apple’s new iPod Shuffle

Only a single button appears on the iPod itself, as opposed to on the earbuds. It’s a sliding power button on the top edge that has three positions — one for “off,” one for shuffling your music, and one for playing your songs in order. Once you set this button, you never have to touch the iPod itself, until you want to turn it off.

The new speech-based navigation feature allows the Shuffle, for the first time, to handle multiple playlists, just like on the larger iPods.

In my tests, I managed to squeeze in more than the 1,000 songs Apple claims. I filled my test Shuffle with nearly 1,100 songs, plus a half dozen podcasts and an abridged audio-book edition of President Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope,” read by the author. My music was organized into about 15 playlists, and I was able to switch among them easily using the voice system.

To pause or resume a song, you click the large center portion of the earbud controller once, quickly. To skip to the next song, you click the same button twice, quickly. To change to the previous song, you click it three times quickly.

If you want the computerized “announcer” to identify the song, you press the center button for a longer time, and you keep holding it to start the playlist roll call. When you hear a playlist you want, you press the button again. Smaller buttons at the top and bottom of this earbud controller adjust the volume up and down. It sounds more complicated than it is. While the voice function is in use, the music keeps playing in the background, at reduced volume.

The computerized voice, available in multiple languages, is hardly perfect. Like all such computer voices, its cadence can sound robotic, and it clips some syllables, but I found it perfectly understandable.

The spoken names of your particular songs, artists and playlists are added when you sync the Shuffle with iTunes. The voice quality is best when using a Mac with the latest operating system. It is slightly cruder on Windows or older Mac operating systems.

Even on the latest Macs, the voice got some words wrong. For a live concert album, it pronounced the word “live” as “liv,” and in another case, it pronounced the Roman numeral “IV” as “eye-vee.”

There are some other downsides. The claimed battery life is just 10 hours, down from 12 on the prior Shuffle model. You can’t fully operate the Shuffle with regular earbuds or headphones that lack the special controller. And, if you have numerous playlists, it could be tedious waiting for the voice control to say all their names until it reaches the one you want.

Still, Apple has packed a lot of new intelligence into a truly tiny music player, at a pretty low price.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

National Semi Chips Away at Workforce

John Paczkowski — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:22:24 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

New From Apple: iPod Shuffle HAL Edition

John Paczkowski — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:28:10 +0000

The Apple Store went down for updating early this morning and when it returned, it featured an all-new iPod shuffle. Nearly half the size of its predecessor, this third-generation player features a new aluminum design and holds up to 1,000 songs with its 4GB of built-in storage. It also boasts a new VoiceOver feature that enables it to say the names of song titles, artists and playlists outloud in 14 languages (click here to hear an example).

“Imagine your music player talking to you, telling you your song titles, artists and playlist names,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod and iPhone Product Marketing said in a statement. “The amazingly small new iPod shuffle takes a revolutionary approach to how you listen to your music by talking to you.”

An interesting feature for those of us that can’t always recall a song name or its author simply by listening to it. Reminds me of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“Dave Bowman: Tell me the name of the song, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Dave Bowman: What’s the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do….”

As with most Apple (AAPL) products, the design of the device is impressive–sleek and impossibly small. That said, one of its elements may prove off-putting: The new shuffle lacks a click wheel. Its controls have been moved to the earphone cord. Which means it’s incompatible with third-party earphones until someone comes out with an adapter cable that will make it a bit costlier than its $79 price.

Flip Camcorder Goes High-Def

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:40:05 +0000

Over the past couple of years, Pure Digital Technologies has changed the way people think about video cameras by turning these heavy, expensive, intimidating devices into affordable, user-friendly gadgets that fit into a shirt pocket.

To keep the prices of its Flip camcorders affordable, Pure Digital always made some sacrifices in quality and style. And though the company improved on style in June by releasing the sleek $180 Flip Mino, it stuck with standard definition while other companies boasted high-definition capturing capabilities.

The $230 Flip MinoHD is the first camcorder from Pure Digital Technologies to use high definition.

Today, Pure Digital adds a high-def member to its family: the $230 Flip MinoHD. This handheld camcorder looks like the original Mino (more digital camera than video camera), but the MinoHD is capable of capturing high-definition footage in 1280×720 pixel resolution, or 720p. (The regular Mino records at 640×480 pixels.)

Both cameras can be personalized with colorful designs that people can either make themselves or select from TheFlip.com. It’s also possible to upload personal photos to decorate the camcorder. This personalization process is free on new Minos, but people who want to personalize Minos they already own are out of luck.

I brought my MinoHD along on a weekend trip to a lake in North Carolina and used it to capture beautiful images of leaves at their color-changing peak and games of charades among friends. Overall, I really liked the quality of the footage, which had rich hues and sharp details such as glistening ripples of waves on the lake’s surface. And the MinoHD’s improved sound even clearly picked up the voices of two guys paddling away from our dock in a canoe.

[ See post to watch video ]

But if you’re the type of person who likes to play back videos after capturing them, you might be disappointed that the MinoHD’s 1.5-inch screen is no larger than the previous models. This means you won’t get a good look at the high-definition footage until you play clips back on a computer.

Another downside is that high-definition footage is much too large to easily send to others in its original format, so it must be compressed to 480×270-pixel resolution for sharing on Pure Digital’s software. Previous Flips also compressed videos for sharing (the Mino uses 360×270), but I particularly missed the ability to easily show others my videos in HD quality via the camera’s software. Pure Digital says it’ll enable HD sharing through a partner company by early next year.

The Flip MinoHD weighs 3.3 ounces and has four gigabytes of internal memory, or twice that of its predecessor, yet both hold 60 minutes of video because the HD format takes up twice as much space. In true Pure Digital style, the camera’s seven buttons are easy to use: Press the red record button to start and stop, and press plus or minus buttons to zoom in or out with a 2x digital zoom while recording. A play/pause button plays back videos and a delete button gets rid of unwanted footage to free up memory; alternatively, videos can be offloaded to a PC.

The MinoHD comes loaded with new software called FlipShare. I found this worked much better than Pure Digital’s previous sharing software, which was rather straightforward but had its share of quirks and rough edges. FlipShare worked on Macs and PCs running Windows Vista and XP. I should note that the software crashed and insisted on changing the color scheme on my Vista laptop the first two times I plugged in my MinoHD, but I had no problems after that.

FlipShare’s use of drag-and-drop video organizing resembles the way that Apple (AAPL) iTunes songs can be dragged into playlists. And just as iTunes searches for music when it’s installed, FlipShare scoured my computers for other Flip videos, neatly arranging those clips into folders. I easily named videos, and clips not saved to the computer were clearly marked as “Unsaved.” Eight large icons at the bottom of the FlipShare software illustrate what can be done with the videos: save to computer; play full screen; share via email, greeting card or Web site (YouTube, AOL Video or MySpace — no Facebook as of yet); or create a movie, snapshot or DVD.

FlipShare works with other Pure Digital camcorders, and users of the older software will get a prompt to upgrade to FlipShare next week. It’s also fully compatible with Apple’s video applications, including iMovie and iDVD. And when I plugged in my MinoHD, iTunes opened and asked if I wanted to import my MinoHD footage.

Pure Digital says the MinoHD’s internal battery lasts for two hours of overall use (recording, playback, standby, etc.) or for 90 minutes of straight recording. Compared with other Flip video cameras, this battery life is half that of the Mino and on par with the older Flip Ultra, which runs on two double-A batteries.

After using the fully charged device to record 60 minutes of footage over a weekend, I still had about one hour remaining. It charges by plugging its pop-out USB connector into any computer’s USB port, and will also work with some USB chargers, though not Apple’s. Pure Digital will sell a standalone charger for $20 that should be available by the end of the year.

If you’re in the market for a simple camcorder that records high-quality video, the Flip MinoHD is definitely worth $50 more than the regular Flip Mino. But don’t say I didn’t warn you so when you’re bummed out by the screen’s still-small size and its inability to share true HD footage via the FlipShare software.

– Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Van Natta Takes Playlist CEO Job, With New Investment by Pittman

Kara Swisher — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:00:39 +0000

Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.

Van Natta’s arrival at Playlist was not the only news for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up–former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s Pilot Investment Group is also investing an undisclosed amount of money in Playlist. Pittman will also join its board.

Playlist has previously raised several million dollars, said sources, but the new funding is many times that, to total about $18 to $20 million.

The move to Playlist is an interesting one for Van Natta, who has looked at a number of jobs since leaving the high-profile social-networking site earlier this year.

He has talked to a wide range of companies, sources said, including Microsoft (MSFT) and a range of start-ups, as well as with MySpace, which is owned by News Corp. (NWS). (News Corp. also owns this site).

Those talks between Van Natta and MySpace to run its new music initiative did not pan out for a variety of reasons.

But he has long expressed a desire to become a CEO of a company, rather than just head to another executive job within a larger company, so the move to run a start-up is not a surprise.

In an interview this afternoon, Van Natta told me he got very intrigued by the possibilities at Project Playlist, which was the first iteration of the start-up and in which he is an investor, due to its viral growth.

And, indeed, Playlist has grown quickly to become one of the larger music communities on the Web, claiming that more than 38 million music fans monthly, sharing playlists via its Web site and also widely distributed embeddable widgets. The site has tens of millions of daily page views, according to surveys.

To get to those big-scale numbers, Playlist essentially has offered users a giant linking service for music, not unlike Google (GOOG) with all information, pointing users to promotional, free and sometimes illegal music and music video tracks all over the Web.

Those links to illegal music have resulted in a lawsuit aimed at Playlist from the music industry, sources said, a sadly typical experience of many online music services.

The usual tactic for the music giants: Sue first and shake down later.

Under Van Natta, I would guess, Playlist is likely to reach out to music companies and strike deals.

The company also needs to settle on its main business plan, which appears to me to have been less important than its explosive growth.

Playlist currently does have some small amount of advertising on the site, and seems to be making most of its scratch from sending leads to ringtone sellers.

Van Natta did not want to reveal specific strategies for Playlist going forward, only noting the opportunity is large.

“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta. “And the company that does the best job of taking advantage of that is really going to be huge.”

That said, there have been a lot of music-aimed efforts like Playlist in the music space, with a lot of different business plans and varying degrees of success, ranging from the Apple (AAPL) behemoth iTunes site, which sells single songs, to the CBS (CBS) music service, Last.fm, which relies more on advertising revenues.

Other contenders in the space include the Rhapsody subscription service from RealNetworks (RNWK), music discovery service iLike and many others. MySpace has also waded deeply into the music space, and Facebook is also reportedly weighing its own service.

Van Natta was one of Facebook’s earliest and most prominent execs, serving in jobs like COO and also Chief Revenue Officer while there.

He came to Facebook in the fall of 2005, after a stint as VP of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development at Amazon, and was part of the founding team of A9, the Amazon search company.

“I am excited to be building a company again,” said Van Natta, who has taken many months off since he left Facebook in February.

Google Answers the iPhone

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:02:04 +0000

In the exciting new category of modern hand-held computers — devices that fit in your pocket but are used more like a laptop than a traditional phone — there has so far been only one serious option. But that will all change on Oct. 22, when T-Mobile and Google bring out the G1, the first hand-held computer that’s in the same class as Apple’s iPhone.

[ See post to watch video ]

I have been testing the G1 extensively, in multiple cities and in multiple scenarios. In general, I like it and consider it a worthy competitor to the iPhone. Both devices run on fast 3G phone networks and include Wi-Fi. Both have smart-touch interfaces and robust Web browsers. Both have the ability to easily download third-party apps, or programs.

But the two devices have different strengths and weaknesses, and are likely to attract different types of users.

If you’ve been lusting after the iPhone’s functionality, but didn’t like its virtual keyboard or its user interface or its U.S. carrier, AT&T, the G1 may be just the ticket for you. But it does have some significant downsides.

By far, the G1′s biggest differentiator is that it has a physical keyboard, which is revealed by sliding open the screen. The keyboard proved only fair in my tests, with keys that are too flat and that can be hard to see in bright light, and with a bulge in the body on the right side that you have to reach over to type. But, for the many people who can’t stomach typing on glass, the G1 keyboard will be a welcome sight. It’s complemented by a BlackBerry-like trackball for navigation.

The G1 has a smart-touch screen like its iPhone rival, for Web browsing and downloading programs. But it has a physical keyboard for conventional typing.

The G1 has a removable battery and uses removable, expandable memory cards. And it’s even a bit cheaper than its Apple (AAPL) rival: $179 versus $199. Its data plan also costs less — $25 a month versus $30 — and includes 400 free text messages, which cost extra on the iPhone. There’s also a $35 plan that includes unlimited text messages. And both plans include free use of T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi hotspots.

The G1 has a slick, clever touch interface to go along with its keyboard, and it includes a powerful new operating system. The operating system, called Android, was built by Google (GOOG). It is slated to appear on other phones over time, though it likely will look different on other devices because it is fully open to modification by other companies.

On the G1, the touch interface is fast and smooth. Programs appear when you drag up a tab at the bottom of the screen, and notifications of new messages can be read by simply dragging down the top bar of the screen.

You get much more flexibility in organizing your desktop than on the iPhone. In addition to placing icons for programs there, you can add individual contacts, music playlists, folders, Web pages and more. You just press on the screen for a longer-than-usual time, and a list of items you can add appears. It also has a higher-resolution camera than the iPhone, but like the Apple phone, it can’t shoot video.

It’s also much easier to place a phone call on the G1 than on the iPhone. You can just start typing a contact name or phone number while on the home screen, sparing you the need to enter the phone or contacts program. And there’s a virtual phone keypad that allows you to avoid opening the physical keyboard just to dial a number. It’s also much easier to jump to the top and bottom of long lists.

The G1′s Web browser, built on the same technology as the iPhone’s, worked well at rendering scores of common sites in my tests. You can either pan around pages with your finger, or choose to view the whole page at once and zero-in on a section by moving a small rectangle around.

This first Android phone, which was largely designed by Google and built by Taiwan-based HTC, also includes some key features Apple omitted. These include a limited ability to copy and paste text, and the ability to send photos directly to other phones without relying on email, a common phone feature called MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service. And, unlike AT&T (T), T-Mobile (DT) will even allow users to legally unlock the phone after 90 days and start using it on another carrier, provided you pay a hefty early-termination fee.

In my battery tests, the G1 lasted through the day, but I had to charge it every night. That’s better than the initial battery life on the current iPhone, though in fairness, Apple has improved the iPhone’s battery life through software updates, and I found them to be about the same for mixed use.

In my talk-time test, the G1 got just under its claimed five hours, about 19 minutes better than the iPhone.

There are two email programs: one for Google’s Gmail, another for all other email services. There’s an instant-messaging program that works with multiple services. There’s one program for accessing Google’s YouTube service and another for Google Maps. The G1′s Google Maps program even has a feature, coming soon as well to the iPhone, that offers photographic street views of certain locations. But the G1, unlike the iPhone, includes a compass that orients the street views as you walk.

The built-in download store for third-party programs, called Market, worked well in my tests. I was able to quickly download games, productivity programs, and other apps and, unlike Apple, Google says it isn’t blocking any programs.

However, the G1 also has downsides. It’s a chunky brick of a device. While it’s a bit narrower than the iPhone and feels OK in the hand, it’s almost 20% heavier and nearly 30% thicker. It also has a smaller screen and doesn’t accept standard stereo headphones.

The G1 also skimps on memory. It comes with only 1 gigabyte of storage, just one-eighth of what the base iPhone offers. To increase the G1′s memory, you have to lay out more money to buy a larger memory card.

The G1 also limits third-party applications to a paltry 128 megabytes of memory. At one point in my tests, after downloading a bunch of third-party programs, and adding songs and videos, the G1 warned me it was running out of room, a warning I have never seen on my heavily used iPhone.

Another downside for some users: The G1 is tightly tied to Google’s online services. While you can use non-Google email and IM services, the only way you can get contacts and calendar items into the phone is to synchronize with Google’s online calendar and contacts services. In fact, you can’t even use the G1 without a Google user ID and password.

The G1 doesn’t allow the use of Microsoft’s Exchange service for email, contacts or calendar items, or any other company’s over-the-air synchronization for contacts and appointments.

In my tests, synchronizing with Gmail, and with Google’s contacts and calendar applications, was smooth and fast. So, the G1 may be great for dedicated Google users, but not so good for folks who rely on competing calendar and contacts services from, say, Yahoo (YHOO) or Microsoft (MSFT). Future Android phones may not be so tightly tied to Google services, but the G1 is.

It also can’t synchronize any data at all directly with a PC or Mac. For instance, it can’t sync with Microsoft Outlook or Windows Media Player on a PC, with Apple’s iCal or Address Book programs on a Mac, or with iTunes on either Windows or the Mac. It has no PC-based synchronization software of its own, and it offers no way to automatically back up your settings, music, applications, videos or photos, either to a computer or to an online repository, though Google says it plans to add a backup feature.

To get Outlook or iCal data onto the G1, you must install add-on software. To get your songs, videos and photos onto the G1, you must plug the phone, or its memory card, into your computer and manually move the files over.

Overall, I found the G1′s user interface inferior to the iPhone’s. It lacks the iPhone’s ability to flick between multiple pictures and Web pages, or to zoom in and zoom out of a photo or Web page by simply using two fingers to “pinch” or expand the image. It also doesn’t automatically change the orientation of the screen from portrait to landscape simply by turning the phone.

Further, many common controls that are easily visible on the iPhone can be accessed on the G1 only by pressing a menu button or by using keyboard shortcuts you have to memorize. Examples are stopping the loading of a Web page or moving forward to the next Web page.

There’s also no on-screen keyboard even for quick tasks, such as typing Web addresses, so you’re constantly having to turn the phone and open the physical keyboard, which quickly becomes a pain.

The G1 also is a greatly inferior multimedia device when compared with the iPhone. Its music player, while adequate, isn’t as nice as the built-in iPod on the iPhone. And it lacks a video player altogether, though a rudimentary one can be downloaded from the Market. The G1 does come with a program for buying songs from Amazon (AMZN), which worked well in my tests.

And then there’s the network. Despite all the troubles AT&T has experienced with its fast 3G network, which is still being built out, that company has 3G service for the iPhone and other devices in 320 U.S. metro areas. By contrast, T-Mobile offers 3G in just 20 U.S. metro areas. Eight more cities are due to come online by year end, which will still leave T-Mobile’s 3G coverage far behind that of AT&T and Verizon (VZ), which will soon introduce its own iPhone competitor, the BlackBerry Storm.

I did 40 speed tests comparing the G1 and the iPhone to see how fast they could download a Web page over 3G. The tests, conducted in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Washington, D.C., showed the iPhone to be consistently faster, by an average of between 50 and 100 kilobytes per second, even though T-Mobile’s network was carrying much less traffic than AT&T’s.

Overall, the G1 is a very good first effort, and a godsend for people who prefer physical keyboards or T-Mobile but want to be part of the new world of powerful pocket computers.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Fresh 'Discoveries' from iPod, Zune

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:16:02 +0000

Amid a speech by its CEO and a musical performance, Apple last week unveiled a new version of its iTunes software and some new iPods.

Meanwhile, Microsoft‘s Zune announced via press release that new players in different capacities and colors would be available this week, along with a software update.

Despite their different approaches, these two announcements shared a notable common thread: integrated music discovery. Each company’s new software features ways for users to find automatically generated suggestions of music they might like, the way Pandora Media Inc.’s popular personalized music lists do. Of course, music discovery also encourages users to buy more.

Apple’s new iPods include a thinner Nano with an accelerometer, which senses the direction a screen is being held in a user’s hands and flips the display horizontally or vertically. These Nanos come in eight- or 16-gigabyte versions for $149 or $199 and are available in nine bright colors. A new, thinner iPod Touch with a built-in speaker was also unveiled, and it comes in eight-, 16- or 32-gigabyte versions for $229, $299 or $399.

Microsoft’s two new Zune players come in 16- and 120-gigabyte capacities for $200 and $250, respectively. All Zunes have built-in FM tuners and wireless capability, but the new upgrade allows users to buy and download songs they hear on their Zunes’ radios via Wi-Fi, when available.

While Apple’s iPod has been a snowballing success for the company, its companion iTunes software is no slouch. To date, 65 million iTunes store accounts with associated credit cards have been set up on Macs and Windows PCs. But iTunes has always been weak on music discovery and community.

Apple (AAPL) calls iTunes 8′s ability to make smart music recommendations the “Genius” feature. The tool can automatically do two things after analyzing a selected song from your music library. First, it can generate a playlist of songs from tunes you own. Second, it can generate a list of songs you don’t own but might want to buy from the iTunes store.

MicrosoftZune’s Mixview feature displays content related to an artist with an explanation of the relationship.

Microsoft’s Zune software discovers and recommends music using categories called “Picks,” “Channels” and “Mixview.” The last of the three, Mixview, generates recommendations for other musicians and albums, as well as other Zune users with whom you might like to connect. The suggestions are based on the artist of the song you’re playing and are displayed in an interactive graphic that explains how each is linked — for instance, if your artist was influenced by a band or if a member of Zune’s social network is a top listener of the artist you’re playing.

After using the music-discovery software from Apple and Microsoft (MSFT), I felt like Apple’s Genius tool still had a lot to learn, though the company says it will improve over time as more people start using it. Zune’s software had some similar issues, but it offered recommendations in a richer, more engaging manner, encouraging me to keep digging around and learn more about my music. Though I didn’t happen to have as much time to use Zune’s software as I did Apple’s Genius, I got more out of my Zune experience.

Apple offers much more content at its iTunes store than Zune. In all categories, iTunes takes the lead: in songs, 8.5 million songs to Zune’s 4 million; in music videos, 10,000 versus 8,500; in television episodes, 30,000 versus 3,000; and in audio and video podcasts, 125,000 versus 6,000.

To analyze and learn from your music, Apple scans the contents of your music library, which may raise privacy concerns for some people. Apple says that the information it collects is completely anonymous, and that it does not and will not associate this information on its servers with you or your account.

Some of my Genius playlists were well-crafted, including songs that meshed well with one another. But outliers cropped up, such as when “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash was stuck in the middle of a list generated from Coldplay’s gentler ballad, “Green Eyes.” Some songs won’t generate playlists if you don’t have enough related songs in your library; this happened to me with the pop hit “Apologize” by Timbaland, featuring OneRepublic.

Songs from artists whose content isn’t sold in iTunes, such as The Beatles, won’t generate Genius lists, because Genius makes suggestions based only on what it sells in its iTunes catalog. Genius will soon work with songs beyond those sold in iTunes.

Genius has a bigger problem. If you hit “Play” in iTunes, a Genius sidebar appears to offer content related to a selected song. But as play continues, Genius doesn’t continuously generate new recommendations; instead, it’s stuck on the very first song that was selected — which you might have chosen two hours ago. This means music discovery must be a manual process, rather than an as-you-listen convenience.

Genius playlists can be made on a computer or iPod and sync back and forth. I synced Genius lists on two iPod touches, but this didn’t work in one test with an iPhone. Apple said it couldn’t replicate this problem and hadn’t had other reports of it.

Zune software never scans your music collection. Instead, it knows only the number of times you played a song and how you may have rated a song.

Zune’s Mixview adds a real zing to the discovery process. It is a kaleidoscope-like graphic that appears on the screen when a song, artist, album or friend’s Zune Card is selected. The selected item is surrounded by eight to 10 floating squares filled with graphics and text, each holding a related song, album, artist or graphic representation of a Zune listener who’s considered an “expert” on the selection.

Each of these related squares includes a line of text explaining its relationship to the center item. For example, as I played “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, Cyril Davies appeared as a related artist; an image of Arthur Alexander appeared as an influencer of the Stones; a Zune community member with the tag “Rreynoso” appeared as the top listener for the band and other Stones albums were displayed.

Mixview changes as you explore it. When one of its recommendations is selected, a new Mixview is created around that selection, encouraging discovery. But Mixview has the same problem as Apple’s Genius: When one song ends and another begins, the Mixview graphic doesn’t automatically change; you must manually start Mixview for a new song. Zune says it doesn’t want to change the graphic in case a user is in mid-exploration.

Unlike Genius, Mixview shows songs and artists beyond what Zune sells online. But the company says Mixview does “favor” Zune content, and Zune Picks are limited to items sold by Zune.

Zune Picks and Channels are more passive ways of discovering music: Picks are generated for you in Zune Marketplace according to your listening habits. Zune Channels bring collections of music to Zune devices and software, but these are useful only for Zune Pass members who pay $15 monthly.

Apple’s Genius is a helpful tool when it comes to quickly making a playlist, and its iTunes sidebar might reveal fresh related content. But the Zune software truly allows people to discover more about their own music and that of others.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

iPhone 2.1: The Fix Is In

John Paczkowski — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:08:10 +0000

Apple (AAPL) released iPhone 2.1 at 6 a.m. PDT today, and as CEO Steve Jobs said earlier this week, it does appear to “fix lots of bugs.”

iPhone version 2.1 contains many bug fixes and improvements, including the following:

• decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
• significantly improved battery life for most users
• dramatically reduced time to back up to iTunes
• improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
• faster installation of third-party applications
• fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes if you have lots of third-party applications
• improved performance in text messaging
• faster loading and searching of contacts
• improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
• repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
• option to wipe data after 10 passcode attempts
• Genius playlist creation

iTunes 8 to Feature Slide-Out Keyboard, Dual Batteries?

John Paczkowski — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:38:17 +0000

The Apple rumor mill has such a hair trigger, that even passing mention of an unreleased product can set it into yammering motion. As happened today after Digg founder Kevin Rose offered up some purported insider information about the focus of Apple’s “Let’s Rock” media event in San Francisco next Tuesday. If Rose is correct–and his record on handicapping Apple (AAPL) announcements is decidedly mixed–Apple will announce updates to its entire iPod line, including the rumored “tall” iPod Nano. Not exactly a tough call considering that XSKN is already selling cases for them and purported photos of the device — like the one below — are showing up on Alibaba.

More interestingly though, Rose says that Apple will uncrate iTunes 8, the first major overhaul of the software since iTunes 7 launched two years ago. Rose claims that iTunes 8 will boast some significant enhancements, among them HD-quality TV show downloads, a new “grid view” browsing feature and a playlist recommendation engine called Genius. “iTunes 8 includes Genius, which makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together,” Rose writes. “Genius also includes Genius sidebar, which recommends music from the iTunes Store that you don’t already have.”

Notably absent from Rose’s list of new features: iTunes Unlimited–the $129-a-year all-you-can-eat subscription service that Apple has been rumored to be considering for some time now.

Like all such reports, Rose’s should be taken with a grain of salt, if not an entire salt lick. Rose was, after all, the guy who erroneously claimed Apple’s first iPhone would feature a slide-out keyboard, dual batteries and CDMA, and GSM support.

Apple's iPod Touch Can Act as Remote For Music System

Nick Wingfield — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:34:02 +0000

One of the first things I did eight years ago after converting my CD collection to MP3 files on my personal computer was to snake a cable from the PC to my stereo system in another room. The setup gave me the pleasure of piping music throughout my home.

But every time I wanted to change songs, I had to go to another room and make a few mouse clicks on my computer. Ever since then, I’ve been waiting for someone to come up with a good, affordable remote control that lets me change tunes no matter where I am in the house.

Apple’s Remote program

It turns out, I already owned that device. It’s an iPod touch. A new program released by Apple (AAPL) in July was all it took to convert my MP3 player into a sophisticated remote control for my digital-music collection. That program, called simply Remote, runs on the iPhone as well as on the iPod touch, a version of the Apple MP3 player that has an iPhone-like touch-sensing screen and Internet-access capabilities using Wi-Fi wireless technology. Remote is available free of charge on the online App Store that Apple has used since July to distribute software for those devices.

In essence, Remote is a remote control for all music stored on a Mac or Windows PC that’s loaded into iTunes, Apple’s music jukebox software. It allows you to jump between playlists, browse artists and pump up the volume. For the program to work, you need to buy into using other Apple entertainment products.

In the simplest setup, Remote lets you control the music from stereo speakers connected directly to a PC. But it’s most useful when you use a PC to deliver audio to additional speakers around a home — say, a pair on the patio and in the living room.

Apple sells a couple of products that receive audio signals from a PC running iTunes. Both work wirelessly over a Wi-Fi home network so you don’t need to put holes into your walls to run computer and speaker wires. I tested Remote using both. One is an Apple TV, a $229 set-top box in my living room that plays digital audio and video through a standard home-theater system. The other is an AirPort Express, a $99 Apple wireless networking device on my patio connected to a pair of powered A5 speakers made by Audioengine, of San Jose, Calif. A third set of speakers was connected to an iMac in the kitchen, where I store all of my digital music. (The least expensive iPod touch costs $299.)

It was a breeze to configure the Apple TV and AirPort Express to show up as remote speakers in iTunes on my computer. Setting up Remote to give me mobile control over this array of speakers was trickier. After installing the program on my iPod touch, I couldn’t get it to work with iTunes on my PC. After 20 minutes of fiddling with the security settings for my Wi-Fi base station, iTunes finally recognized Remote. I was in business.

We all know how confusing the remote controls for TV sets and stereo systems can be. Remote, by contrast, cleanly displays all the music on my PC on the color screen of my iPod touch.

The program let me flip through artists, albums and playlists with simple finger swipes. But I was sorry that Remote doesn’t have a feature in the iPod touch called cover flow that lets users browse their music libraries by flipping through album-cover art. Apple says it may offer the feature in the future.

The software also let me easily turn on and off the music from my speakers in my kitchen, living room and patio. I could have all the speakers on at once — good for a party. The sound was terrific. The crisp-sounding $349 Audioengine speakers don’t require a stereo receiver.

Because Remote uses Wi-Fi to communicate with iTunes, I could control music anywhere around my house and backyard, which are small enough to be fully covered with a signal from my Wi-Fi base station. That’s a big plus over conventional remote controls that use infrared, a technology that doesn’t work through walls.

One drawback: The battery in my iPod touch drained overnight when I configured the device to stay connected to iTunes, a feature that increases software responsiveness. Changing the setting let me go days without recharging my iPod touch, but it meant I had to wait a couple of seconds for Remote to connect to iTunes when I started up the software — an acceptable trade-off.

Another multiroom audio product with a good remote control is the ZonePlayer from Sonos, an equipment maker based in Santa Barbara, Calif. That system has some advantages over Apple’s offerings, including the ability to access tunes from online music services, such as Pandora and Rhapsody, and separate volume controls for each set of speakers.

The Sonos system starts at $999 for a remote control and wireless receivers, without speakers, that can deliver music to two rooms.

For people who already own an iPod touch or iPhone, Remote is a good reason to buy an AirPort Express, and fill your home with music.

Walter S. Mossberg is on vacation.

Email Nick.Wingfield@wsj.com.

Fresh Prince Gettin' Jiggy Wit HD Video

John Paczkowski — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:27:12 +0000

If YouTube aims to someday host every music video ever made, as co-founder Steve Chen once claimed, it better get crackin’. Because the market’s getting crowded.

This morning PluggedIn Media launched a new service for streaming HD-quality music videos. Backed by Overbrook Entertainment–Will “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” Smith’s production and management company–PluggedIn will offer some 10,000 videos from EMI (EMI.L), Vivendi (VIV.PA) and Sony BMG (SNE), along with the standard music-site fare–artist bios, users playlists and whatnot. That being the case, how does PluggedIn hope to differentiate itself from the competition? “We look at all the changes shaping online entertainment and see massive opportunity for lots of companies to appreciate and forge really viable consumer connections,” said CEO Jeff Somers. “We think what will separate us from what is out there today is an unbelievable high-quality viewing experience, matched with in-depth content and community tools.”

Perhaps. But it will also create dangerous rivalries with some powerful competitors. With its social-networking features, PluggedIn will soon find itself in direct competition with MySpace Music (NWS) as well as Hulu (GE).

Fresh Prince Gettin' Jiggy Wit HD Video

John Paczkowski — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:27:12 +0000

If YouTube aims to someday host every music video ever made, as co-founder Steve Chen once claimed, it better get crackin’. Because the market’s getting crowded.

When to Stay With Windows

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:01:00 +0000

Here are a few questions I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

We plan to buy a new computer running the XP version of Windows, not Vista. We are afraid to take the step to the Mac since we are in our 70s, and are just average on the computer. We rely on our children for help when we get into a jam, and they have no experience with a Mac. Would you recommend we venture into Mac land, fear and all?

No. While I believe Apple’s (AAPL) hardware is very good, and the Mac operating system is better than either version of Windows (MSFT), I also believe that average users whose operating system works well for them, and who can buy new hardware that runs the same system, shouldn’t feel pressure to change. That’s especially true when they have a ready source of support.

However, that course of action will become more difficult this summer, when Microsoft plans to stop licensing Windows XP to computer makers for preloading on new machines. That will make Vista the only version of Windows available to new computer buyers. Buying a new Vista PC does require users to learn new techniques and to cope with hardware and software incompatibilities.

I heard that you could still use your AOL email address without paying for the other AOL services, which are no longer used in our household. I am wondering if this is true.

Yes. AOL (TWX) has made its email free. The email service is also now available from a Web site, and no longer requires special AOL software.

I have purchased a new laptop. How do I transfer the songs from the iTunes library on the old laptop into the iTunes library on my new laptop? None of these songs are copy-protected. I created them from my own CDs.

If your setup is typical, I would recommend copying the entire iTunes folder that is found under My Music or Music on a PC, or under Music on a Mac. This folder should contain both a subfolder called “iTunes Music” (which contains the actual song files iTunes manages) and one or more files containing the words “iTunes” and “Library,” which tell the program about your playlists and other details. If your setup is atypical, you may have to copy music files from other folders and have the copy of iTunes on your new machine re-import them.

Another approach is to use an iPod, if it has all your music and playlists on it. There are small utility programs available on the Web that will copy the contents of an iPod, including playlists, into a fresh version of iTunes on another computer. One that I have used successfully is called Music Rescue and is at www.kennettnet.co.uk. It comes in both Windows and Mac versions. But there are others.

Reminder: if you are discarding or giving away the old computer, be sure to deauthorize it from your iTunes Store account before doing so. Just go to the “Store” menu in iTunes and click on “Deauthorize computer…”.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

A Home Base for iPod Hits

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:01:00 +0000

(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)

Next time you get comfortable on the couch, remember that you’re relaxing in the consumer electronics battleground: the living room. Major tech companies are pouring resources into products they hope you’ll use to remotely receive your computer’s content — namely videos, music and photos — in a more comfortable place.

But while some of these complex solutions are still struggling to catch on, digital music marched steadily into the land of recliners long ago. IPods naturally plug into home stereos, multiplying music collections and bringing playlists to parties. And an industry of devices sprouted up specifically for playing iPods and other music players to a crowd.

This week, I tested a new version of one of these dock systems that specializes in wirelessly distributing music via small, cube-shaped speakers that can be spread throughout your house: the $300 Evolve speaker system from Griffin Technology Inc. (http://evolvespeakers.com). This setup offers a straightforward and stylish solution, delivering what I consider good quality sound.

Griffin Technology’s $299.99 Evolve is an affordable wireless speaker system.

Griffin’s attempt at claiming valuable real estate in the living room pits it against Sonos Inc., a high-end competitor that is already well-established in the wireless-music arena. Sonos sends digital tunes from your computers to up to 32 rooms using an attractive remote with a full-color screen. But this system starts at $1,000, not including speakers, and its computer-related set-up might intimidate potential buyers.

Closer competitors to Griffin’s Evolve can be found in Brookstone and Hammacher Schlemmer catalogs, where similar wireless speaker systems for the iPod are sold for $150 (on sale) and $400, respectively. Brookstone’s set-up includes small, spherical wireless speakers and Hammacher’s uses bulkier, rectangular-shaped wireless speakers with visible antenna.

I tested the Evolve system using my iPod touch and a first generation iPod nano bought in 2005. Both devices worked with the system, and the Evolve speakers connected wirelessly to the base station from up to 150 feet away on the digital 900MHz spectrum, which doesn’t interfere with Wi-Fi and works through walls and floors. Two speakers come with the system, each carrying a charge of 10 hours according to Griffin, though I got 11 in my tests.

Evolve has some downsides. While it’s great to know that its speakers work 150 feet away from the base station and iPod, they can only be controlled by the base station or by a remote control in view of the base station. So, if you and the speakers are in a room without the base station, you can’t see any information about the song that’s playing, nor can you adjust the volume. Each speaker does have its own power button.

And when I switched from my iPod touch to the iPod nano, the Evolve remote stopped working, and I couldn’t get the remote to work with my iPod touch again. Griffin acknowledged a bug that occurs with speaker systems when an iPod isn’t up to date with the latest firmware, which it wasn’t, and assured me that updating the device, unplugging and re-plugging the Evolve would fix the issue. These fixes didn’t help, nor did repairing the remote, and there wasn’t time for Griffin to send a new remote. I continued to use Evolve without the remote, but hope that other units won’t operate like mine.

Griffin’s Evolve base station seems to hover just inches off the ground and is made of a brushed aluminum. Left to right, it measures about 16 inches, and an iPod dock and three buttons mark the center of the base station. Two squat antenna stand behind this dock, and square wells on the left and right give the speakers a place to rest while charging. These wire-free charging wells are designed with overcharge/undercharge protection, so each speaker’s battery isn’t harmed by resting on the base station for a long period of time.

When the remote was working with my iPod touch, I navigated through songs from across the room, pausing and adjusting volume. I easily carried the speakers into my kitchen using handles built into the back of these cubes, and my roommate enjoyed listening to Amy Winehouse in stereo while she made dinner. But during the actual dinner, when we wanted to turn the volume down, we had to walk back to the living room where the base station was located while calling down the hall to one another to find out if the sound was low enough.

Hidden indicator lights in each speaker tell whether they’re charged or not; orange signifies a charge is needed, while green means you’re in the clear. A switch on the base station changes the speaker sound from mono (useful when listening to audio books) to stereo. Each speaker contains built-in technology that assigns it to automatically know if it’s right or left. To conserve battery, a speaker that’s turned on but isn’t playing music will turn off after 60 minutes.

I kept my speakers on for 11 hours straight before they pooped out, moving them to different floors and as far from the base station as possible — the signal stayed strong. In just two hours, the pair was recharged. I kept the volume pretty low for at least half the time my speakers were on, and Griffin says lower volumes conserve battery, and vice versa. I listened to all sorts of music, including hip-hop, jazz, country, rock and classical. I’m no audiophile, but to my ear, the Evolve handled each genre with aplomb.

All iPods (even the iPhone) work with Griffin’s Evolve, and this gadget will also work when connected to other MP3 players, stereos, TVs, and CD players, which could come in handy. In early March, Griffin will sell add-on speakers for $99 each with separate charging plates for $30 apiece; $200 bundles will include two speakers and two charging plates. There’s no limit to the number of speakers that you can add to a system.

Though Griffin’s Evolve lacks some of the luxuries that high-end systems have, it solves a problem with minimal effort on the user’s part, and looks good while doing it. If you don’t mind returning to the base station to make adjustments, and if your remote doesn’t stop working, you’ll enjoy this sleek and functional device.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications:

Griffin Technology Inc.’s Evolve wireless sound system uses a remote that can control certain functions of the iPod, even when it is out of sight of the base station. This column erroneously implies that the remote must be in view of the system to work.

Log On, Listen, Blog, Discuss

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:01:00 +0000

When you hear a catchy new song, it’s hard not to tell your friends about it. The opposite is also true: it’s nearly impossible to discuss a song when you haven’t heard it first. Yet there are plenty of blogs and Web sites where music is discussed under the assumption that other bloggers know how a song, album or artist sounds.

This week, I dived into the music blogging world of MOG.com, a Web site where enthusiasts can read, blog and network with one another. Starting today, this site will integrate with Rhapsody, the subscription-based music service, so that MOG users, or MOGGERS, can simultaneously blog about and listen to millions of songs that fuel their online discussions.

Rhapsody is now integrated into MOG’s site for music aficionados.

MOG Inc. prides itself on working as a destination for people who hope to discuss music tastes and opinions, like TripAdvisor.com works for travelers. MOG’s first public beta, or test version, came out about a year and a half ago.

Its use of a subscription model comes at a time when CD profits are lagging and larger social-networking sites are negotiating with record labels to incorporate music streaming. Plenty of people still prefer purchasing music a la Apple Inc.’s iTunes Store, where there aren’t restrictions due to streaming or subscriptions.

Along with built-in Rhapsody, this newly enhanced version of MOG includes other improvements, such as a better search engine and a speedy tool that generates personal profiles for each MOG user according to his or her musical tastes.

I was granted early access to MOG’s revamped site and was most impressed by its fast search tool, which works just like the Spotlight search in Apple’s operating system. Results are narrowed with each typed letter and returned in neatly divided categories. Best of all, music results came back as fast as if they were on my hard drive instead of various MOG pages and Rhapsody’s database.

MOG also does a good job of marrying its contents with Rhapsody in a way that isn’t overly obvious; tiny Play icons beside song titles can be selected to start hearing a tune through the Rhapsody player, which hums along in the background, and similar icons add songs to playlists in one step.

But for a site that prides itself on appealing to music enthusiasts, I found certain genres much more represented than others. The rock music category, for example, had plenty of related posts and coinciding Rhapsody music, but the classical music section was almost nonexistent and country tunes were poorly represented. I typed “Bach” into the search box, expecting to be flooded with results, but saw no music and only one post by a MOG user about why she thought Bach was a great composer. The company says it will fix this in the next couple of months.

Unlimited Rhapsody access costs $13 monthly and is offered free for the first 14 days. But, like all subscription models, it blocks access to music if you don’t pay this monthly fee. MOGGERS who don’t want to pay or don’t plan on using Rhapsody as much can choose from two free options: one that allows users to listen to 25 songs a month and another that only allows free 30-second clips of song.

MOGGERS can upload their own MP3s within blog posts on the site. But linking to Rhapsody songs was easier and faster.

I got started by clicking a giant “Magic Button” icon on the MOG site. This installed MOG-O-MATIC, a tool that automatically searched my computer’s hard drive for all of my music files, then indexed them and created a profile of my music taste on a personalized My MOG page. This tool was also available in the first version of MOG but is 10 times as fast now, indexing 10,000 songs an hour compared with 1,000 songs previously.

I liked that MOG-O-MATIC did some page-creation work for me, making a list of the songs I listened to most recently — regardless of what program I used to listen to the song (iTunes, Windows Media Player or Rhapsody). Another list that was automatically generated from my music showed which artist was best represented in my collection. If you don’t want the world to know about your Barry Manilow obsession, this list can be altered to fudge the truth.

Because MOG-O-MATIC scans your entire music collection, it knows what music you like. A Recommendations page shows you what other MOGGERS with similar tastes are listening to, helping you discover new tunes. I found these suggestions to be pretty accurate, and even discovered a great song on another MOGGER’s recommended playlist called “Summer Teeth” by Wilco. I checked out the page belonging to the MOGGER who created this playlist, and found other tunes that were in line with my musical taste.

Using Rhapsody, I played entire Web pages of recommended songs with one click. Likewise, entire music collections belonging to other people can be played the same way, as long as you have the right Rhapsody account to play that many songs.

I wrote a blog post on MOG about the newest album from “Fountains of Wayne,” and it automatically included a Play button icon, enabling the song I wrote about to play along with my post. This auto-linking is done with fill-in-the-blank boxes that tag each post with music.

MOG isn’t trying to be a social-networking site that enables all things. Instead, it focuses on one thing, music, and successfully improves the way people discuss, share and discover music online.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

Removing Songs from an iPhone

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:01:00 +0000

Here are a few questions I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability. This week my mailbox contained questions about removing songs from an iPhone, setting the wallpaper on a computer desktop, and automated online backup services for PCs.

I can’t figure out how to remove a song from my iPhone. How do I do it?

Unlike an iPod, the iPhone has no purely manual-mode option, which would allow you to drag songs on and off of it. However, there are alternative methods.

The simplest approach is to connect your iPhone to your Windows PC or Mac, and allow it to synchronize as usual. Then, select your iPhone in the list at the left edge of the iTunes window in order to bring up the iPhone-settings functions in the large window at the right in iTunes. Click on the Summary tab, and check the option called “Only sync checked items.” This will limit the songs and videos the computer places on the iPhone to those for which you have checked the little box that appears next to their names in iTunes. Next, go into your music library, or into any playlists you have selected for syncing with the phone, and uncheck any songs you no longer want on your iPhone. The next time you perform a sync, these songs will be removed from the phone.

Another method is to place all the songs you want on the iPhone into a single specially designed playlist, or several such playlists. Then, go to the Music tab in the iTunes settings screen and click on “Selected Playlists.” Next, check off only your special iPhone-bound playlists. Once this is done, you can control which songs are, or aren’t, synchronized to the iPhone by adding or removing songs from these playlists. If you remove a song from one of these playlists, it will be deleted from the iPhone the next time you perform a sync.

Neither of these methods will delete the songs from your computer or your iTunes library, or prevent them from playing on your computer.

I have tried to download some pictures recently and use them as wallpaper. I am storing them in my My Pictures folder. But, when I choose to make them my wallpaper, they appear multiple times on my desktop. How can I have a picture cover the whole background on my monitor?

Assuming you are using Windows XP, go to the Display control panel and select Desktop, then find the image in the Background list and select it. Then, under Position on the right, select Center or Stretch. Note, however, that if you have downloaded a small image from the Web, and your monitor has a relatively high resolution, the Center option won’t allow the image to fill much of the screen. The Stretch option, while filling the screen, may result in a grainy and/or distorted image.

I was wondering if you could recommend a good service for automated online backup of a PC running Vista. All the services I have found require the user to manually transfer files to the online site. In my ideal world, I could set up my machine to transfer the files during the evening.

There are two automated online backup services I’ve tested and reviewed, Mozy (mozy.com) and Carbonite (carbonite.com).

Both work on Vista, neither requires manual file transfers, and both are good, though I preferred Mozy when I last tried them in December 2006. However, Carbonite has released a new version I haven’t tried yet, and Mozy has also been updated since then. I don’t think you’d go wrong with either. You can read my review at ptech.allthingsd.com/20061214.

Mozy offers two gigabytes of backups free, and charges $4.95 a month for unlimited backup, though you can save by paying one year or two years in advance. Carbonite offers a 15-day free trial, after which you pay $50 a year for unlimited backup, though you can save if you pay upfront for two years.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns online free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com