iPod and iTunes
When it comes to automatically pushing phone-based pictures to the cloud, no one has Apple beat: With the iPhone 4S and an iCloud feature called Photo Stream, Apple's users have a best of breed solution that just works, and does so automatically. It's not without quirks, however, so if you want to take best advantage of this solution, please read on.
more Here are the Audible books and Kindle eBooks I read and recommended on the Windows Weekly podcast this past year.
more Amazon Cloud Player, Apple iTunes Match, Google Music all offer interesting options for digital music enthusiasts, and all work well with Windows. Less obviously, perhaps, they can work together in interesting ways, too. I'm particularly intrigued by the notion of managing my music collection in the cloud rather than on a single PC desktop. And with these services, that's become more possible than ever before.
more Apple's new iCloud service is the most compelling and complete consumer oriented cloud computing service available today, offering deep integration between Apple's devices and the company's other products and services. iCloud is a no brainer for any iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad user, and that's true whether you're a Windows or Mac fan.
more This year, Apple skipped its September music event and instead discussed its iPod updates at an October event that also saw the launch of the iPhone 4S. From a hardware perspective, little has changed since last year. But two of the iPods, the touch and the nano, see significant software updates.
more As the basis for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, iOS is installed on hundreds of millions of devices, a platform that constitutes one of the single biggest competitors to Windows there is. So it should come as no surprise that iOS 5, the latest version of this software, is a compelling, evolutionary update that all iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users are going to want to download and install as soon as possible.
more I spent much of today writing a 4000 word analysis of yesterday's Apple iPhone 4S event. But I'm not going to publish it: There's just too much to complain about. Instead, let me just recap the highlights.
more In my latest retrospective, I take a look back over a decade of Apple's digital media products: the iPod, iTunes, and Apple TV. These are products I still use regularly, iTunes because I have to and the iPod touch and Apple TV because they're still the best products in those respective markets.
more With the digital music market bifurcating with the introduction of useful new services, we now have more choices than ever before, not just between the actual services themselves, but also between the types of music services we can access. If you're a digital music lover and an avid consumer of this kind of content, it's likely that you'll want to use two or more of these services in tandem. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
more Previous to last week, Spotify was available only in several European nations, which sounds like a recipe for irrelevance. But Spotify has garnered a whopping 10 million registered users in Europe alone, 1.6 million of which are actually paying the company a monthly fee to use a higher-end version of the service. And it is quite suddenly the music subscription service to beat.
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