Zune
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 This retrospective covers the second half of Zune's lifetime, from roughly 2008 through 2010, and encompasses the third and fourth generation of the platform's software, services, and devices. Microsoft did something special there, but then they just let it die. And that's a shame, because Zune was ultimately pretty darned good. It's just too bad most people will never know this.
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.
more This first of two Zune retrospectives covers the first half of Zune's lifecycle, from late 2006 to mid-2008, a period during which Zune matured from a sad, me-too product into a full-fledged, innovative product line of its own. I went from Zune critic to Zune user and advocate during this period, and my growing excitement over the Zune platform explains the sheer amount of time and effort I devoted to it.
more Sometimes you run into a mobile app that is so useful yet so simple in purpose and so elegant in implementation. Shazam is such an app.
more Zune 4.7 isn't a major update to Microsoft's digital media platform, but it provides Windows Phone support, streaming video capabilities, international support for Zune Marketplace, and other new features.
more Zune 3.1
Microsoft today released a minor upgrade to its Zune 3 PC software (see my review) and device firmware (see my review), bringing the version of both up to 3.1. Zune 3.1 doesn't offer a...
more An upcoming update to the Xbox 360 will add Zune Music, ESPN and other services while bolstering the NXE user interface with a more attractive and more usable new look and feel.
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