Tag: ANDROID,@FEATURES

We know that Google is planning a streaming music service for Android devices, and rumors of Apple offering a similar product have been circulating for years. Late last night, though, Amazon stole their thunder. With little to no fanfare, Amazon unveiled 'Amazon Cloud Player,' a service that comes bundled with 5GB of free Cloud Drive storage for uploading your music and other files, too. The ...

It may not be top-secret or espionage-worthy, but the information we keep on laptops and smartphones is still something we all would like protected. Saved passwords, addresses, bank balances, friends' contact info -- all sorts of information could have potentially devastating effects in the hands of a crook. Large companies have long had the technology to remotely lock-down and wipe mobile ...

Symptom: You reach into your pocket or bag, and, well, it's empty! Diagnosis: Beyond the understandable distress of losing a pricey smartphone, laptop or tablet PC, the real trauma is the sudden and unfettered access afforded to the slippery-fingered jerk who took it. The cost of a new laptop is meager compared to the personal and even financial havoc that a motivated thief can wreak ...

By Terrence O'Brien and Leila Brillson What Samsung got right is exciting: thin, beautifully designed bodies and bright, vibrant screens. The new Notebook 9 Series weighs in at under three pounds and is a half-inch deep, and the CES audience gasped when Tim Baxter, president of Samsung America, removed the black frame from around his "smart TVs", the D8000 and D7000. The Galaxy player, ...

2010 has been a pretty packed year for tech. Streaming video came into its own with radically improved content choices and affordable living room hardware devices, Android and Apple's iOS dominated the cell phone market, the mobile app markets show no sign of slowing down and the iPad revealed a huge demand for tablets. We here at Switched have taken a look back over the past 12 months and each ...

You may be on the road less traveled, but, if you are part of the Android movement, you are ahead of the smartphone curve. The platform's many benefits are offset, though, by real setbacks -- like the fact that Android owners aren't shepherded by the Draconian App Store monitored by the Big Brothers at Apple. We are freer, but we are also subjected to a load of crap, like cross-platform ...

The NOOKcolor is the first of its kind: a serious, full-color e-reading device. Sure, the iPad and Galaxy Tab have found some success moonlighting as virtual readers, but they're first and foremost devices for apps and browsing the Web. Plus, they're a lot more expensive. The NOOKcolor is $249 of straight-up, reading-focused hardware and software. You can still browse the Web and do other things ...

It's early December, the holidays are just around the corner, and you haven't even begun thinking about what gifts you're going to buy for your friends and family. Each day seems to bring a new diamond commercial and another blow-out holiday sale, but, for some reason, you can't muster up the energy to get off your couch and face the gauntlet of yuletide shopping. Before you know it, you're on a ...

While we've been waiting for the iPad and iPhone versions of Google eBooks to land in the App Store, we put the Android version through the paces. While it's not the most feature-filled e-reading app available on Android, it is slick, polished and easily the best non-NOOK and non-Kindle e-reading app for the platform. There are some limitations, like the lack of simple bookmarking and the absence ...

In our quest to digitize every last bit of our lives, one thing has escaped us: a streamlined system for taking and managing our notes. We've looked at Evernote, which is an impressive service with some top-notch software, but it had one major flaw in that we couldn't get it to stick; it just never worked for jotting down quick notes. Simplenote is the ideological opposite of Evernote. It lacks ...

Google isn't satisfied to dominate Web searches and virtually all online advertising. It's not content being the gold standard for productivity-based Web apps, a serious player in the browser field, or being the only smartphone OS maker capable of challenging Apple. No, Google's apparently been thinking too small -- or at least too small screen. But now, the Mountain View mammoth is eying our ...

It used to be that tracking your money with a computer meant manually entering transactions and account balances, just as you would with the ledger at the back of your checkbook. Eventually, financial software matured enough to allow you to import your statements from some banks, as long as they were available to download in a specific format. Today, Mint automates the whole process for you, ...

It's no secret that the Android Market is considerably smaller than Apple's App Store, but this shouldn't get Android users down when searching for the Twitter app that will maximize their micro-blogging. There are more than enough high-quality Twitter apps available in the Market, and, as Android continues to grow, the offerings will only get better. Here's a list of some apps that let us tweet ...

Until recently, if you wanted to listen to music on your smartphone through a premium-paid service, you only had a few options, such as Rhapsody and Rdio. Fortunately, MOG, another music-streaming service, comparable to Rhapsody and Rdio, has just appeared on the scene with apps for both iPhone and Android. Read on to see how MOG sets itself apart. ...

With the release of Froyo and the barrage of high-end handsets, Android has gone from an interesting but decidedly geeky smartphone experiment to a serious contender for your cellular buck. Whether you're upgrading from an older device, fleeing the cult of Apple, or converting from another platform like BlackBerry, there are a few things you'll need to know as you embark on your sugar-injected ...