Tag: APPS,@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 ...

With SXSW less than a week away, everyone's racing to push out new apps and updates -- and inexplicably road tripping on a StartupBus -- to beat the rush in Austin. Today's unavoidable app is Zite, a personalized magazine that's being touted as a 'Flipboard-killer' because of its learning capabilities. Unlike iPad publications like The Daily or Sir Richard Branson's 'Project,' Zite mixes 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 ...

It's a fact of life that too many of us learn the excruciatingly painful way: hard drives, like humans, have an unpredictable lifespan. Sometimes they last a long time, but sometimes, well, they die suddenly. Now think of all the physical goods we used to store in shoeboxes and drawers that in today's world exist only in digital form on our PCs: photos, music, home movies, Hollywood movies and TV ...

The Super Bowl, as you might have heard, is Sunday. The NFL playoffs have nearly run their course, the league's pretenders have gradually fallen by the wayside, and, this Sunday, all of America will watch in heightened (and inebriated) anticipation as the Green Bay Packers take on the Pittsburgh Steelers for the right to wear special baseball caps and participate in a parade at Disney World. ...

We want to make one thing clear: we're not picking on Windows. But, the truth is, for a number of different reasons, keeping Microsoft's OS safe requires more thought and effort than other systems. Entailing more than hackers and viruses, being secure means protecting your privacy, securing your data, and ensuring that your account passwords are as robust as possible (and not written down on ...

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 holidays are expensive enough. Why spend extra cash on tricking out your iPhone with sweet new apps? Besides, there are zillions of selections on the market; how can you even figure out which ones you really need -- or better yet, which ones won't chew through your battery and destroy your phone? Wouldn't it be great if there were a list of iPhone apps that were not only cheap, but essential, ...

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 ...

Share (function() { var s = document.createElement('SCRIPT'), s1 = document.getElementsByTagName('SCRIPT')[0]; s.type = 'text/javascript'; s.async = true; s.src = 'http://widgets.digg.com/buttons.js'; s1.parentNode.insertBefore(s, s1); })(); digg I'll admit it. I'm an i-dosing skeptic. When we first found out that today's teens are getting high by listening to MP3 recordings of so-called ...

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 ...

If you've followed our coverage of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, you'll know that the tech-lovin' artist has a thing for biometrics. Now, as part of his ongoing series of biometric objects and installations, Lozano-Hemmer has turned to iDevices with his 'Pulse Phone' app. Put simply, Pulse Phone is a heart rate monitor that gathers pulse data by using your iPhone's camera. As you lightly place your ...