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Consumer Reports won't give Apple a break.

Citing Apple's decision to discontinue its free-case program for the iPhone 4, the company has decided to maintain its position not recommending Apple's latest smartphone going forward.

"The offer that takes effect next month is less consumer-friendly in several respects," Consumer Reports said about Apple's decision to only offer free "bumper" cases to customers that call it with reports of antenna problems.

"Putting the onus on any owners of a product to obtain a remedy to a design flaw is not acceptable to us,&… Read more

Apple has quietly updated its iPad App Store, allowing the tablet's owners to find apps with the help of the company's Genius recommendations.

When iPad owners load up their App Store app on the tablets, they will now see a "Genius" option next to "Updates." After turning it on, the feature lists several applications they might like, based on their previously downloaded apps. This is the first time Genius recommendations have been made available for the iPad. The tool has been offered in the iPhone's App Store for a couple years.

The iPad'… Read more

Despite the press, geolocation service Foursquare is still pretty small. But it's proven influential in another way: the phenomenon of "checking in" has spread beyond telling people where you are, and a handful of services now focus on letting you "check in" to what you're doing--whether it's attending a concert or reading one of those ubiquitous Stieg Larsson novels.

One of them, GetGlue, announced Wednesday a partnership with HBO to promote its current series "True Blood," "Hung," and "Entourage," in which users who use the GetGlue iPhone … Read more

If you find yourself constantly checking the Web for the latest and greatest stock information or for updates on your own stocks, you'll certainly appreciate what StockPoint has to offer. We're not exactly experts when it comes to the stock market, but we still found the program intuitive and easy to use.

StockPoint offers a tabbed user interface that keeps your stock information organized and easy to find. The various tabs are organized into three categories: Research, Earnings Releases, and Browser. The Research tab let us quickly find stocks with the help of its Screener Options drill-down feature. … Read more

GrokMusic is a music discovery site that will appeal to any music fan who's ever tried to describe a new band by naming other artists. As in, "St. Vincent? She's kind of like a guitar-playing Laurie Anderson crossed with early Genesis, with a little Steve Reich thrown in."

The site launched in 2008 with artist information and editorial content about music, then introduced a pair of free music-discovery tools in 2009. With MusicMap, you can enter any artist's name, and it will show you that artist's place on a visual map near related artists. … Read more

While I write this, I am enjoying a custom-built station on Slacker Radio, and as of last night, Canadians can do this as well. The news is a big win for both Canada and Internet radio, and is thanks in no small part to BlackBerry, which has a huge presence in the country and a growing relationship with Slacker.

No doubt, many Canadians will be thrilled with this announcement, as I've had no small number of them e-mail me about various music recommendation and streaming services. However, Slacker won't be exactly the same in Canada. Residents will only … Read more

Everybody likes contributing an opinion, especially in subjects on which we consider ourselves experts. Rank'em (located at gorankem.com), now in beta testing, uses this human urge as the basis for a crowdsourced song recommendation engine.

This obviously wouldn't work without some structure--asking users to pick their 10 favorite songs at random, for instance, would be too scattershot and yield useless results. So Rank'em has users select particular artists, then asks them to choose between 5 and 20 songs and rank them in order. Users must also rate their level of enthusiasm--or "fanstanding" as the … Read more

I've written about social recommendation network Glue before, noting that it is a social network that is just along for the ride as a Firefox/IE extension that slides out when you need it. The basic idea is that when you visit a site that's supported by Glue (IMDB, Amazon, Wikipedia, Last.fm, and a lot more), the Glue extension will slide out and tell you what your friends thought about that particular piece of content and give you the option to review it yourself. It's a great concept where the information comes to you instead of … Read more

Google's Gmail Labs has just rolled out a useful, but mildly creepy feature that gives you suggestions on who you should e-mail based on previous conversations. So, if you've had threads going with a group of people, it will recommend some of those folks once you've added at least two addresses in the recipients field. Best part is, they don't even have to be in a group of contacts you've created in Gmail's contacts manager.

I got this to work to an almost uncanny level. It handles things like family members without a hitch, … Read more