Operating systems

Palm's music strategy: Use iTunes

Back in January, I criticized Palm for not having a reasonable music strategy for the upcoming Pre, the touch-screen superphone that could save the company. At that time, I mocked Palm for suggesting that consumers would have to drag and drop music files from their PC to the Pre, which would appear as a mass storage device. As I wrote, "without iTunes, there's no iPhone. And without the iPhone, there's no consumer smartphone audience." (Users will also be able to buy downloads over the air with an Amazon MP3 client, but the vast majority of music … Read more

Palm Pre: Where's the music?

Palm's Pre won CNET's Best of CES award for 2009, and is getting tons of love from around the tech world.

Not a bad accomplishment for a smartphone with a completely new operating system, from a company written off as dead not long ago.

I wrote something like this about RIM's BlackBerry Storm and got some heat for it, but still...where's the music?

I don't mean that the Pre won't play music--of course it will. Palm even announced a deal with Amazon.com to let users buy music downloads without any intervention (cooperation? … Read more

Sounds like the Storm isn't much of a music phone

The reviews are in on the Storm, the new touch-screen phone from Research In Motion, and nobody loves it. Check out takes from CNET, Engadget, Gizmodo, and Time for a sample.

In particular, the mechanics of the touch screen--you have to press areas on the screen with some force, as if they're actually keys--have been greeted with almost universal frustration.

But for a would-be iPhone killer, the reviews are remarkably light on the Storm's music features. It's true that BlackBerry users are traditionally e-mail junkies, and the phone's communications features (apart from the touchscreen weirdness) are … Read more

Blackberry 9000 will get iTunes sync

Smartphone fans are excited about yesterday's announcement of the Blackberry 9000, aka Blackberry Bold, aka Research In Motion's iPhone killer. But Blackberry users are a different breed than iPhone users--the Blackberry's reason for existence is always-connected e-mail, and Blackberry users tend to be all business, afraid of being out of touch for even a moment. (An old friend in Washington D.C.--where Blackberry users are legion--had to make a vow after her third child was born not to check her e-mail after 6 p.m.)

So while the iPhone grew out of the iPod, and thus … Read more

Music download service for BlackBerry

BlackBerry owners may be feeling like they have nothing to brag about now that the iPhone has added connectivity to Exchange e-mail systems--the BlackBerry's bread-and-butter feature.

Not to worry. By April, Blackberry owners will have something the iPhone still lacks--the ability to download songs over the air from any location with cellular access. Canadian company Puretracks, which has licensed more than two million songs from all four major labels and plenty of indies, announced plans to launch a mobile store for the BlackBerry family of devices in April.

The files will be in the AAC format used by … Read more