Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed a new line of tablets on Wednesday morning including one, Kindle Fire, that unleashes a clear warning shot across Apple’s bow. It could even score a direct hit. Here’s the scoop about the Amazon Kindle Fire, which ships on November 15, based on the announcement and Bloomberg’s sneak peak (updated as…
With the release of Songza’s free iPhone and Android apps, fans of the socially-fueled playlist service can finally bring it anywhere. Songza — previously available as a web or Chrome app only — has been through many iterations. The current one includes stations that are hand-curated by other users. Funnily enough, you can’t listen to…
When Scott Hirsch launched appsbar in April, his vision was to help small businesses build apps — “to fill the middle ground in costly, professionally-produced apps, and free, garbage-generating app builders,” in the words of a spokesman. He was in for a surprise: Most of the “small businesses” that wanted to make apps with the…
Research In Motion, maker of the Blackberry smartphones that business people prefer to the extent that they call them “crackberries,” is in talks with all four major labels, according to a recent report, and most likely indie music sources as well, to launch a music service. According to CNET, Blackberry’s own Messenger app — one…
Google’s new to the party, and Apple hasn’t even shown up yet, but mSpot has been helping people build their own cloud music services since 2007 — first by letting them stream songs from their PCs to their smartphones, and now, by hosting it in the cloud so you can play it on your computer,…
It’s the start of a new week, which for most of us means back to the grind. Add a little rain here at our Boston and New York offices, and it doesn’t leave much to smile about. But there’s a silver lining, because at Evolver.fm, each week brings new music apps for our “This Week…
Google announced that it will buy Motorola Mobility on Monday morning, another play that seems borrowed from Apple’s playbook. The reported $12.5 billion cash deal will let Google make its own hardware for its own operating system, just like Apple does. (Motorola spun off its smartphone and tablet division into Motorola Mobility in January.) Android has…
Each week, our “This Week in Music Apps” series whets your app-etite (sorry, couldn’t resist) with a satisfying slice of the most promising music app releases for Android, iOS, and your web browser. (For a taste, sample last week’s fare or previous courses.) We like to start you off with the full-length Evolver.fm app reviews you may…
This Week In Music Apps has been running for about nine weeks now, which according to a staffer is longer than the average gestation period of a puppy. So there’s that. Thanks for tuning in, and check out our previous installments for more music apps of interest. The best is yet to come. This week brings one…
In an age when so many apps seem to come from a couple of people building stuff on nights and weekends, the big guys can still bring the goods too. AOL, which made its billions in part by snail-mailing countless CD-Rs to introduce web naifs to the internet (and AOL’s private version of it), has…
You can now play over 15 million Spotify songs on your computer for free in this country — partially because Spotify counts on the fact that if you get addicted to listening to music and building playlists on the service, you’ll want to play those playlists and listen to that music on other devices: your…
This week brings our sixth installment in our This Week In Music Apps series (check out the previous ones here). While you were flipping burgers under a soft pyrotechnic glow, we were banging out the following stash of app-store fireworks for Android and iPhone, with the idea that you might want to take a crack at a…
Right around the time that it announced it would carry the Apple iPhone, Verizon announced that, like the other official iPhone provider AT&T, it would limit the monthly bandwidth on all new accounts. That change will come on Thursday, July 7, according to what a Verizon spokeswoman recently told FierceWireless.
When it comes to following industry trends, smartphone sales figures have a special resonance for consumers, because the best smartphone platform is whichever one everyone else prefers. For the first time, according to Nielsen, the majority of American phone-buyers (55 percent) reported buying a smartphone, up from 34 percent last year. The majority of U.S….
Local programming may keep FM radio going strong in some regions, but in many cases, syndicated radio broadcasts come from nationwide feeds, and only plug in those “[your city here]” identifiers to make them feel local. Geo-aware music services, such as the new Raditaz iPhone and Android app (first mentioned in our weekly wrap-up), are…
