Apple News, Analysis and Podcasts

Review: Amazon Audio Books

iPods can be used for more than just listening to music. Podcasts are a way to download and listen to regularly produced audio content while on the go. Listening to books also provides another great way to use iPods and iPhones.

One place to purchase Audiobooks is from the iTunes store. The second option is from Audible. Audible, which was purchased by Amazon, sells individual books and subscriptions to several types of audio content. Is purchasing Audiobooks from Audible better than iTunes?

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Review: Amazon Music Store

Amazon’s MP3 Music Store has been around since January 2008. It was the first store to go DRM free across all music, as Apple made the move a year later. It has provided an alternative to Apple’s iTunes for purchasing music online.

Apple still provides the easiest and fastest way to purchase music. Their one click to download and be done process is as easy as it can get. For Apple users, does Amazon provide a good alternative to the iTunes music purchasing experience?

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Review: Amazon’s Cloud Drive

Amazon announced a new service that provides 5GB of free data storage, called Cloud Drive last March. Any music files that are stored in the Cloud Drive, can be streamed via a media player on their Web site.

Amazon has created an Android music player for their service, but not for the iPhone. A review of this service can be found from Kevin C. Tofel at Gigaom and Andy Ihnatko. This service might be nice for Android users, but does it providing anything for Apple users?

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Review: Amazon Mac Download Store

Apple changed the way users purchased Mac applications when they created the Mac App Store at the beginning of the year. Even though it still does not have all the biggest software titles for the Mac, it still is the first place to look for new applications. Can anyone else compete with it?

Amazon is set to find out by creating their own app store for the Mac called Mac Software Downloads. Is there enough room for two stores and can they compete? Lets take a look at the Amazon store experience and see how it compares with the Mac App Store.

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Amazon – Apple's Next Big Threat

"Stay Tuned" says Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. Stayed tuned for what? A tablet. But before diving into that topic, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. No one in the tech industry is better positioned to take on Apple in the mobile computing space than Amazon – no one.

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Podcast: Episode 43 - The Caboose is off the Tracks

Recorded March 29, 2011. Download | Subscribe | View Other Podcasts | Show Notes

Topics include: WWDC, iOS 5 and OS X Lion, iPad 2 lines, LePad by Lenovo, Amazon Cloud Drive, MobileMe direction, Windows 7 to overtake iOS? and more.

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Safari and iTunes to Merge

Apple may be preparing a massive move that will propel Safari from niche browser to market leader. The move to merge Safari and iTunes into one software solution appears long in the works, which may arrive this fall at Apple's usual iPod special event.

Apple acquired the streaming music services company, lala, for $80 million in December 2009. The purported purposes for such an acquisition was for Apple to spearhead the way towards taking iTunes towards an online service, accessible via any browser, and away from a desktop software solution. That may no longer be the case.

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