iHome’s new iW2 ($200) is an AirPlay-enabled speaker that allows you to send audio from any iOS (4.2 and up) device right to it with the click of a button. It has finally untethered me from my white-wired earbuds, and transformed my living room into a place of musical bliss.
Aereo is a great service for denizens of New York City. For $12 per month, you get to stream local live TV direct to your iPad, iPhone, Roku box, Apple TV, or just about anything with an internet connection. It’s simple, it does nothing but relay the free-to-air channels already available to any New Yorker, and of course the TV companies are already trying to shut it down.
UnoDNS is a service that will let people outside the U.S stream services like Hulu and Netflix, and let users inside the U.S get in on things like BBC iPlayer. There are other services which do this, but UnoDNS is the easiest I have tried, although I do have a few worries. In short, it’s cheap, it works, and it can be free.
Music streaming service Spotify has announced that it will continue offering unlimited listening to its free customers in the United States. In case you didn’t know, all that free music you’ve been listening to won’t last forever. Spotify said from the very beginning that free users would only have unlimited listening for 6 months, and it’s been 9 months since the streaming service went stateside. Looks like the honeymoon will last a little longer.
A specific date for the unlimited listening discontinuation has not been given, so you may want to think about coughing up $10 per month for a Spotify Premium account. There’s also some good news for certain Spotify users in Europe.
Back when I first moved back from Germany to the United States, one of the things I initially missed most about my previously Euro-centric digital lifestyle was, of course, Spotify. Depressed that the streaming music service hadn’t launched yet in the United States, I tried Rdio, a U.S. only analog.
Over the last year and a half, I’ve completely come around to Rdio as the superior service. It’s got a better interface — one that doesn’t look like it was designed as a Winamp skin circa 1997 — and really makes sharing and music discovery easy. It also, unlike Spotify, has a native iPad app.
The only problem with Rdio was that it was a fantastic music streaming service that I couldn’t recommend to my European friends. But now that’s all changed, or at least in the process of changing, because Rdio is coming to Europe.
Music streaming services like Spotify, Rhapsody, and Rdio are set to face yet another competitor on iOS, as Sony prepares to make its own service available to the iPhone and iPad. The company’s COO, Shawn Layden, has confirmed that Music Unlimited will be making its way to the App Store “in the next few weeks.”
In their rush to announce the new iPad on Wednesday, Apple hurried through the details of their new Apple TV and didn’t talk much about the new ability to stream your movies straight from iCloud to your Apple TV or iOS device. What’s awesome about the new feature is that it works for movies that you didn’t even buy from iTunes: iTunes Digital Copies.
We’ve heard whispers of Apple launching a streaming video service in the iTunes Store before, and now a new report from The New York Post claims that the company is “pushing ahead” to get such a service off the ground by Christmas.
According to the report, Apple “point man” Eddy Cue has been in talks with leading content providers to negotiate distribution deals for what will presumably pave the way for the mystical iTV.
Spotify has issued an update to its hugely popular iPhone app that introduces the ability to stream music at an “extreme” 320kbps — the same quality Spotify Premium members enjoy from the Spotify applications for Mac and Windows.
Audiobooks.com has today launched the first subscription service to provide unlimited access to thousands of audiobooks streamed directly to your device. The service uses an HTML5 web app and promises to enforce no monthly limits and no long-term commitments.
The Looxcie camera is a neat little gadget by itself, able to clip onto an ear and record 30-second video bursts of your life. Now it has a fantastic little streaming app that you can use to stream those clips and even allows two-way voice communication. Hello, ultra-portable broadcast team.
Launched a few weeks ago, the Pogoplug Series 4 ($100) is Cloud Engines’ latest attempt at making their network-attached storage device as ubiquitous as the microwave oven. Like its predecessors, the S4 allows you to attach a hard drive or flash drive to create your own cloud, which you can use to stream media, share files or create slideshows, all of which can be accessed over the Internet and shared with others. Additionally, it can also be used for remote backup.
Seems like there’s been an explosion of small, portable, Bluetooth speakers onto store shelves this last year — the most popular or well-known of which is probably the Jawbone JamBox — from the advance notices we’ve seen, in a few weeks the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas will herald a whole new crop of the little tribbles.
Monster’s take on the concept is the Monster iClarityHD Precision Micro Bluetooth Speaker 100 ($100). And like pretty much everything the company puts out, the iClarity is bassy and L-O-U-D.
Pogoplug has been busy. For a company that focuses really intently on a single concept — namely, putting your stuff in the cloud — it has released a prolific number of products since the original Pogoplug first debuted in early 2009. Today brings their latest offering: The Pogoplug Series 4 ($100).
Cloud Engines, the outfit that makes the Pogoplug, sent us an Series 4 to check out, and we got a little hands-on time with it before the launch today.
Apple quietly issued an update to its Apple TV earlier this week, which finally introduced TV show streaming from the cloud to users in Australia, Canada, and the U.K. for the first time. However, there may have been a good reason why Apple was so quiet about it.
It would seem that the feature isn’t ready yet — or that it was not meant for certain territories — because just days after being introduced, Apple has removed it again.
Apple has begun issuing an update to its second-generation Apple TV that finally allows users in Australia, Canada, and the U.K. to stream TV shows they’ve purchased on iTunes directly to their television.
The latest iTV rumor is hitting the web today as Gene Munster told the crowd at IGNITION: Future of Media that the new Apple Television Set has been in the works for sometime now but should be released next year.
Munster is so certain that the new device is coming that he told everyone to wait before buying a new TV because Apple’s is going to be awesome.
Sure, the 32GB iPad has enough storage space for a bunch of apps, some songs and maybe even a movie or two. But for those of us with large media collections, even the mega 64GB version will start to feel a little cramped when stuffed full of music and videos (and I have no idea how those of you with 16GB iPads get by).
So, what if you could just stick a portable external drive into your iPad, like you would with a MacBook? Bam, extra storage! Well, yeah — but you can’t, right? Wrong! Well, sorta — you can’t plug one in physically; but the 500GB Seagate GoFlex Satellite ($200) gets around the whole physical connection thing by supplying its own wifi hotspot that lets you create a wifi link between it and your iPad. Genius.
Myxer, which just released its iPhone app, is alot like Pandora, only with a huge side of friends. Instead of being based around a solitary experience, Myxer encourages users to listen to what their friends are into — which is great for discovering new tunes.
Fanhattan is absolutely the required guide for TV/Movie junkies who frequently view titles on the iPhone. Just like on the iPad version, the app acts as a gateway to entertainment — it gathers a heap of information about shows or movies that can be watched on the iPhone, then serves up that information in a super-cool, easy-to-navigate interface (that looks absolutely stunning on the iPhone 4).
After months of anticipation, Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire started shipping yesterday, but even since its unveiling critics have been labeling it a worthy iPad competitor. Its pocket-pleasing price tag coupled with its terrific user interface could make it the first tablet to really give the iPad something to worry about.
But how does it stack up to Apple’s device in terms of performance? Well, at less than $200, none of us expected the Kindle Fire to really match the iPad 2’s speed, but as you’ll see in this video comparison, it does a fantastic job of keeping up while browsing the web, and it’s significantly quicker and streaming Netflix videos.
Adding to their now dizzying array of cloud-in-box hardware and desktop app that turns your Mac into a cloud server, Pogoplug has just unveiled a web-based cloud service that can be used as a standalone media storage option, and either accessed through a web browser, or through the desktop or Universal iOS app. And just like Apple did with iCloud, they’re giving the first five gigs away for free.
Sometimes all it takes is a little tweaking to turn a decent gadget into one that makes the corners of your mouth curl up in a grin every time it’s pulled out and powered up.
That’s exactly what happened with the Logitech Wireless Boombox for iPad ($150), a portable six-speakered dock based off Logitech’s S715i dock, which we reviewed earlier this year.
I could tell what Sonos and its PR firm thought about the product as I walked in.
Festooned over a thousand square feet of penthouse atop one of San Francisco’s finest boutique hotels were samovars of fresh coffee, pitchers of fresh-squeezed juices and a banquet table overflowing with edibles under picture windows filled with panoramic views of Union Square and the San Francisco skyline. The layout was also outfitted, front-to-back, in a couple thousand dollars worth of Sonos gear — including the subject of this review, the Sonos Play:3 ($299).
Curvy. Smooth. Uncomplicated. Think of any product One Infinite Loop has spat out over the last decade or so and you’ll almost invariably and immediately come up with a few key adjectives to describe them (and if you don’t, you’re probably not reading this right now anyway).
But The Bluetooth-equipped Altec Lansing InMotion Air ($200) is pretty much the opposite of anything and everything Jony Ive and his colleagues at Apple believe in. At least, that’s true as far as its aesthetics and ergonomics are concerned; under the hood though, it packs a punch.