Many songs are missing the correct album titles and cover art—or just show up in Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iTunes with mysterious names like “Track04.” Over the years I’ve used several programs to import and buy music, resulting in wild inconsistencies in my collection. I’ve got songs by Beyoncé (with accent), Beyonce (without accent), Beyoncé Knowles (with accent) and Beyonce Knowles (without accent).

Several companies have developed programs that tap into vast databases of songs to tame music collections. I’ve been testing one by San Francisco startup TuneUp Media that’s available to download online and buy in Apple’s stores. While I was reluctant to pay $19.95 for a year’s subscription to a service I reckon should be in iTunes for free, TuneUp has largely delivered on its promise to scrub my music collection with minimal effort, making sure tracks were properly titled and adding extras like album cover art.

TuneUp’s greatest asset is that it works seamlessly with iTunes (for Mac and PC). With TuneUp hooked on to the right side of the iTunes program, you drag “dirty,” or mislabeled, songs into a box identified by a spray bottle of cleaner. The software identifies songs by taking clues from information you’ve embedded in your music, as well as sampling the song’s digital fingerprint. TuneUp looks for a match to those clues in a database of songs maintained by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Gracenote.

Some matches are a slam dunk, but almost half of my collection proved to be problematic. Of the 500 most-played songs in my pop-oriented collection, TuneUp found “matches” for songs across 79 albums and “likely matches” for songs across 209 albums. It couldn’t identify 10 songs. The company says it counts matches as a 90% or higher chance of a match, and “likely” as at least 75% chance of a match. Songs with a likelihood under 75% are labeled “not found.”

TuneUp gives you the chance to review each of the matches before it adjusts your catalog. (It comes with an undo button.) Accepting all of the sure matches is easy enough, but slogging through the likely matches is troublesome. TuneUp gives you only the option to accept or reject its one recommendation after listening to the file, if you want.I worried that I might be inadvertently mislabeling a song, but haven’t yet found evidence of errors in my collection. The company says it cut out alternative matches to simplify the cleaning process, but is working on adding them to future releases of the software.

Once a song has been cleaned by TuneUp, it is given a consistent name, track number, album cover and other helpful information, such as the year it was released. Now I’ve got songs by just Beyoncé (with accent) and almost all of my songs feature the album cover art that looks so nifty on iPhone screens. The software assigns your songs genre identifications, which can be handy for matching music to your mood. Most of the classifications aren’t terms I would have come up with: Beyoncé is dubbed “urban crossover,” while Michael Jackson is either “disco” or “other pop” depending on the era—but at least they’re consistent. You also can tell TuneUp not to change any specific part of a song’s existing catalog listing, including genre.

TuneUp takes a few seconds, depending on your computer and Internet speed, to identify and re-classify each song. Attempting to scrub a whole collection—mine has more than 10,000 songs—can be a lengthy affair. The company suggests cleaning 500 songs at a time, but you can do many more than that if you leave it running over night.

I tried out a free competitor to TuneUp called MusicBrainz Picard, which matches songs based on a database collected by a swarm of Internet users, rather than one particular company. TuneUp and MusicBrainz, which is run by a nonprofit, are as different as Britannica and Wikipedia in their approaches to cataloging information.

The MusicBrainz approach to building a user-generated database is powerful and has been tapped by companies such as the BBC and Amazon.com (AMZN) to improve the way they keep track of music on their sites. Some of my songs that TuneUp couldn’t identify, such as the song “This Way” by hip hop group Dilated Peoples, were a breeze for MusicBrainz. To date, MusicBrainz has about 700,000 “releases” (such as whole albums) and 8,000,000 individual “tracks” in its database.

But MusicBrainz’s database has limitations, such as the inability to catalog album-cover images or song lyrics, both of which are copyrighted material. The free Picard program lets you tap the MusicBrainz database from your own computer. Serious music fans will be attracted to Picard because it is more precise than TuneUp; Picard guides you to choose from a variety of options when it isn’t certain of a match. But the software is rudimentary and requires concentration and time to use. Picard also doesn’t connect directly into iTunes’ catalog. To use it with iTunes, you have to first clean up all of your music files with Picard and then re-import your songs into iTunes.

I recommend TuneUp for the average music fan who might view cleaning up a music collection as the sort of task that shouldn’t take much longer than one rainy Sunday afternoon. Picard is better for people for whom maintaining an orderly music collection is a never-ending project.

TuneUp comes with a feature called “Tuniverse,” which fills the right side of the screen with information related to whatever song iTunes is playing at the time. That information includes YouTube videos, biographical details from Wikipedia, Google (GOOG) News, music recommendations from Amazon and tickets from StubHub to coming concerts in your area. While I initially worried Tuniverse would feel like added advertising on the screen, I’ve come to enjoy the extra information. And once again, I was left wondering why Apple hasn’t built these capabilities directly into iTunes. I, for one, learned from Tuniverse that Beyoncé has a concert in San Francisco next week, and I just might buy a ticket.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at Geoffrey.Fowler@wsj.com

Linux on netbooks isn’t going away though. In fact, software and hardware companies have been making big investments to improve Linux netbooks. For the past week, I’ve been using several flavors of Linux running on netbooks — Ubuntu, Hewlett-Packard’s Mi (which is based on Ubuntu) and Moblin, created largely by Intel and not yet available commercially. In all cases, the Linux netbooks failed at some basic functions that any laptop, no matter how tiny and inexpensive, should be able to handle, like working with printers. At the same time, Mi and Moblin have impressive graphical user interfaces well-suited to the habits of typical netbook users, like checking email and accessing social-networking sites, as well as the small screens and low horsepower of tiny laptops. In addition to Linux, all of the computers shared the standard features, or lack thereof, common among netbooks, including compact keyboards and no DVD drives.

H-P’s Mini 110 Mi Edition

The most polished of the products was H-P’s Mini 110 Mi Edition, a new model with a 10.1-inch screen that H-P will begin selling on its Web site for $279.99 on June 10. That’s nearly $50 less than what H-P will charge for the Mini 110 running Windows XP, which will come with a 160-gigabyte hard drive instead of the 8-gigabyte solid-state drive that will come with the Mi edition.

The striking thing about this netbook is the slick graphical user interface created by H-P that runs on top of Ubuntu and first began appearing on H-P netbooks early this year. Instead of a traditional desktop like that found in Windows and the Mac, Mi (pronounced “me”) arranges commonly used applications and content on a screen called the “dashboard,” which looks like a personalized Web page and lists recently received emails, fresh thumbnail images of favorite Web sites, and a Web-search toolbar.

The Mi home screen is a clever way to make the computer seem alive with on- and off-line content, which is fitting since netbooks are designed for on-the-go Internet activities. It’s also tailor-made for the small screen size of netbooks.

A more eye-catching iteration of Linux is Moblin, which I tried out in test form on an Acer netbook; it is expected to ship on netbooks by the end of the year. Moblin has a menu of icons at the top of the screen, the most interesting of which leads to the M-Zone, a home screen that displays calendar appointments and favorite applications alongside snapshots of recently visited sites and a continuous feed from the user’s Twitter network.

An icon called “People” leads to a list of instant-messaging buddies, while another, called “Zones,” let me organize all the applications I had launched into different virtual workspaces, which is useful for hopping between various tasks on a small-screen device like a netbook.

The look and feel of the standard Ubuntu system, without the Mi interface, is more commonplace. I tried out a Dell Mini 10 with a 10.1-inch display and 160-gigabyte hard drive that sells for $349 on Dell’s Web site. The Mini 10 ships with version 8.04 of Ubuntu, which resembles Windows XP, with its desktop, taskbar and pop-up menu system. Ubuntu, in some cases, seemed to overestimate the size of the Dell Mini’s display: A window for configuring wireless-networking capabilities was so large it bled off the screen, and I couldn’t access all the buttons on it. I also installed on the Dell a new version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which works better on small screens. Since a Windows XP version of the Dell Mini 10 sells for the same price as the Ubuntu, I can’t see a compelling reason to choose the Ubuntu option.

All the netbooks I tried had compatibility problems with other external devices. The netbooks couldn’t load the software drivers to let me print to my Canon and Dell printers. I couldn’t load pictures over a USB cable from my Canon PowerShot SD750 digital camera. I was able to get my pictures on the machines by plugging a storage card from my camera directly into the netbooks.

Canonical, the London company that oversees development work on Ubuntu, says it is improving the system’s compatibility with various devices. Intel says it is unfair to judge Moblin until it is commercially available.

Some key applications currently don’t run on Linux, like Apple’s iTunes, which makes it difficult to load music files onto iPods from the netbooks. While the Linux laptops didn’t run Microsoft Office, they came with OpenOffice, a free package of word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications that allowed me to open and modify basic Word and Excel files.

The companies behind Linux netbooks have made great strides in improving user interfaces, but until they can achieve similar breakthroughs in how the machines work with other devices, Windows netbooks are still a better deal.

• Email nick.wingfield@wsj.com. Walter S. Mossberg is away and will return next Thursday.

For a while, some wireless carriers in Europe and in Asia have been selling tiny laptops, called netbooks, equipped with built-in cellular modems, at low, subsidized prices, just as they do with mobile phones. And, just as with a subsidized phone or a plug-in laptop data card, there’s a catch: To get the low upfront price, the customer must agree to a contract and pay a monthly data fee.

Starting May 17, Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, will try the same thing on these shores, selling a netbook model made by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) at $200, after a $50 mail-in rebate — less than half its usual price of $520. To get this price, the customer must sign a two-year contract and pay either $40 or $60 a month, depending on the amount of data to be consumed.

I’ve been testing this netbook, the H-P Mini 1151NR, a version of H-P’s Mini 1000 series with a cellular modem built-in. This model sports a 10.1-inch screen, and yet is very compact and easy to tote. It weighs just 2.45 pounds, is about an inch thick, and is only about 10 inches long and 6.5 inches deep. It has an Intel (INTC) Atom processor, common in netbooks; runs Windows XP; and includes one gigabyte of memory, a built-in Webcam and an 80-gigabyte hard disk. Like most netbooks, it includes Wi-Fi, but lacks a DVD drive.

My verdict: This netbook is an adequate light-duty computer, and $200 is a low price for a PC with a hard disk running Windows XP. But Verizon’s charge for Internet service is high if you intend to rely on that service as your main online connection, because the data levels covered by the carrier’s plans aren’t unlimited, and cost extra after you exceed a certain amount. It makes much more sense if you travel a lot, stay within the data limits each month, and want to avoid hotel and airport Wi-Fi fees.

But the Verizon (VZ) service is slower than many Wi-Fi connections, and it can be obtained for almost any laptop by buying a plug-in card that carries the same monthly fees. In my tests, at a typical Marriott (MAR) hotel, the Verizon cellular service achieved download speeds of around 1.6 megabits per second, while the Wi-Fi modem in the same PC got over five mbps.

The H-P Mini 1151NR

Also, even for a netbook, the computer itself is underequipped. Its 80-gigabyte hard disk is cramped by today’s netbook standards, and it has only a small three-cell battery that doesn’t last long. In my tough battery test, where I left the cellular Internet connection on, disabled all power-saving features, and played music continuously, the H-P Mini 1151NR lasted a pathetic one hour and 55 minutes. That suggests that, in normal use, you might get around 2.5 hours of use.

A bigger six-cell battery is available for $130 from Verizon, but that’s a huge price premium on a $200 PC, plus it makes the netbook 75% thicker and 30% heavier. Verizon doesn’t offer a larger internal hard disk.

By comparison, you can buy an Acer One Windows XP netbook with the same size screen as the Verizon netbook, and twice the hard disk and battery capacity, for $340. The Acer lacks the built-in cellular modem, but you can buy that from Verizon in plug-in form for $30, with the same monthly fees. Total upfront price: $370, versus $330 for the Verizon model with the bigger battery.

You could also pay much less at a RadioShack (RSH) store, which is selling a subsidized netbook with a built-in cellular modem and required contract (with AT&T) (T) at $60 a month. This model, also an Acer running XP, has a smaller 8.9-inch screen, but most other specs are similar to those on the Verizon model. Yet there’s one enormous difference: It costs only $50, plus a $36 activation fee.

In my tests, the Verizon/H-P netbook handled all common tasks well, if not at blazing speeds. It lacks Microsoft Office, but includes the lesser Microsoft Works productivity suite. I was able to download and run common third-party programs like Firefox and iTunes. The built-in Verizon software for managing the cellular and Wi-Fi connections worked very well, and can be upgraded to a new version with added features.

The hardware has some notable downsides. The keyboard feels too flexible, and some symbols on the function keys are hard to read. The mouse buttons are awkwardly arrayed on the sides of the touch pad, not below it. And the speaker, while loud, is tinny. Also, the machine has a bunch of craplets, mostly links to H-P Web sites or to companies like eBay (EBAY) and Pandora.

Still, if you travel a lot and like using a cellular modem, the machine’s $200 price is compelling, so long as you can handle the wimpy battery and small hard disk.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090513/verizon-now-sells-subsidized-netbook-with-cell-service/feed/ 2 http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090401/network-hard-disk-by-western-digital-offers-easy-backup/ http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090401/network-hard-disk-by-western-digital-offers-easy-backup/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:02:04 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090401/network-hard-disk-by-western-digital-offers-easy-backup/ External hard disks that can be attached directly to a home network for use by multiple computers have been around for a few years now. They’re valuable tools, making it likelier that all your files on every machine will be backed up, and allowing music, photos, videos and other files to be accessible all over the house.

But, unlike external drives that just plug into a single PC, these stand-alone, networked hard disks have tended to be techie products. Too often, they require a deeper familiarity with networking and file-sharing procedures than most folks possess. And some are aimed only at Windows or only at Macs, leaving out mixed-machine households.

Now, there’s a new networkable hard disk that, in my tests, proved so simple that anyone who can plug in a cable can use it, with no setup or knowledge, provided your computers have the most current operating systems. It works concurrently and seamlessly with both Windows PCs and Macs, and can even stream music to Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes program installed on either platform.

In addition, it can stream music, photos and videos to a TV, if you have a compatible add-on box attached, such as an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. Its contents also can be accessed over the Internet from any major Web browser.

The product is the My Book World Edition, from Western Digital (WDC). This second version of the World Edition sells for $230 for a model with a capacity of one terabyte (roughly 1,000 gigabytes) and $450 for two terabytes. It’s available from various retailers, or at westerndigital.com.

Western Digital’s new My Book World Edition

The My Book World Edition isn’t flawless. Its Internet remote-access feature isn’t great, and it’s more complicated to use on computers running older operating systems, like Windows XP or Apple’s Tiger. It’s also sluggish with older PC hardware. But for its basic functions — backup, centralized file storage and sharing, streaming of music and other media — the My Book World Edition is simple and speedy on relatively new computers with current operating systems.

I tested the My Book on my home network, using several Macs running Apple’s Leopard operating system, as well as Windows PCs from Dell (DELL), Sony (SNE) and Lenovo. Some of the latter were running Vista, some XP and one was using the prerelease version of the new Windows 7 operating system. I also tested it with an Xbox 360.

To start, I just plugged the My Book into an electrical outlet and connected it to my home network’s router with a standard networking (Ethernet) cable. Almost immediately, all of the Macs, and all of the Windows PCs running Vista or Windows 7, displayed an icon called MyBookWorld, making it appear like a regular hard disk on the computer.

Opening the icon revealed two folders, one called Download and one called Public. The latter folder contained three subfolders: Shared Music, Shared Pictures and Shared Videos.

Without installing drivers or any other software, I could copy files onto the My Book from the Windows PCs and Macs. I copied some Microsoft Word and PDF documents, plus several hundred songs, photos and videos. This copying process went quickly, almost as quickly as with a directly connected hard disk. And I was able to open, display or play the files on the My Book on all of my test machines, Mac and Windows.

Then, I opened Apple’s iTunes on all my test machines, and discovered a MyBookWorld entry on the left-hand side, from which I could play the songs on the shared drive. In the case of songs from the iTunes store, however, the machine had to be registered to my iTunes account.

Next, I installed Western Digital’s backup program on several of the computers. It comes in Windows and Mac versions, works automatically, and allows you, via a simple interface, to select which folders or which types of files you want backed up automatically. It worked fine.

For my tests, I then hooked up an Xbox to my TV set, navigated to the media section of the Xbox, selected My Book from a list as my media source, and was able to play on the TV all music, display all photos and watch any videos that were compatible with the Xbox.

I also tried accessing my files over the Internet from remote PCs and Macs, using a free service Western Digital offers called MioNet that merely requires a Web browser. It worked on Windows and Mac, but it was so slow as to be painful, so I would only count on it in emergencies.

I also don’t recommend buying the My Book for use with older PCs running Windows XP. With XP, the shared drive isn’t immediately visible; you have to install the included software to get it to show up. That’s not a big deal on a newer XP computer, but on an older XP laptop I tried, that installation was painfully slow, and so was using the My Book.

When used with modern operating systems, though, the My Book World Edition is the simplest, speediest networkable hard disk I’ve tried.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090401/network-hard-disk-by-western-digital-offers-easy-backup/feed/ 5 http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090304/new-safari-browser-succeeds-at-speed-flops-on-features/ http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090304/new-safari-browser-succeeds-at-speed-flops-on-features/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:02:03 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090304/new-safari-browser-succeeds-at-speed-flops-on-features/ Apple’s Safari browser has always been speedy and has introduced its share of innovations. While it is mostly used on Apple’s own Macintosh computers, with which it is bundled, Safari also comes in a Windows version and it is the browser on the iPhone as well.

Last week, Apple released a new version 4 of Safari, for Mac and Windows, that it claims is the world’s fastest browser, and that has a number of new graphical features Apple says will make it easier to navigate the Web. Safari 4 is labeled as a beta, and both the Windows and Mac versions are free downloads at apple.com/safari.

I’ve been testing the new Safari on both operating systems, comparing it with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. My verdict is that Safari 4 really is significantly faster than its rivals, but that its user-interface changes are a big disappointment. They either add relatively minor eye candy, are catch-ups to features introduced by rivals, or actually make the browser harder to use.

First, let’s talk about speed. I tested Safari 4 on multiple Macs, and on multiple Windows PCs running Vista and XP. I did these tests on three different networks — a fast fiber-optic service, a typical hotel Internet connection, and a relatively slow cellphone data card.

On each type of connection, I timed the loading of a variety of common Web sites, like Facebook, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Major League Baseball, both individually and in folders that opened multiple sites simultaneously in tabs.

The results were striking. In nearly every case, Safari 4 was much faster than any of the other browsers. In many of my tests, it required only a third or a half of the time to load a given page, or a group of sites, as the other browsers did, even though all were running on the same computer and the same Internet connection.

I was especially interested to see that Safari 4 for Windows blew away Google’s Chrome in my tests, even though both browsers share some open-source technology managed by Apple but licensed to others.

In some cases, where the new Safari’s speed advantage was just a few seconds, that quickness may seem unimportant. But, when opening a large number of pages in tabs, it really makes a difference. For instance, on my fastest test network, Safari 4 for Windows fully opened a folder of 21 news sites in 43 seconds, while it took the new IE 8 over two minutes to perform the same task.

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the other changes in Safari, but I can’t. Apple’s worst decision was to move the tabs that represent open pages to the very top edge of the browser screen, above all the toolbars and menus, instead of below the toolbars and menus, where they have traditionally resided.

This move was copied from Chrome, and Apple says it makes the tabs easier to discover. But I disagree strongly. Apple’s implementation, in my opinion, makes the tabs harder to see and use on a crowded computer screen and separates the tabs too much from the content in the pages they represent. This is a particular problem in Vista, whose translucent window title bars can make the tabs almost impossible to read.

In another unfortunate choice, Safari 4 has done away with the progress bar that shows how much of a page has loaded. The company says it did this because Web pages are now so complex that the bar was no longer fully accurate. But I believe users like to see where they are in the page-loading process, even if it’s only a rough approximation.

I am not alone in this sentiment. Already, Apple-oriented Web sites which normally defend the company’s every move are publishing instructions on how to hack Safari 4 to restore the old tab system and the progress bar.

The new graphical features are just OK. Now, when you open a new tab, without specifying a Web address, Safari fills the formerly empty space with a gorgeous graphical representation of your most-visited Web sites. You can simply click on any of these to go right to that page. It even indicates when a page has changed since you last viewed it.

This is nice, but it copies a feature already in Chrome, and I believe most people won’t see it much, since they usually know in advance which site they want to view in a new tab.

Apple has also adopted “cover flow,” iTunes’ visual method for navigating albums, for the bookmark organizer in Safari. It shows a preview of each page in your bookmark list. Again, this is fine, but not a big deal.

Safari 4 also catches up to its rivals by offering suggestions of what you are looking for when you type in a Web address or search term. This worked well, but not any better than it does in other browsers.

Finally, the Windows version of Safari now looks and works much more like a standard Windows program than a Mac program. It has traditional Windows-style buttons and behaviors, which Safari lacked before.

Overall, Safari 4 is a mixed bag. The speed is great, but the design changes range from mildly interesting to downright annoying.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090304/new-safari-browser-succeeds-at-speed-flops-on-features/feed/ 15 http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090121/even-in-test-form-windows-7-leaves-vista-in-the-dust/ http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090121/even-in-test-form-windows-7-leaves-vista-in-the-dust/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:02:03 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090121/even-in-test-form-windows-7-leaves-vista-in-the-dust/ This will be a big year for new operating systems. Apple (AAPL) plans a new version of its Macintosh operating system, to be called Snow Leopard. Palm (PALM) plans an all-new smart phone operating system called Palm WebOS. But the new release that will affect more users than any other will be Windows 7, the latest major edition of Microsoft’s dominant platform.

Microsoft (MSFT) hasn’t announced an official release date for Windows 7, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t available to consumers by this fall. The company has just released the first public beta, or test, version of the software, and I’ve been trying it out on two laptops. One is a Lenovo ThinkPad lent me by Microsoft with Windows 7 already installed, and the other is my own Sony Vaio, which I upgraded to Windows 7 from Windows Vista.

I won’t be doing a full, detailed review of Windows 7 until it is released in final form, but here’s a preview of some of the main features of this new operating system and some of my initial impressions.

In general, I have found Windows 7 a pleasure to use. There are a few drawbacks, but my preliminary verdict on Windows 7 is positive.

Even in beta form, with some features incomplete or imperfect, Windows 7 is, in my view, much better than Vista, whose sluggishness, annoying nag screens, and incompatibilities have caused many users to shun it. It’s also a serious competitor, in features and ease of use, for Apple’s current Leopard operating system. (I can’t say yet how it will compare with Apple’s planned new release, as I haven’t tried the latter.)

In many respects, Windows 7 isn’t a radical shift from Vista, but is more of an attempt to fix Vista’s main flaws. It shares the same underlying architecture, and retains graphical touches like translucent Window borders. But it introduces some key new navigation and ease-of-use features, plus scores of small usability and performance improvements — too many to list here.

The flashiest departure in Windows 7, and one that may eventually redefine how people use computers, is its multitouch screen navigation. Best known on Apple’s iPhone, this system allows you to use your fingers to directly reposition, resize, and flip through objects on a screen, such as windows and photos. It is smart enough to distinguish between various gestures and combinations of fingers. I haven’t been able to test this feature extensively yet, because it requires a new kind of touch-sensitive screen that my laptops lack.

But even if your current or future PC lacks a touch screen, Windows 7 will have plenty of other benefits. The most important may be speed. In my tests, even the beta version of Windows 7 was dramatically faster than Vista at such tasks as starting up the computer, waking it from sleep and launching programs.

And this speed boost wasn’t only apparent in the preconfigured machine from Microsoft, but on my own Sony (SNE), which had been a dog using Vista, even after I tried to streamline its software. Of course, these speed gains may be compromised by the computer makers, if they add lots of junky software to the machines. Windows 7 is also likely to run well on much more modest hardware configurations than Vista needed.

The familiar Windows taskbar is more customizable and useful in Windows 7. The program icons are larger, and can be “pinned” anywhere along the taskbar for easy, repeated use. There are also “jump lists” that pop out from the icons in the taskbar and start menu, showing frequently used or recent actions.

A screenshot shows several application windows on the desktop of the Beta version of the Microsoft Windows 7 software.

Windows 7 also cuts down on annoying warnings and nag screens. Microsoft notifications have been consolidated in a single icon at the right of the taskbar, and you can now decide under what circumstances Windows will warn you before taking certain actions.

Compatibility with hardware and software, which was a problem in Vista, seems far better in Windows 7 — even in the beta. I tried a wide variety of hardware, including printers, Web cams, external hard disks and cameras, and nearly all worked fine.

I also successfully installed and used popular programs from Microsoft’s rivals, such as Mozilla Firefox, Adobe Reader, Apple’s iTunes, and Google’s (GOOG) Picasa. All worked properly, even though none was designed for Windows 7.

But there are some downsides to Windows 7. First, you will only be able to directly upgrade Vista computers to the new version. People still using Windows XP will need to perform a more cumbersome multistep process. Microsoft is working on a method to help XP owners preserve all their data during this process.

Second, Windows 7 will eliminate some familiar bundled programs from Windows. Vista’s Mail, Calendar, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and Address Book programs are being removed. To get similar basic, free, programs, you’ll have to download them from Microsoft’s Windows Live service, or use alternatives from other companies. Microsoft defends this move as supporting consumer choice and better coordination with Web services, but it does remove out-of-the-box functionality from Windows.

Still, even in its preliminary form, Windows 7 looks very promising, and could well help expunge the bad reputation of Vista.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090121/even-in-test-form-windows-7-leaves-vista-in-the-dust/feed/ 13 http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/ http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 02:04:07 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/ Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has been a solid success. The device can access a catalog of over 200,000 digital books, including most current best sellers, according to Amazon (AMZN). Its sharp screen, built-in downloading and long battery life have overcome a relatively high price and some poor hardware-design features.

However, most people aren’t likely to carry a Kindle everywhere — it’s too large to fit in a pocket and hogs space in a handbag. Yet they do tote their cellphones everywhere. So, for years, a dedicated minority of folks have been reading books on smart phones and other pocket devices with relatively large screens.

In recent months, e-book offerings have especially exploded on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPod Touch, which, like the Kindle, have excellent screens and an easy and well-organized system for directly downloading content. Apple’s App Store, which carries everything from games to business software, has hundreds of e-book offerings (in addition to the audio books available through the iTunes store).

Some of these e-book apps, or programs, constitute just a single book, while others are digital-reading portals that can access anywhere from a handful of e-book titles, like the collected works of Shakespeare or the Sherlock Holmes tales, to many thousands of titles.

Two of the most popular e-book apps for the iPhone and the Touch are Stanza and eReader. They are pretty basic and straightforward, with little in the way of fancy formatting. But they get the job done, allowing you to download tens of thousands of titles from a variety of sources.

But, as with past cellphone or PDA e-book systems, most of those on the iPhone and Touch focus primarily on older, classic, or out-of-copyright titles, rather than on the sort of current, in-demand titles available on the Kindle. Some fresher titles are available, but the selection of popular books is relatively thin.

Now, two companies are launching new e-book apps that aim to bring current and popular titles from major publishers to the iPhone and Touch. And they add interesting features, including fancy formatting and community tools. I’ve been testing both.

One, called Shortcovers, is from the large Canadian bookseller Indigo Books & Music. Due to show up in the App Store in the next few weeks, Shortcovers is a portal to sampling, buying and reading books, and will have a companion Web site. It will allow readers to get free samples of blogs, magazines and books — say, the first chapter — and then buy either the entire work or other individual chapters or sections, which the company calls “shortcovers.”

The second, called Iceberg, is from an iPhone application developer called ScrollMotion. Already available, Iceberg offers each book packaged as an individual stand-alone app, with rich navigation features.

I found that reading books from these two services was OK, but not nearly as satisfying as reading them on a dedicated, large-screen device like the Kindle, which also offers free excerpts. But it was more convenient. I was able to knock off a chapter or a few pages while commuting or waiting in line. The apps use the iPhone’s touch features to allow you to navigate.

Shortcovers is the more ambitious and creative of the two. At launch, it expects to have 200,000 shortcovers — chapters or other free excerpts — available. About 50,000 of these also will be available for purchase as full digital titles; the rest can be ordered as physical books. Of the digital titles, roughly 15,000 to 20,000 will be older or public-domain books, and the rest commercial books. Typical book prices will be between $10 and $20. If you want to buy paid shortcovers — say a chapter of a business or travel book — the typical price will be 99 cents.

The key aim of Shortcovers is to get people to discover new works. So it emphasizes community features such as rating, tagging and sharing. It even allows people to make “mixes” of their favorite works and to upload their own writing. The Shortcovers catalog is a riotous mix of classics like “The Three Musketeers,” current titles like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” and blog posts and magazine articles.

Iceberg’s claim to fame is its handsome appearance. It has just 14 titles available now, including the “Eragon” fantasy trilogy, and each must be downloaded as a separate app, which risks cluttering your iPhone with icons. The company is promising thousands of titles eventually, and has signed deals with major publishers. Prices hover around $10 or $11, but range to $27.

Books by Iceberg try to preserve the formatting and pagination of the printed title, and stress easy skimming to any page, searching and annotating. Pages are tinted and flip with a visual effect that apes a physical page-turn.

But there are missing features in both. Iceberg doesn’t allow bookmarking and Shortcovers lacks annotation. Neither app allows highlighting, or looking up words.

The iPhone isn’t primarily an e-book reader, and these new apps still can’t match Kindle’s full catalog. But they add yet another dimension to a very versatile gadget.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20090114/shortcovers-iceberg-put-latest-e-books-on-your-cellphone/feed/ 0 http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081203/weighing-devices-for-your-netflix-delivered-via-web/ http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081203/weighing-devices-for-your-netflix-delivered-via-web/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:18:03 +0000 Nick Wingfield http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081203/weighing-devices-for-your-netflix-delivered-via-web/ Netflix was a pioneer in the business of movie rentals — getting consumers to rent DVDs online and mailing them out in cheery red envelopes. Recently, it has put a lot of effort into a service that delivers movies digitally over the Internet to subscribers, preparing for a day when getting movies on a physical disc will become outmoded.

People today use the Netflix service on their computers, but Netflix (NFLX) has cut a series of deals with hardware partners to make the service available on TV sets through an array of devices.

Most of these devices were designed to do other things: a videogame console, high-definition Blu-ray disc players, a TiVo (TIVO) digital video recorder. So to see how well the service works on these devices, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks comparing the Netflix experience on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox 360 game console, on LG Electronics’ BD300 Blu-ray disc player and on a set-top box from Roku called the Netflix Player. The last, as the name implies, is designed mainly for Netflix service.

The devices suffer from a relatively skimpy selection of videos on the Netflix Internet service. Netflix has more than 100,000 titles for rent on disc, but about 12,000 titles for viewing through its Internet service at the moment, and there’s often a months-long delay after a movie’s release before it shows up online. Television shows generally turn up more quickly, with a handful, like NBC’s “Heroes,” watchable the day after they air.

Still, I find the Netflix service very appealing, especially for catching up on episodes of TV series, such as “30 Rock,” that I missed when they aired. Unlike the iTunes Store and other sites that charge users $1.99 per TV episode and $3.99 to rent a movie online, the Netflix Internet service is free to subscribers to its DVD service on one of the company’s “unlimited” rental plans, which start at $8.99 a month.

Depending on how fast your Internet connection is, Netflix videos begin playing almost instantly, though you can’t keep permanent copies.

Connecting the devices to Netflix through my wired home network was easy in all three cases. I used a wireless home network — more common in homes than the wired variety — with the Roku device, the only one of three products that comes with built-in Wi-Fi (it worked well in this mode). People who want to use the Xbox 360 with a wireless network will have to spend $70 or so on an external Wi-Fi adapter. LG recommends people use only a wired home network to connect to Netflix from its player, including adapter kits that cost about $100 for transmitting data over home power lines.

All the devices require you to create a list of movies you want to watch from a computer, just like Netflix subscribers set up “queues” of DVDs to be delivered by mail. The Xbox 360 offered by far the most elegant-looking interface for browsing through videos in my Netflix queue, letting me glide through a long row of cover art representing the movies and TV shows I selected on my PC.

In contrast, the Netflix menu on the LG Blu-ray player and Roku device were more static, making it more awkward to navigate the expanse of titles. Netflix became available on the Xbox 360 in November as part of a more sweeping software upgrade, delivered over the Internet, that remade the graphical look of the system.

The quality of most of the videos on Netflix is, to my eyes, about DVD quality, though Netflix is adding some titles in high-definition to its Internet library. HD titles were available for viewing only through the Xbox 360 when I was testing the service. Roku and LG say they will make software updates available online this month that add HD support to their devices.

The Xbox 360 also has some annoying quirks when using it as a movie player — including a noisy fan I found distracting. The game controller that comes with the Xbox 360 is clunky for playing movies, so users will need to invest in an inexpensive additional remote-control design for media. The Roku and LG players, in contrast, were totally silent and had acceptable remote controls for watching Netflix videos.

I experienced the most serious glitches with the LG Blu-ray player, which occasionally dropped the video signal to my television set as I was watching a movie. LG says the loss of video signal could have been due to the connection I used to hook the player to my TV, though I’ve never had a problem with other devices using the same connection. The LG Blu-ray player also took the longest of all the devices to install software upgrades from the Internet.

While there are some differences in the Netflix experience on the Roku device, Xbox 360 and LG Blu-ray player, none of them is so great that they should trump other considerations — like a desire to play videogames or watch HD Blu-ray movies — in deciding which system is the best fit.

The LG Blu-ray player is available online for about $300. The cheapest Xbox 360 model is $199. (To get Netflix through the Xbox 360, users must be “gold” members to the $49.99-a-year Xbox Live game service.) But if what you’re after is primarily Netflix movies, and you’ve got room near your TV for another box, the $99.99 Roku product is the best value.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com

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