A new digital music player called the Slacker plays music that is absolutely free, contained in preprogrammed Internet radio stations instead of individually selected songs and albums. But the device has some glitches.
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. Its sharp screen, built-in downloading and long battery life have overcome a relatively high price and some poor hardware-design features.
Walt finds that Amazon.com has fixed the worst design flaws in the Kindle, its popular electronic-book reader, while maintaining the excellent book-buying experience that made the first model tolerable despite those problems.
Walt reviews the first talking music player in the impossibly small iPod Shuffle. Push a button and it will tell you, in a computerized voice, the title and artist of whatever song you’re hearing. Keep holding that button and it will recite a roll call of all your playlists, allowing you to select among them. In Walt’s tests, this worked as advertised.
Internet Explorer 8 is more stable than its predecessor and packed with valuable new features, but it still can’t match its browser rivals in speed and performance.
Apple’s new iPhone 3G S and OS 3.0 offer plenty of new features. But the software may be enough of a boost to keep many users from buying the new model, Walt Mossberg writes.
Edited by Walt and written by Katie Boehret, this is a guide to gadgets, web services and other consumer technologies.
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