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.
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.
Forrester Research imagines the Apple products of 2013 in a new report. Their conclusion: While much of Apple’s great successes have been mobile products, the company will seek to colonize rooms throughout the home.
Guest columnist Nick Wingfield is filling in this week for Walt Mossberg, who returns June 5.
The fight between YouTube and Viacom isn’t primarily about consumers and their rights, and its outcome won’t necessarily make things better for Internet users, Walt Mossberg says.
Apple’s adoption of Intel processors for its future Macs is big news in the computer world. But what does it mean for the average consumer, who just wants the best computer for the job?
Edited by Walt and written by Katie Boehret, this is a guide to gadgets, web services and other consumer technologies.
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