Walt Mossberg says Picnik — a Web-based photo-editing application — is good for tweaking and improving photos, then posting them to photo Web sites, saving them to a computer, emailing them, or even printing them.
Yahoo Mail has emerged from testing as a polished, fairly powerful online email program. It beats Google’s Gmail both in terms of features and its ability to act like a computer program instead of a Web page, writes Walt Mossberg.
A new type of T-Mobile cellphone can place calls over Wi-Fi for a flat monthly fee without using regular cellphone minutes and can switch seamlessly to regular cellular service, but has a few drawbacks.
Walt reviews Linux’s relatively slick Ubuntu variation and finds the alternative operating system too rough around the edges for the vast majority of computer users. (Video)
The iPod Touch is an elegant and capable music player, but this cousin of the iPhone is short on battery life and lacks some important software features, writes Walt Mossberg. (Video)
Apple’s new version of OS X, called Leopard, builds on Apple’s quality advantage over Windows, says Walt Mossberg. Leopard is better and faster than Vista, with a set of new features that make Macs even easier to use.
Gateway One is striking like the iMac but offers smaller screens and lower resolution — huge factors in an all-in-one machine — for prices that can exceed the iMac’s, says Walt Mossberg. Video
Every average consumer using a computer should at least look at the Mac, suggests Walt Mossberg. Here’s a quick guide — a sort of Mac FAQ — to shopping for a Macintosh.
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.
Free online translation services are in greater demand, but their results can be rife with syntactic and semantic errors — from the merely too-literal to the laughably bad.
Dell’s new all-in-one PC, the XPS One, is a stylish Windows Vista machine that runs well and won’t cost a fortune. If it didn’t have the Dell logo on it, the XPS One might be mistaken for a product of the PC industry’s design leaders, Apple or Sony.
Verizon’s new Voyager looks remarkably like the iPhone and even beats Apple’s product in certain respects. But Walt Mossberg says the Voyager suffers badly in the area where Apple’s phone shines: software.
A tiny new computer called the Eee PC is better than competing products in certain respects, such as text entry and price. But it still has too many compromises to pry most travelers away from their larger laptops.
Edited by Walt and written by Katie Boehret, this is a guide to gadgets, web services and other consumer technologies.
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Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.