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Wearable Technology

Last week I spent fifteen minutes in a queue in Piccadilly Station. There's a chap in a booth there who's the best person in London, in my view, to get watches fixed or their batteries replaced. He does everything. He's...

Posted by Adam Bowie on March 11, 2013 11:32 AM

Apple and its Suppliers

Apple has just announced some staggering profits. $13bn in the last three months alone. Once again, it's close to being the most valuable company on the planet. Earlier this week, the New York Times published this devastating report on...

Posted by Adam Bowie on January 29, 2012 7:33 PM

The Podcasting Challenge

Last month, the BBC announced that it had delivered its billionth podcast since it first started delivering downloads in 2007. Closer to home, Absolute Radio continues to deliver exceptional numbers of podcast, with programmes like Frank Skinner and Dave...

Posted by Adam Bowie on January 3, 2012 1:25 PM

New Amazon Kindles and Pricing

So Amazon, as widely expected, has announced details of its new range of Kindles. There are four of them: Kindle at $79 Kindle Touch (WiFi) at $99 Kindle Touch (WiFi + 3G) at $149 Kindle Fire (their colour tablet) at...

Posted by Adam Bowie on September 28, 2011 5:52 PM

Keep An Eye on the FT

Anyone with any sense in publishing will be watching very carefully what the FT is doing. They've decided to forgo platform-specific apps, sold through app-stores, and instead produce a compelling, HTML5 compliant mobile-oriented website. OK - they're not actually dumping...

Posted by Adam Bowie on June 7, 2011 9:09 PM

iCloud Cuckoo Land*

As regular readers will know, I'm a frustrated iTunes user. So what should I make of Apple's announcements yesterday - in particular those associated with iCloud? I tend to still buy quite a lot of music on CD, if...

Posted by Adam Bowie on June 7, 2011 3:38 PM

iTunes Woes - When Consolidate Breaks

This is a bit of a plea. Any solutions welcome... I have a big iTunes library. It's something like 250GB because I keep certain old podcasts, have lots of music (ripped at high bit-rates), quite a few audiobooks (also in...

Posted by Adam Bowie on May 31, 2011 12:37 PM

What Do I Do With My Music?

I'm facing a dilemma. I'm wondering whether I should ditch Apple for my music needs... Here's where I am, as Duncan Bannatyne might say: I use iTunes to manage my music and audio. I have over 160GB of music/audio. Partly...

Posted by Adam Bowie on May 10, 2011 11:31 AM

Queuing

We're told that queuing is a very British thing, although as much as anything, that might be because other countries use their own words like "line" in the US. But what's clear to me is that it's not something I...

Posted by Adam Bowie on March 25, 2011 10:18 AM

Things That Have Piqued My Interest Recently

Further proof that BBC Four is the best channel in the UK comes through a series of excellent programmes that have been on-air this week: - Storyville had YouTube Hero: The Winnebego Man starting briefly with the stories on people...

Posted by Adam Bowie on September 1, 2010 8:45 PM

Paywalls

This morning a PR team from The Times was dishing out free coffee to colleagues at work. They're promoting the fact that from today, The Times and Sunday Times have new websites. And with them come paywalls. As it happens,...

Posted by Adam Bowie on May 25, 2010 1:24 PM

The Spawn of Satan

Sorry. I'm going to return to an evil that I've talked about before. What bedevilment do I mean? Why - the standard "ear buds" that come with Apple's products. Look - I know I can sometimes moan about Apple. They...

Posted by Adam Bowie on May 14, 2010 1:02 PM

EBook Readers And In-Fighting

What are we to make over the weekend's bit of fun over at Amazon.com? In brief, Amazon likes to charge a single price for its ebooks on the Kindle - $9.99. Macmillan, one of the biggest publishers in the US...

Posted by Adam Bowie on February 2, 2010 10:14 PM

The Year of the Kindle/ebook Reader?

Sometimes, a piece of information just doesn't smell right. On Boxing Day this year, Amazon announced a couple of pieces of information in a release that got lots of coverage, in large part - I'd suggest - because over the...

Posted by Adam Bowie on January 4, 2010 1:57 PM

The iPhone on Orange

There's much excitement today as Orange announces - two years after the phone's first launch - that it has secured the iPhone on its network. They've set up a pre-order system and everything. As Rory-Cellan Jones says in his good...

Posted by Adam Bowie on September 28, 2009 12:39 PM

iTunes and Audiobooks

In a lot of ways iTunes is really very good. Obviously it's a painless way to purchase music, or convert your CDs to audiofiles for uploading to your iPod. It allows you to sync your library to your portable device...

Posted by Adam Bowie on February 1, 2009 6:19 PM

Please Apple - Do Something

No - this isn't yet another post about the release of a new mobile phone. This is far more important. This is about Apple's iPods. Actually, it's not even really about that. You see love or loathe Apple, broadly speaking...

Posted by Adam Bowie on July 22, 2008 10:36 PM

Something to Watch on iTunes

If you were a UK resident and rushed out and bought an Apple TV device after they were announced in autumn 2006, you'd have been sorely disappointed when you got home and plugged it in. Certainly you could listen to...

Posted by Adam Bowie on June 4, 2008 1:30 PM

ITV on iTunes

ITV is dipping its toe in the iTunes water by making available some of its back catalogue on the iTunes television store. This is no bad thing, but I think that it does again highlight some of the issues that...

Posted by Adam Bowie on April 22, 2008 1:51 PM

Apple Video Pricing Revisited

There's an interesting piece about Apple's pricing for video in Variety at the moment. It seems that Apple would quite like to drop prices from $1.99 to 99c an episode, and not all the studios are happy. ABC/Disney might bite...

Posted by Adam Bowie on September 8, 2007 10:36 AM