NYC

Gone are the days of going to the music store, finding a vintage CD or cassette tape, happily unwrapping it and thoroughly perusing the cover art as you listen to your new album for the very first time. In a want-it-now world, that simply takes too long -- and we have the internet to thank for the change in pace. As preferences seem to shift in the music consumption universe, it feels as if tastes are centered around consuming the largest amount of music possible. And thanks to the sudden proliferation of online streaming services, satisfying those desires in record time has become a reality. Unsurprisingly, competition is mighty fierce -- consumers have options for user-made radio stations, on-demand streaming content, and cloud-based multimedia. But if you've been hearing the word on the street, Apple and Google could soon make their way onto the scene by offering streaming music optionsof their own. Almost everything these two tech giants touch turns to gold (emphasis on...

By now you've no doubt read or at least heard about the  New York Times  interview where RIM's co-CEOs wound up asking most of the questions and challenged conventional wisdom about the company, or seen the  BBC  interview that Mike Lazaridis put an abrupt end to (see below, if you haven't). Those both offer plenty of juicy morsels for folks like us to chew on, but they're also indicative of a broader sense of frustration from the company that's getting difficult to ignore. One that is strikingly similar to what we've recently seen from another company that grew to dominate on the world stage, became a figure of national pride in its home country, and is now struggling to reinvent itself in the face of stiff competition: Nokia. To get an idea of how similar the two situations are, we only need to look back to 2009 -- admittedly an eternity in the smartphone business, but not really  that  long ago. While Nokia still dominated the worldwide smar...

Like Joanna shamelessly admitted in her editorial a few months back, I was a BlackBerry addict. I'm also a 20-year old college student / tech-head whose phone serves every purpose from communications device to music player to TV remote. I tried to switch cold turkey and bought an iPhone 4 in August, but somewhere around Thanksgiving I gave in and picked up a Verizon Bold. I've been double fisting ever since -- using the BB almost exclusively for BBM, and my iPhone for everything else. Fast forward to late last week when I attended a meeting in New York with Tim Stevens and RIM CEOMike Lazaridis to get the latest dish on the PlayBook. As Lazaridis demoed myriad features from HDMI presentation mode to the built-in music player on the company's hotly debated tablet, it hit me: the one question I've been pondering since getting a real look at the device.  Who is it for?  At that moment, I realized the problem that's been plaguing RIM as of late -- and not just in...

This thought was first given voice by Myriam Joire on last night's Mobile Podcast, and the simple, lethal accuracy of it has haunted me ever since. All the hubbub and unrest about whether Google is trying to lock Android down or not has failed to address whether Google should be trying to control the OS, and if so, what the (valid) reasons for that may be. Herein, I present only one, but it's arguably big enough to make all the dissidence about open source idealism and promises unkept fade into insignificance. Let's start off by setting out what the goal behind Android is. It'd be impossible to identify the flaw with Google's strategy if we aren't clear on what it's strategizing toward. From its very inception, Android has been about expanding the reach of Google search. Never mind all the geeky professions of wanting to build a great mobile operating system and one which Googlites themselves would want and be proud to use -- there's no rea...