magazine

Think of it as an old-fashion circulation war in the digital age, substituting tablets for tabloids.

Google is trying to raise support from newspaper and magazine publishers for its own digital newsstand for Android-powered devices, according to a Wall Street Journal report, a venture that would ramp up its competition with similar efforts backed by Apple and Amazon.com. The digital newsstand would reportedly feature apps from publishers that would allow versions of their content to appear on devices running Google's mobile operating system, according to the report, which cited anonymous sources.

However, media executives said the details and … Read more

Ultimate AV Magazine's Scott Wilkinson has an eye for style. He regularly posts some of the most beautiful shots of high-end audio exotica I've seen, so I decided to share a few of them here.

Leave it to the Italians to come up with a radically different approach to speaker design. Behold the Book of Music's Teti Extreme; its twisted curves look great and improve sound quality. With the standard finish each speaker carries a hefty price tag of $9,920; or if you're really willing to splurge, go for the special "liquid-rubber" paint … Read more

I thought it would be fun to contrast and compare the tubes vs. solid-state debate with the analog vs. digital standoff. I'd readily concede that solid-state/transistor components are, watt for watt, cheaper, more reliable, cooler running, smaller and lighter in weight. But if solid-state is so terrific why haven't tubes become extinct in the half century since transistors came onto the scene? Maybe, just maybe, because tubes sound better?

Ultimate AV Magazine recently conducted a poll, "Do You Prefer Tube-Based or Solid-State Audio Gear?," and the results demonstrated a nearly two-to-one preference for transistors over … Read more

Computer hardware is hot among holiday buyers this season, according to data out yesterday from ComScore.

As online buyers scoop up iPads, e-readers, laptops, and other portable devices, computer hardware is ringing in the holidays as the product category showing the most growth for the season so far, a 25 percent increase compared with last year.

Lower prices on flat-panel TVs is spurring growth in consumer electronics, helping that category grow 22 percent among online buyers over the same period last year, says ComScore. Books and magazines are also proving to be a popular gift item, up 21 percent from … Read more

China will soon overtake Japan as the world's second heaviest spender on research and development, according to a report from the Battelle Memorial Institute.

A nonprofit group that conducts scientific research, Battelle published its findings today as part of an article in its R&D Magazine. The article and its full supplementary report (PDF) looked at global R&D spending in general and across six specific segments--Information Technology, Electronics, Life Sciences, Aerospace/Defense/Security, Energy, and Advanced Materials.

Next year, China is expected to spend $153.7 billion on R&D, a big jump from $141.… Read more

Magazines and newspapers are migrating to iOS devices (most notably the iPad) at a steady clip, but there's one problem: publishers don't have a way to sell subscriptions--not yet, anyway.

That may change with the arrival of iOS 4.3, which is rumored to be arriving (or at least announced) as early as this Thursday, December 9.

As CNET's Joe Aimonetti reported last month, this build was already in the works when Apple rolled out iOS 4.2. And despite the latter's brief delay, it appears iOS 4.3 may still arrive on schedule (at least … Read more

It's going to be a lot harder to hide this from your partner/parents/roommates, but imagine holding 56 years of Playboy magazines loaded onto an external hard drive.

That won't mean much to the kid with a hundred gigs of bootleg skinema buried in a system sub-folder, but surely someone remembers analog porn and will appreciate the entire Playboy catalog in a 2.5-inch portable enclosure.

The 250GB, USB 2.0-powered hard drive features an engraved Playboy logo on the side and contains every Playboy magazine starting from the December 1953, issue all the way up to … Read more

NEW YORK--There must be something squirreled away in the human brain that is hard-wired to go absolutely bonkers at the sight of anything that's shiny, slick, and begging to be touched. That, after all, is how Apple CEO Steve Jobs sells products.

But an iPad is only as good as the things you can do on it, and in this sense the device is implicitly a bit of a challenge, an Everest to climb or an English Channel to swim, for developers and entrepreneurs: What can you do on this? How can you take advantage of the features it … Read more

I've heard most of the world's very best speakers and amplifiers, and while they can sound pretty amazing at times, they never sound like live music. The reasons for the shortfall are many, but heading the list are recordings, there's way too much signal processing and manipulation imposed on the sound of instruments and vocals, so even if you had a perfect hi-fi, the recordings wouldn't sound realistic. Analog or digital? Sorry, neither has a real advantage here; state-of-the-art recording technology still loses too much information to achieve total fidelity.

I covered this subject in a … Read more