quality

Google's music-streaming service All Access launched last month during I/O. The service, similar to that of Spotify or Slacker, allows Android users to create radio stations or stream entire albums directly on an Android device.

Streaming isn't a new feature in the Google Music app, as you have been able to stream music library stored in the cloud service for a while now. But All Access has increased the amount of streaming, and thus increased data usage.

Google on Thursday updated the Android Music app, which now allows you to choose the audio quality streamed through the … Read more

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman may have stated the obvious when she said today that HP is transferring its attention to tablets.

"We're shifting resources from PCs to tablets," she said during the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference.

"The market moved very fast to tablets and smartphones, and we've got to now manage that transition."

She continued. "And it's not that HP didn't try to manage that transition -- they did with the acquisition of Palm. But as you know under the previous [management] that took a little detour to … Read more

Apologies for being a little tardy on updating our long-running list of must-have Blu-ray movies, but here it is, refreshed for 2013. This month's updates entries include "Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection," "The Avengers," "Finding Nemo," "Jaws," "Lawrence of Arabia," and "Titanic."

Though my face is at the top of the column, the list was compiled with input from editors John Falcone, Matthew Moskovciak, and David Katzmaier, who look at a lot of video content in their day-to-day testing of products. We also keep an eye on AVS Forum's Blu-ray picture-quality and audio-quality threads, and have always appreciated the site's tiered rating system.

This list is not set in stone, and we'll be adding and removing discs as new ones come out. As always, feel free to make comments and suggest your own personal favorites. They may get added to the list in the future. … Read more

The Google Play Books app was recently updated with a "Read Aloud" feature for Android devices. Once enabled, your Android device will read the text of books acquired from Google Play Books.

There's just one problem; the voice reading the books sounds horrible. It's slow, words are awkwardly broken up, and it just doesn't lend itself to a great experience. The good news is you can enable a high-quality voice to read the book to you directly in the app.

How good is the iPhone 5's call quality, and most importantly, how it does it compare across carriers? We addressed some of the iPhone 5's call quality in our CNET review and follow-up stories, but let's take a listen to the Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T models side-by-side. Is there a difference in audio quality?

For our quick test, I made phone calls from the same street corner in New York to Brian Bennett upstairs, using all three carrier models both against my ear and held several feet away from me in speakerphone mode. I also made test calls from the same location on all three models to our San Francisco office's voice-quality-testing voice mail drop. For comparison purposes, I also threw in my AT&T iPhone 4S in all instances to see how it fared. … Read more

Shopping for a new television can be an overwhelming experience. Confusion plagues even the most careful shoppers, and TV manufacturers, retailers, salespeople and numerous Internet sources can create more uncertainty as they push extra features, new technologies, and add-ons in the incessant pursuit of profit.

I hope that this guide, which I created in 2002 and have updated every year since, will help you cut through the confusion with unbiased information so that you can select a new television. It won't answer every question, and when you read it, it won't tell you "the perfect TV for … Read more

If you're looking for a cheap TV 42 inches or larger, there are a lot of advantages to buying a plasma instead of an LCD.

The biggest is picture quality: an LCD is typically not able to reproduce the black levels and contrast of an equivalently priced plasma, and plasma always trounces LCD for viewing angle and uniformity. Entry-level 720p plasmas are also more energy-efficient than more expensive 1080p plasmas, and while they use a lot more power than LCDs, they still only cost about $20 to $30 per year to run.

We recently reviewed a bunch of entry- and midlevel plasma TVs, and our favorites are collected below. There were a few that didn't make the cut, including the LG PA6500 and PA4500 as well as the Panasonic X5. The latter was a surprise as every other plasma in the Panasonic range is superb for the price, and the X5 is simply...well...poor. Its picture quality was very disappointing even for the money, especially compared with that of our new budget star, the Samsung E450.… Read more

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) launched a site dedicated to the education of current and prospective electric vehicle owners in the San Francisco Bay Area. The site, called Bay Area PEV Ready, aggregates information useful to those electric vehicle owners.

For new buyers, the BAAQMD offers help to offset the high initial cost of owning an electric vehicle. Through available public funds, BAAQMD gives out grants to owners to help install charging stations at home. For those existing owners, the BAAQMD is fighting to secure more public EV charging stations. Already BAAQMD has allocated more than $6.… Read more

The Pazera Free MP4 to AVI Converter is a software application for converting your MP4 videos to AVI format.

This is a very basic and simple-looking video converter. The program is light on features, because it has one main purpose, which is converting videos to AVI format. The conversion process time varies from one job to another. You should expect it to take about twice as much time as the length of the video being converted if it's longer than a few minutes.

Even if you're not very familiar with computers, it should be pretty easy to start … Read more