Google’s Music Store announcement today

Google will be having a press conference today at 2pm PST to announce something related to an online music store. cnet will be live blogging the announcement here, and live streaming will be here.

There’s been some speculation which of the major labels are on board, ranging from only one to all but one. Have to see how it pans out this afternoon. It’s obviously going to be linked in with their existing music.google.com service which allows you to store all your music online and stream to your desktop or Android device, but have to see if there’s any more interesting features that haven’t been announced yet.

The most interesting rumor is that the major labels have agreed to let users of Google’s service share music between their friends, which would tie music in with Google+?

Consumer Reports rate many Android phones better than the iPhone 4S

Whether you put much weight in the reviews in Consumer Reports or not, the fact that they operate independently of any company whose products they review and that they don’t accept any products they review as gifts (they buy every product they review) in order to maintain impartiality, plus the fact that they have over 7 million subscribers, when they rate one product over another it’s kind of a big deal.

Consumer Reports doesn’t ‘recommend’ the iPhone 4 due to it’s signal strength issues inherent in unfortunate design where it’s signal is killed by holding the phone in your hand. Small problem. The new iPhone 4S however they do recommend.

Here’s the kicker though, and one that may be an eye opener for some who are blinded by Apple’s great marketing – they rate a wide range of Android phones carried by AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, all HIGHER than the iPhone 4S. Yes, you read that right. Consumer Reports in their impartial and objective reviews recommend a number of Android phones with higher ratings than the iPhone 4S. Android phones rated high than the iPhone 4S include:

  • Samsung Galaxy S II
  • Samsung Galaxy Infuse 4G
  • LG Thrill 4G
  • Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch
  • Motorola Photon 4G
  • Samsung Epic 4G
  • HTC Evo 3D
  • Motorola’s Droid Bionic
  • HTC Thunderbolt
  • LG Revolution
  • Samsung Droid Charge

… that’s a lot of phones to choose from that in their impartial review are better than the iPhone 4S.

First quad core Android tablet from Asus announced, running latest nVidia Tegra 3 chipset

It had to happen sooner or later. Dual CPU cores for tablets are now officially yesterday. Say hello to quad core tabets running nVidia’s latest Tegra 3 chipset. The interesting thing about this latest version of the Tegra system-on-a-chip is that it will use 1 CPU for ‘normal’ processing, and then an additional 4 CPU cores step in when needed for heavy lifting.

Asus have an updated version of their EEE Transformer named the Transformer Prime which will be running on the Tegra 3 chipset and available by the end of this year starting at $500.