Telecoms and Technologies

I was about to embark on a 3 1/2-hour trek home to Connecticut from Maine after a beach weekend. I had two youngsters in the back seat and, my wife and I would quickly discover, no food. But I had gadgets, and I had apps. And I was about to find out if they could mollify an 8-year-old boy, Luca, and an 11-year-old girl, Juliana, more effectively than snacks. A little preview: If you have a BlackBerry, pack lots ...

Professional investors and Wall Street executives have Bloomberg terminals and a small army of assistants, analysts and brokers to keep them fully updated on business news at any given moment. You can’t quite get that from an app, unless you pay $20,000 annually for a proprietary service like Bloomberg, which will throw in the app for free. But for those with much lower expense accounts, the free Bloomberg Mobile app (iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Windows and Nokia devices) is ...

Music subscription services never quite struck gold with Internet users, but now that the smart phone is becoming the era’s standard listening device, a new gold rush is on. Established music services like Rhapsody, Pandora and Slacker continue to improve mobile service, but they are suddenly facing new mobile music competition. Depending on a person’s phone, budget and listening habits, the new services may be a better call. The services seem to be converging on the same target – ...

When cell phone shopping, many people start by looking for the perfect phone. All the carriers have good smart phones, so most of the time choosing one comes down to taste and budget constraints. But by focusing on the handset, shoppers may be ignoring the importance of the network. After all, the ability of the carrier to transmit e-mail, photos, video, music and TV shows depends on the reliability and speed of its network. There are scores of places ...