Technophile: Sony’s X-Series Walkman reviewed

Sony's X-Series Walkman has a lovely screen and sounds good, too – such a shame about the browser Pretty much the first thing you say when you turn on the Sony Walkman X-series is "wow". A simple Home button at the bottom illuminates a touchscreen that has a set of simple logos – only one of which, for YouTube, requires words. Touch an icon and it beeps (you can turn the beep off) and lights up and you're into the next level. The 432 x 240-dot screen, which uses OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology, is marvellous. It seems to have an inward glow, with incredible detail; the film clips come up more than pin sharp.

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Technophile: Sony's X-Series Walkman reviewed

Technophile: Charles Arthur on Spotify’s universal jukebox

Once upon a time there was a peer-to-peer file-sharing service called Napster, and it caught the record labels completely unawares. For years people had been ripping their CDs into MP3s, but Napster showed them how to get tracks they didn't have (illicitly). And so the universal jukebox was born – though it was quickly extinguished by lawyers. Now Spotify is here, a completely legal service which tries to get close to that universal jukebox idea, where all you have to do is either pay a monthly fee (£10 in the UK) or listen to some ads at the start of a track (and see them on the application's interface) and you can get at a huge range of music. It's not quite every song ever made - give the folks a chance - but it's a big start. The application you download (for Windows or Mac; or in Wine on Linux) connects to the net and streams the songs. You can create your own playlists, listen to the "radio", or – perhaps most interesting – create collaborative playlists that anyone can add to (or subtract from) once they know the URL. (In the picture, the collaborative ones are green.) And when you're playing a track, there's a link - not yet implemented - to let you buy that song from Amazon or iTunes. Logically, Spotify would get a cut of any such transaction. The files are high-quality - Ogg Vorbis (the open-source codec) at roughly 160kbps; you need about 256kbps bandwidth to get it all working. It all sounds like Napster version 1 done right. So is there anything that doesn't work right? I asked on Twitter and found that what people wanted most was a mobile-phone version (I understand that's in the works, though it might be some way off); better recommendation; better collaborative information (so you can see who has added a track to a playlist, say); and streaming to other devices such as hi-fis. Oh, and more songs - though the classical repertoire is good - and better filtering in the searches, which tend to be overly broad - my search for King Crimson turned up tracks that ex-members had made.

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Technophile: Charles Arthur on Spotify's universal jukebox

Microsoft’s Azure is not Hailstorm, but what’s the point of it?

Microsoft has made its Azure cloud computing announcements at PDC, so now we know what it's doing: it is extending Windows 2008 Server into the online market so that programmers who develop applications in Visual Studio (and other things, see below) can test them locally and deploy them globally . Azure runs the same code but uses a hypervisor to distribute it across multiple machines and, next year, multiple data centres on different continents. Application management is automatic

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Microsoft's Azure is not Hailstorm, but what's the point of it?