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Release Date: August 05, 2009
Genre: Games
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iTunes New Music Releases

Release Date: September 29, 2009
Genre: Rock
Release Date: September 20, 2009
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Genre: Rock
Release Date: August 25, 2009

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StickWars $0.99
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Discover New Music

  • Abnormal Anonymous

    • 8 out of 10
    • Congo Norvell
    • Very few albums manage to capture snapshots of a quality of life in the manner that Congo Norvell's sophomore record, "Abnormals Anonymous," does.

      Comparisons to the Velvet Underground are

  • Haunted

    • 10 out of 10
    • Poe
    • Dropping like a bomb on some of the blah musical offerings of her contemporaries, Haunted was one of the best albums of 2000, obliterating the competition.

      Ostensibly a tie-in to her brot

  • Suspended Animation

    • 8 out of 10
    • Fantomas
    • Mike Patton may well be one of the hardest working men in showbiz these days, and his latest with Fantômas underscores just about how far out he is willing to travel.

      Suspended Animation

  • Odyssey Number Five

    • 10 out of 10
    • Powderfinger
    • Guitar-driven rock out of Australia, Powderfinger has not seen much exposure in the States, but should get a nod for their toe-tapping songs. Building off their previous release, "Internationalist" (
  • With Teeth

    • 4 out of 10
    • Nine Inch Nails
    • In the sprawling post-A&R rock and roll world, there are two camps: the Beatles and the Stones. The Beatles are the artists that like to explore, evolve, and change styles. The Stones are the artis

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News

Microsoft Teams with Philips, Creative, Samsung to Create ‘iPod Killer’

Microsoft has joined forces with Philips, Creative and Samsung in a bid to create the fabled "iPod killer." In reporting that news, technology news site Softpedia wonders "How should the ideal competitor for iPod look?"

Of course, as writers Alexandru Macovschi and Tudor Raiciu note, "there are hundreds of sites and forums on the Internet whose main topic is what should be changed or added to iPod." Ultimately, however, as they also point out, MP3 players with such features -- video capability, a larger screen, a radio function, etc. -- have failed to defeat the iPod, so there must be something more to the phenomenon.

They write: "The only problem everyone fails to see is that iPod's success has nothing to do with hardware or with software." No matter what this Microsoft-Philips-Creative triumvirate comes up with, they won't unseat the iPod because, as Mr. Macovschi and Mr. Raiciu explain, "the iPod's success is due to marketing strategy and historical conjuncture."

Essentially, the iPod came along shortly after Napster went under, "meeting the requirements of millions of users that had filled their hard drives and CDs with hundreds or even thousands of MP3s downloaded off Napster." Ultimately, they write, "iPod is the result of a once-in-a-lifetime moment, which cannot be recreated even if they add two wheels and a 5TB hard drive."

Instead, the companies searching for that proverbial iPod killer "can either support cell phone producers to launch as soon as possible models with large capacity hard drives that have insanely low prices, or give their money to charity for better purposes, such as curing cancer or helping third world countries."

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