systemplus

To coincide with the release of the company's iPhone 3G, Apple overhauled its Mac-centric .Mac service and renamed it--seemingly without irony--MobileMe. In addition to the new name and the vaguely Windows ME-esque logo, the new service introduces one notable new feature: the ability to sync with iPhones, iPods, and PCs.

The new MobileMe service also arrived with about 70 new bugs, many of which PC World had occasion to experience during the service's first few weeks of life, and many of which remain unresolved as of this writing. Apple is aware of the problems, however; Steve Jobs himself admitted that the application was "not up to Apple's standards" and said that it would have benefited from more time and testing.

The good news: If you're a long-time Mac user with an existing .Mac account, switching to MobileMe won't be much of an adjustment. MobileMe's existing support for syncing iCal calendars, bookmarks, and connecting two Macs via the Back-To-My-Mac feature still work as they always have. In our tests with the iPhone and the iPod Touch, the service reliably synced calendars and bookmarks with our Macs.

With our PCs, it has been a different story. MobileMe's support for Windows focuses almost entirely on Microsoft Outlook. If you aren't a fan of Outlook and would just like to sync calendar events to Vista's built-in Windows Calendar, forget it. That omission wouldn't be so bad if Outlook syncing worked smoothly, but it doesn't. Instead, we continue to get daily error messages informing us that the MobileMe Sync Server is configured incorrectly, along with a vague message directing us to the MobileMe control panel, which offers no further help.

Even with the service's problems, however, our calendar events do consistently migrate from Outlook to iPhone and iPod and Mac, and back again. And MobileMe's Web interface is one of the finest we've seen, living up to Apple's reputation for slick software design. Snappy menus and intuitive drag-and-drop controls guide you through calendar entries and the iDisk online-storage service.

Nevertheless, it's difficult to justify the $99 yearly subscription fee for such a half-baked syncing tool. In an all-Mac world, MobileMe might be a worthwhile expense, due to the undeniably handy Back-To-My-Mac remote control feature. But with limited support for Windows calendar apps--and a barrel of configuration problems--MobileMe is no bargain for Windows users.

After a few delays and a lot of grassroots hype, the Slacker Portable Internet radio is finally available. Starting at $200 for the 2GB model, this ambitious music-only device features a 4-inch wide screen, built-in Wi-Fi, and an excellent Web service. The Slacker deserves credit for approaching issues of form and function in its own way--it borrows almost nothing from the iPod--but it's also blocky, buggy, slow, and more than a bit frustrating.

Besides reading this review, you can watch our video of the Slacker Portable Internet radio player in action.

The strongest aspect of the Slacker Portable is the associated Slacker Web music service, which you can listen to for free without the player. I suggest that you do so right away, even if you don't plan on buying the player. As with the Pandora online music service, users can enter an artist's name on the Slacker site, click Enter, and create a custom "station" consisting of free music from that artist and others similar in sound or genre. The Slacker site does a great job of matching your demonstrated tastes to other music that you might enjoy, though Slacker's artist roster and music-matching abilities don't seem quite as deep as what I've experienced with Pandora's service.

Here's where the Slacker Portable is unique: After entering an artist's name and creating a custom station at the site, you can sync your stations to the player, for free. As a result, you'll always have a pocket full of music that you like, plus the element of surprise as to what's coming next on your station's playlist.

The free Slacker Web service is supported by targeted ads that the Slacker Portable will run, beginning with tips on how to get more out of the Slacker experience. Slacker says that a user's station will never begin with an advertisement and that there will be, at most, about 3 minutes of ads per hour. In accordance with Digital Millennium Copyright Act guidelines, users of the free service may skip only six songs per hour on the player. A paid version of the Slacker service avoids such restrictions, for a price.

With the paid version of the service ($9.99 per month for three months, $8.33 per month for six months, or $7.50 per month for a year's subscription), the ads are gone, and the Slacker player lets you save songs for playback later and lets you skip as many songs as you want. However, the paid version still lacks a way to skip backward to hear a previous track again unless you've saved it. Also, any songs that you saved while a paid user will disappear when your subscription ends.

Windows XP and Windows Vista users can transfer their own MP3 and WMA digital music files to their Slacker Portable, with some limitations. On the $200 (15-station-limit) 2GB model, only 500MB of storage space is accessible; that maximum grows to 1.5GB on the $250 (25-station-limit) 4GB model, and to 4GB on the $300 (40-station-limit) 8GB model. The Mac OS doesn't support personal content transfer.

Once you're listening to music, the Slacker Portable shines. It's like having several iPod Shuffles at your disposal, each focused on a different genre of music. Budget-minded music fans who are also looking to discover new bands will especially appreciate the chance to hear songs by musicians who are similar to artists they already know and love. While playing to the music, the device displays extensive biographical information about the artist on its 4-inch, 480 by 272-pixel wide screen.

The Slacker Portable player is fairly large (2.76 by 0.67 by 4.2 inches) and light (4.6 ounces)--about the size of a cassette tape. The device takes about 3 hours to charge its replaceable battery completely; the battery is rated to last about 10 hours on a charge.

Navigating the on-screen menus is done entirely by buttons and analog scroll wheels. Slacker gives you the option of switching controls to the player's touch strip, which extends down the left side of the player's screen, but I couldn't get the strip to work reliably. Consequently, I recommend sticking with the analog-style buttons and scroll wheel.

Though navigation is easy and intuitive, the scroll wheel is sometimes unresponsive to clicking or takes a few seconds to register clicks. Moreover, because it's located slightly too close to the skip-forward and pause buttons, you may simultaneously select a station and skip or pause the first track. Five buttons run along the device's sides and top: pause, skip forward, 'home', 'heart' (for adding songs to your hard drive if you subscribe to the paid Slacker Premium service), and 'ban' (to remove songs from your stations). A volume rocker appears on the top of the device.

The power button on the right side of the player doubles as a lock switch, which you'll definitely want to use. Though the controls are intuitive and easy to use, you'll inevitably press them unintentionally at times. Accidentally skipping forward on a track is especially frustrating if you don't have the paid service--you'll want to hoard your half-dozen skip-forwards as if they were free steaks.

On the connectivity front, Slacker's Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) capability is a major drawing point. Having a player that can refresh a station's songs wirelessly while you're on the go is wonderful. Alternatively, you can use the bundled USB cable to refresh your station's song lists. In my tests, updating 19 stations over USB 2.0 on the player took about 30 minutes.

You'll also definitely need better earbuds than the awkwardly big pair that come with the player. I doubt that the included earbuds would fit in most peoples' ears, and the sound they produced was neither deep nor rich. Sound quality improved markedly through a pair of Sony MDR-EX71SL Fontopia earbuds, however.

Even with all the bugs, it's hard not to love the Slacker independent approach to things. It doesn't do video at all, but this is an ambitious player. Slacker's Web-based music service is great and accurately matches your musical tastes to tunes you'll like but may not be familiar with. I recommend trying Slacker's music service immediately, but waiting to buy the hardware until some of the kinks are worked out.

Adobe obviously pays attention to what's hot these days. And online photo sharing is more popular than ever, with sites like Flickr and Facebook and programs like Apple iPhoto keeping people connected through photos, blogs, and blurbs. With Photoshop Elements 7 ($100, or $150 when bundled with Premiere Elements 7 video-editing software; in private beta, due in October), Adobe provides ties to its forthcoming online service, Photoshop.com, and adds enough new features to the desktop app itself to make version 7 a worthy upgrade.

The big news here involves the Photoshop.com service, which due to launch in October as well. Adobe says that the service will supplement its existing Photoshop Express. However, it wasn't accessible at the time I tested this beta version of Elements 7; we'll update this review with more info on the service when it launches.

According to Adobe, Photoshop.com will have two levels of membership: a free, basic membership; and a $50 per year Plus membership. The free membership provides 5GB of storage and automatic backup of your images to Photoshop.com's servers. You can also access your account and online galleries from any Web browser. When you edit your pictures, the changes you make will be synced up with your home PC-and similarly, changes you make on local photo files will be uploaded and synced to your Photoshop.com storage. Adobe is also working on a mobile uploader that will let you post photos from your cell phone. With the Plus membership, you get 20GB of storage, as well as the option to have Adobe send you design advice, new tutorials, tips, seasonal artwork, and templates as these are developed throughout the year.

Even though the Photoshop Elements 7 software that I tested was still in beta form, I found much to like. New to version 7 of Adobe Photoshop Elements is a Smart Brush tool borrowed from Photoshop, as well as a handy Scene Cleaner that has been added to the Photomerge tool. Disgruntled users of Photoshop Elements past will be pleased to learn that this version lets users adjust the background tint from charcoal all the way to stark white. More good news: Photoshop Elements 7 has FTP settings, so you can upload galleries directly to your own Web site.

Unfortunately, Elements 7 still lacks the Fade slider tool available in Photoshop that lets you adjust the intensity of a filter immediately after applying it, so you can get exactly the look you want. Considering its many impressive creative filter options, Elements 7 would benefit from such a tool.

The application continues to straddle the line between novices and more seasoned users, offering three levels of editing: Full Edit, Quick Fix, and Guided Editing. You can switch between the levels by clicking on tabs, and after a while I became familiar with which options are available at each level. Still, the three-level structure feels a bit clunky at times, especially when you're forced to blunder through a combination of menu options and tabbed screens to find more-advanced options such as editing color curves.

Full Edit provides essential controls similar to those in the full-fledged Photoshop, with advanced editing tools, filters, and layers. Quick Fix offers sliders for common tasks such as brightness, saturation, sharpening, color balance, and red-eye reduction. A "touch-up" panel makes Smart Brushes available, including a toothbrush for whitening teeth, a brush for saturating dull skies, and a high-contrast black-and-white tool for applying effects to selected areas in your photo. As in Photoshop, you can customize the brush's size, hardness, and spacing. The program's selections were impressively accurate at whitening teeth; and you can also use the "add" or "subtract" tool or adjust feathering to refine your selection.

If you're new to image editing and not up for all of this complicated stuff, Elements 7's Guided Editing is for you. In this panel you'll find text-based guidelines that you can select from a list. Guided Editing shows you how to adjust specific image properties such as contrast; or it can walk you through the process of antiquing a photo, showing you various effects. Guided Editing can be a useful educational tool for people new to image editing and for more-seasoned photographers who are learning to use the program. It's also fun to play with.

Photoshop Elements' Photomerge capabilities are a boon to anyone who's ever taken a snapshot. With its new Scene Cleaner, the program does an excellent job of removing unwanted interlopers in a photo of your brother in front of the "Rocky" statue. As it could in Elements 6, Photomerge can fuse subjects from several photos into one, creating a scene where everyone is looking at the camera, eyes open. Such compositing used to take hours, but now you can do it in just a few seconds.

For anyone seeking a combination image editor and organizer that doesn't break the bank, Photoshop Elements 7 is a powerful contender. The program's new online components permit you to do more from within a familiar interface, and its new tools alone make it worth the upgrade.