Every time you hook up your iPhone to your PC the iTunes app immediately starts by doing a backup of everything that's on the phone. But what is it actually backing up and is there any way to get to the information that's there if you were to lose your phone or if you just want to poke around? That's the purpose of iBackupBot (formerly known as iPodRobot), a slick little Windows app that makes...

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Now that I have a bunch of apps on my new Apple iPhone 3GS, I want to change what's where in the most efficient manner possible: dragging back and forth isn't my idea of fun when there are three screens full of icons! What's the best approach for reordering my apps on the iPhone?...

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I don't know how it's happened, but I seem to have a bunch of duplicate tracks in my (huge) iTunes library and it's annoying as heck. I can remove them by hand, but it's tedious and I'm afraid of user error. I checked out the "Show Duplicates" feature in iTunes, but it seems to think that songs with the same name by different artists on different albums are dupes. Uh, no. So what's the solution,...

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I've heard I can use my Apple iPhone 3GS as a Kindle without actually buying a Kindle from Amazon. How is this possible and how do I do it?...

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Now that I have an Apple iPod Touch and have figured out how to get it working on my Microsoft Windows Vista PC, my question is how do I import music CDs into iTunes?...

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I just got an Apple iPod Touch, which is super cool, but I have no idea how to get it to work with my Dell PC. I'm running Windows Vista and use Windows Media Player 10 (WMP10) for the music on my computer, but WMP doesn't seem to see my iPod. How do I proceed and get it to work??...

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I've been hearing rumors for months about Apple releasing a tablet computer but they give me very odd looks when I ask about it at the Apple Store. Then at Christmas dinner someone told me that it's on the way and it's going to be called the iSlate. What? How could they know, and what's your best information about what an iSlate will be?...

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I have an iPod shuffle and it's pretty neat, though of course I'd love to have a tiny screen on it. Problem is, a lot of the time the music that iTunes drops onto the iPod isn't what I want. I do aerobics, and there's nothing that's a buzzkill faster than a slow song in the middle of a workout!...

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I can see that there some sort of song tagging capability in the FM radio portion of my new Apple iPod Nano 5G device, but for the life of me, I can't figure it out, and the micro-documentation from Apple doesn't shed any light. Dave, how the heck does this work?...

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I've been contemplating buying a new iPod Nano since the FM receiver capability would help me listen to the TV programming at the gym while I work out. Before I take the plunge, though, can you show me how the FM radio features work on the 5th gen iPod Nano?...

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I watched the latest Apple announcements and was pretty impressed by the different things that Steve Jobs talked about, but the one that caught my attention was the iPhone Application Genius recommendation service. I'm a bit of an app-aholic, so I like to see what's new, but with tens of thousands in the iTunes app store, well, a recommendation service seems like a great idea. How do I use it?...

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I've lost count of how many iPods I have here in the office, but it's at least a dozen of various sizes, shapes, and technologies, ranging from a first generation mini-hard drive unit with a firewire connector to the very latest Classic (that's an odd expression, isn't it?) In addition, I'm a big fan of my Apple iPhone, which among many other great features, is a splendid iPod in its own right and currently stores...

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I can still remember the first Mac I used: it was a 512K unit that the fine folk at the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link loaned me when they hired me to hack their discussion system and make it faster. At the time I'd just left my job at Hewlett-Packard and had no computer of my own (back then people didn't have computers unless they were hardware hobbyists or could handle cassette backups). To the proffered...

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I love my shiny new iPhone, but I'm totally concerned someone will steal it, find all my personal information and steal my data.  What can I do to prevent it from being lost?...

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My sister put her Apple ipod nano in the washer, and now it only works when it is plugged into a computer. any advice?...

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My kids are really into High School Musical and Miley Cyrus, to the point where we bought them the soundtrack and they promptly broke the CD squabbling over it. I know I could buy a couple more but that's pretty expensive! Is there a way to just use iTunes to dupe a music CD so they could listen to the copy and we'd keep their Hannah Montana music (etc) safely stored away?...

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If you're like most people, you've found yourself at least once in the situation where you have your music library on an old computer that's the system you used to sync with your fancy iPod. No problem, until you get a newer computer or laptop and suddenly find that you can't just switch: iTunes wants to wipe your iPod (or iPhone) before its first sync. Not good at all. There are various ways you can...

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I've bought a fair amount of music from the iTunes store and have also ripped much of my old music collection too. Now I want to make a few audio CDs of favorite songs that I can listen to in the car. How do I do that?...

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This is the first of many reports we'll be filing from the Consumer Electronics Show, January 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada. There are lots of places to get all the big announcements, so our focus will be on trends and things that catch our eye. Will Interactive Blu-Ray Save the Format? "Dreamer, a leader in interactive TV solutions, announces today that their BIDDLE™ platform will be utilized by Technicolor to offer digital content delivery services...

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What's going to be the big announcement at Macworld this year, Dave? You have an inside track on these things, right?...

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