Now playing: Watch this: Music Beta by Google 1:50 Google’s long-awaited cloud music service has arrived. It’s called Music Beta; it’s free (for now, and currently invite-only); and after giving it a test-drive, I’m happy to report that the whole system is fairly smooth. From the perspective of the end-user, the payoff of Music Beta …

Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, kicks off Tuesday at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. CNET/James Martin Editor’s note: We used Cover It Live for this event, so if you missed the live blog, you can still replay it in the embedded component below. Replaying the event will give you all the live updates along with commentary from our readers …

Microsoft has stopped identifying specific Windows Phone handsets when it collects location data from them, and will soon stop any unique device identifiers at all being sent to its location services, the company said yesterday. In a blog post, Windows Phone chief Andy Lees said the data Microsoft collected from the smartphones was for identifying local “landmarks”–nearby Wi-Fi access points …

A significant update to Windows Phone 7 will be released within a fortnight. It’s widely expected to be version 7.5, code-named ‘Mango’. Microsoft will hold a special event on 24 May in New York City to announce the upgrade. Microsoft developers have revealed a number of consumer-friendly features that will be included in the next release, Windows Phone Secrets reports. Bing on …

Google kicked off its annual Google I/O conference for developers with a collection of announcements to enhance the Android platform, including updates to the OS firmware and new multimedia services. The new Android Honeycomb platform will receive an incremental update with the introduction of version 3.1. Improvements available in this update include an extended multitasking panel, adding more recent tasks …

Crave’s dinky little iPhone app is working perfectly once more, delivering timely and amusing tech nonsense to your mobile, after a short period of, er, brokenness. Here’s what happened: there was a small problem with the podcast and that broke the feed to our app over Easter. The bad data (bad data! No cookie for you) was cached and took …

SAN FRANCISCO–Android, Google’s top developer priority, hogged the spotlight at Google I/O today–in part as the foundation for new Google music and video services. Among the Google I/O announcements today: • Google announced Android 3.1, an update to Honeycomb that adds new interface options, lets people plug in USB devices, and sports a movie rental service that works directly from …

Google has finally launched Music Beta, a cloud service that stores your music and lets you stream it to any browser or Android-based device. It’s invite-only for now, but the beta version is free. It’s not without its limitations, but we think it will certainly become a viable competitor against Amazon’s recently released Cloud Player. Here, we present a chart …

SAN FRANCISCO–Google defended its music storage service at a press conference today shortly after it unveiled the service at its developer conference here. The new Google Music service, which CNET first reported last night, allows people to store up to 20,000 songs in the Internet “cloud.” The benefit of doing this is that they will then be able to access …

Two of HTC’s forthcoming Android phones, the Salsa and ChaCha, are now available to pre-order on Amazon UK. We’ve known for a while that this pair of Facebook-friendly mobiles will arrive in the UK in June. Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange will sell the handsets. What we didn’t know was the price. Amazon has kindly divulged that the ChaCha will cost £250 …