An Android Central forum member was lucky enough to receive the Android 4.0.4 OTA update on his Verizon Galaxy Nexus before anyone else. The update has since been extracted and made available for everyone else to download and install. As you may know, the Galaxy Nexus was still running on Android 4.0.2, which had a couple of issues and was also lacking a few things that were added in...

Skype was acquired by Microsoft in 2011 and a Skype client for Windows Phone had been promised by the end of last year. So far, Microsoft and its Skype unit have been quiet about the integration, but the Verge is reporting that company employees can now download a test version of Skype from the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Meanwhile, an internal Microsoft video that had been intended for executives at Nokia, is fueling more speculation about what features will be added to Windows Phone 8. Known by the codename Apollo, Windows Phone 8 is expected to be released sometime after the release of the Tango operating system, which is also expected at the Mobile Phone Congress.

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The video, obtained by the smartphone review site PocketNow, will have better integration with Microsoft desktop clients which should allow developers to reuse much of their code. While Windows Phone has been mostly lauded by crtics, a chief complaint has been a lack of apps.

Windows Phone 8 is also being upgraded to work on a wider range of hardware, and will include support for NFC radios.

Microsoft also said it expects 100,000 apps to be available for Windows Phone by the time Apollo is launched, which is currently rumored to be sometime in the fourth quarter.

"Overall, we're looking at a lot of changes and additions here, all of which seem designed to either bring Windows Phone in line with other platforms, feature-wise, or make it more closely identical to the desktop version of Windows," Evan Blass wrote on PocketNow. "It's probably safe to say that the jump from Mango/Tango to Apollo will be nearly as significant as the transition from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone, and this preview certainly gives us a lot to look forward to."

There are several ways that you can browse your music library in iTunes. Its grid and Cover Flow views are really great for picking out an album by its artwork, and you can play an individual track within seconds of it springing to mind, just by typing in the search bar.

But sometimes you'll want to kick back with a tailored selection of songs, or create a playlist for a party. iTunes caters for this with several kinds of playlist.

Each type is differently suited to the effort you want to invest and how finickety you happen to be feeling.

The most basic type of playlist is nothing more than a place to gather songs from your whole library and play them in whatever order you choose.

With Smart Playlists, instead of hand-picking every single song, you can specify criteria that inspects information attached to your songs, such as the artist and year of publication. iTunes also records dynamic information, such as the number of times you've played a song and how many times you've skipped it.

iTunes does the hard graft of working out what matches your criteria, which it does in next to no time even if your library contains thousands of songs.

Several Smart Playlists are automatically provided to serve common purposes. One shows your highest-rated songs, while another shows recent additions to your library. You might want to create a list just to show dance music from the 1990s only, or songs by particular artists that you haven't listened to in the last six months.

For a Genius Playlist, you only need to pick one track from your library to generate a selection of up to 100 songs. This requires the Genius feature to be on (Store > Turn On Genius), so that iTunes can periodically provide Apple with information about your songs and listening habits.

Apple analyses information from many people around the world and cross-references with your library to pick out songs that it thinks are complementary to the single song you've chosen.

1. Build a playlist

Choose File > New Playlist or click the + at the bottom-left of iTunes' window to create a playlist. Name it and press Return. Click Music in the left pane and drag songs from your library onto the playlist's name. Hold Command to select multiple tracks to add in one drag.

2. Change the order

Click your playlist. Tracks play in the order they were added. Drag them up and down the list to change that. Click the second icon at the bottom-left to turn on shuffle. The third repeats the playlist or song indefinitely. Playlists individually retain these settings.

3. Get smart

Smart Playlists have a cog to the left of their name in the left pane. Hold Ctrl and click one of the pre-defined ones that comes with iTunes and choose Edit Smart Playlist. From the same menu, use Duplicate to adapt an existing Smart Playlist.

4. Make the rules

Choose File > New Smart Playlist to start from scratch. Click the + button to add rules to be additionally matched. Hold Option and the + will change to '…', which adds a group of conditions. You can set it to match any of the rules within.

5. Tidy up

File > New Playlist Folder organises playlists. Drag a playlist onto a folder to put it inside. Folders can contain other folders. To move a playlist to the top level, drag it over a playlist at that level, then left of its icon. Let go when the blue highlight disappears.

6. Speedy creation

Make sure Genius is on and up to date (Store > Update Genius). Next, hold down Ctrl and click a song in your library. Choose Start Genius to create a Genius Playlist. At the top-right, you can choose how many tracks it contains.

7. Saving genius

Press Save Playlist at the top-right so you can revisit this playlist later. A Genius Playlist remains the same until you select one and press Refresh at the top-right. To avoid losing content, press Command+A to select and choose File > New Playlist from Selection.

8. Listen on the go

Playlists can help transfer music to an iPod or iOS device if it can't hold everything. Connect your device, select it on the left, then click Music at the top of the right pane. Under Playlists, put a tick next to any playlists you want to take with you.

NAS (network attached storage) devices certainly aren't the most glamorous gadgets you can have in your home. A network-connected hard drive might seem like a remnant from a home office – a backup necessity for over-paranoid users and not much more.

Early NAS devices – and even some new no-frills budget ones – do little more than allow any computer that's connected to a network to access an external hard drive as if it was physically installed in the computer. However, a lot of new NAS devices have some great features built in, which can completely transform what your home network is capable of.

Not only can they act as media servers throughout your house – letting your devices access and stream music and videos to any device on the network – they can also be used be used to stream your media across the internet, letting you access the files from anywhere in the world, and effectively allowing you to create your own version of Spotify or Netflix.

As for cloud backup and synchronisation services, while you could pay Dropbox the equivalent of $9.99 a month for 50GB of space, with a NAS device you could have your own service with huge amounts of storage (some NAS devices accept hard drives of up to 3TB) without monthly fees or the need to trust your private data to a third party. We've gathered the best NAS devices on the market to find out just what they are capable of.

Buffalo Cloudstation Duo - £240
www.buffalotech.com

Western Digital My Book Live - £147
www.wdc.com

Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 - £423
www.netgear.co.uk

Buffalo Linkstation Pro LS-VL - £129
www.buffalotech.com

D-Link ShareCenter - £60
www.dlink.com

Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 - £274
www.iomega.com

Netgear Stora MS2110 - £130
www.netgear.co.uk

Synology DS411 - £485
www.synology.com

There remains a lingering feeling that setting up a network attached storage device can be complicated, time consuming and fiddly. Buffalo aims to dispel these preconceptions with the Cloudstation Duo, a NAS kit designed to be as user friendly as possible without losing any features or functionality.

The device itself is compact, though quite heavy. Flicking open the front gives quick access to the two 1TB hard drives that come installed. Removing the drives is a bit fiddly at first, but the process is certainly a lot easier than with many other NAS drives.

The fact that the Buffalo Cloudstation Duo is supplied with two large hard drives already installed and set up in a RAID 1 configuration is great, and eliminates a more fiddly and complicated part of the setup procedure.

Read the full Buffalo Cloudstation Duo review

When it comes to hard drives, Western Digital knows its stuff. While the Buffalo Cloudstation Duo is promoted for its ease of use, the Western Digital My Book Live goes even further in its pursuit of simplicity.

For a start, the small case is completely enclosed, so there is no easy way to open the My Book Live up and replace or upgrade the hard drive as you can with the Buffalo Cloudstation Duo. This means that it's not really suitable as a comprehensive backup device – the lack of hot swappable hard drives means you'd have to physically remove the entire thing if you wanted to store your data safely off site.

The 'My' in the title is evidence that this is a NAS device that focuses on creating your own personal cloud, sharing your own media and files across the internet with as little fuss as possible.

Read the full Digital My Book Live review

NAS devices are a speedy, convenient means of backing up data, and units like the ReadyNAS Ultra 4 featured here are also capable of streaming any multimedia files to any device that can accept them.

Each of the ReadyNAS Ultra 4's bays can accommodate a 2TB drive, resulting in a possible 8TB of storage – that's an awful lot of video, photos and music.

The Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 supports various implementations of RAID technology, which trades off available capacity against protection for your data. If one of the drives fails, you should be able to recover your files.

Features like RAIDar and X-RAID 2 help you make the most of this handy feature. Powered by a dual-core 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, it's speedy and responsive. The onboard DLNA 1.5 media server worked well with a variety of networked players. Even multiple full HD video streams were glitch-free.

Read the full Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 review

Devices like these are becoming the tool of choice for storing a wide range of digital media, including downloaded movies and TV, music, images and CD/DVD/Blu-ray rips. Speed, capacity and reliability are all essential features, and the Linkstation Pro LS-VL has all three.

This 'Multimedia Shared Network Storage BitTorrent Download Box', ships with a power supply, LAN cable and installation discs, and is available with built-in SATA hard drives in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB sizes. Windows and Mac OS X compatible, the unit is simply plugged into any network Ethernet port or into the back of your wireless router, and is instantly accessible from any networked device.

The device features transfer speeds up to 76MB/s courtesy of a 1.6GHz CPU, which is a big increase from Buffalo's more home user-orientated Cloudstation Duo.

Read the full Buffalo LinkStation Pro LS-VL review

D-Link has designed its NAS device to be at the centre of your home network, sharing your files and media throughout your home and over the internet – an admirable aim. The installation process is fairly straightforward, though there are a few options that you need to set yourself, and these can be confusing if you're not used to setting up network attached storage devices.

For example, at one point you're asked if you want to enable NTP server, without any explanation of what this is. There's also a step that asks you to enter your email address, along with port number and SMTP server – a pain if you don't have that information readily to hand.

The network drive wasn't mapped during installation – instead we had to run the D-Link Easy Search Utility, which found the D-Link ShareCenter on our network and then let us map it.

As with other aspects of the ShareCenter, the execution was rather cumbersome and inelegant, but it worked.

Read the full D-Link ShareCenter review

This 2TB NAS drive is billed as cloud storage, which means you can access the drive from anywhere with an internet connection. It's nothing hugely new, but Iomega has provided a good web interface for accessing your stored data online.

Unlike some of the other drives in our test, we had to install software to make it appear on our network. Fortunately, the software is well designed and your hand is held firmly through the process, making it ideal for people who have never used a NAS drive before.

From here, every feature of the drive is clearly explained with colourful bold icons, and essential tasks – such as setting up backups – are highlighted.

There's a range of useful tools too, from email updates to let you know if anything's changed on the drive itself, to the rather useful ability to download torrent files. You can also view hardware statistics, such as how full the drive is, and its current temperature. It's ideally suited to a RAID setup, too, and this can be implemented quickly and easily.

Read the full Iomega's StorCenter ix2-200 review

We had high hopes for Netgear's NAS drive – after all, Netgear's home networking solutions have often trumped the competition in tests like these. However, we found ourselves sorely let down.

As soon as we connected the drive, all other computers on the network lost the ability to connect. It turned out that the drive had been completely locked down to the previous user, forcing us to do a complete hardware reset. That's not hugely unusual, but we're not sure why Netgear insists on you entering a software-style product key for something that's unlikely to ever leave your home or office.

Although the drive is hefty, the build quality is below par. The front panel – which clicks off to access the hard drives – sprang off in our hands. In fact, merely placing it on the floor caused the panel to flop open. Fortunately, the drives inside feel nicely secure, with a latch at the back to eject them.

Read the full Netgear's Stora MS2110 review

The DiskStation feels like it's stuck between being a consumer-friendly NAS drive and a rack-mounted server. It's supplied without any hard drives, and looks like a small PC, complete with thumbscrews at the back and an array of lights at the front.

Synology recommends certain drives for the product, which are formatted on insertion. This isn't an easy process, especially compared to the more user-friendly drives we've looked at.

Hard drives must be mounted and formatted with Synology's software, and then the NAS drive itself has to be configured via a small patch located on the CD. Then any folders you want on the drive need to be added manually. These all seem like features that would be automated on other NAS drives.

Read the full Synology DS411 review

This group test proved to be a perfect microcosm of the current state of the NAS market. On one hand you have devices that stick to the old ways of doing things – heaps of functionality, but with little thought of user-friendliness. The main culprits here are the Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4, the D-Link ShareCenter and the Synology DS411.

On the other side of the divide are the devices whose manufacturers have acknowledged that there is a growing market for centralised storage in the home, and have tailored their devices to offer easy to use interfaces for creating our very own personal clouds without a single network administrator in sight.

We believe that these devices that will excel in the future, when more homes are equipped with internet enabled devices like smart TVs, leaving the backwards-looking NAS devices in their wake.

The StorCenter ix2-200 encapsulates everything we were looking for in a NAS device. Its advanced features are wrapped up in a user friendly package that's easy to set up and maintain. It isn't as fast as a professional NAS, but for the internet connected home, this is a great choice.

It's not quite the cheapest NAS device on test here, but the Western Digital My Book Live wins the best value award because it has some great features, is reliable and is easy to use. If you want a relatively cheap NAS device that you can quickly set up and then just leave it to do its job without you having to check on it and tinker every now and then, go for this.

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