Recommended Reads on the Mobile Beat This Week

Experts Still Think uBeam’s Through-the-Air Charging Tech Is Unlikely
A piece in IEEE Spectrum lays out why experts remain skeptical of startup uBeam, which claims it will be able to wirelessly charge your phone and other gadgets over the air via ultrasound.

YouTube Music Isn’t Perfect But It’s Still Heaven for Music Nerds
YouTube brought its music service out of “beta” this week, and the service is a great way to explore all kinds of music content–live performances, covers, etc–related to music videos you’re watching, according to this review from Engadget

Fossil’s $260 Million Purchase of Misfit Will Kick off Wearable Consolidation
This short post from ZDNet makes a few interesting points about the decision of watch company Fossil to purchase Misfit Wearables, maker of the Shine activity tracker, in a deal announced Thursday. Among them: that this is likely just the first in a wave of such acquisitions as there are a lot of activity-tracker companies and many watches will eventually incorporate such technology.

Publishers Are Underwhelmed with Apple News App
This piece in Digiday reports that publishers are upset about Apple’s news aggregation app, Apple News, which was released in September along with the newest version of Apple’s mobile operating system. Their complaints, apparently, range from “underwhelming” traffic to user data that publishers don’t think is detailed enough.

Gay Talese Has a Cold Reaction to The New York Times Virtual Reality App
This piece from Quartz is a fun one–the reporter showed veteran journalist and author (and, currently, octogenarian) Gay Talese the New York Times’ new virtual-reality app running on Google Cardboard, and Talese wasn’t really into it.