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Welcome to our annual New Smartphone Set Up Guide. Someone thought enough of you to help replace that dumb ol’ brick you’ve been lugging around these past few years. Now what? Out of the box, most smartphones aren’t all that smart. In fact, many can be downright idiotic. Prepping your new pocket ‘puter means some Continue Reading →

Google Search is changing rapidly. Given the company’s love of small, rapid-fire updates, its sometimes hard to keep track of where the company is going, but earlier this month, at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Google Engineering Director Scott Huffman presented a pretty compelling overview of the direction Google is taking in search. Here’s the Continue Reading →

Crowds gathered at a NASCAR racetrack in Miami this weekend to witness a more sedate sport than usual, as some of the world’s most advanced legged robots inched their way through a range of emergency tasks, including clambering over rubble, clearing debris, and operating a fire hose. And two of the robot-makers acquired recently by Continue Reading →

Certain animal species experience a phenomenon called imprinting; for example, upon coming out of their eggs, ducklings will follow and become attached to the first moving object that they encounter. Imprinting is a powerful combination of instinctive behavior and environmental influences. In humans, psychologists refer to this as bonding. In common every day experiences, you Continue Reading →

While smartwatches have already managed to have a profound impact on some users, they have largely been something of a disappointment thus far. And to be frank, Samsung’s Galaxy Gear might be the worst among them, at least where big-brand offerings are concerned. In our review we said that the device itself was probably among Continue Reading →

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. on Saturday put in place daily limits on use for debit-card holders who shopped at Target stores during a 20-day security breach, a move showing how banks may try to contain their exposure to the massive data theft. In a letter to debit card holders posted on its website, Chase Continue Reading →

2013 was the year of the selfie, according to the Oxford English Dictionary — but self-snaps aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Everybody is taking selfies, from President Obama to astronaut Aki Hoshide. With the proliferation of smartphones with front-facing cameras, selfies have become mainstream. And with apps like Snapchat and Instagram that encourage people to Continue Reading →

Japan-based SoftBank Corp is in final stages of talks with T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom about acquiring the U.S.-based wireless carrier, the Nikkei news service reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous sources. SoftBank, which purchased 80 percent of Sprint earlier this year, wants to pay for T-Mobile using shares of Sprint as early as next spring Continue Reading →

I love year-end lists! It’s my favorite thing about turning over the calendar. Here are my picks for the best iOS games on iPhone and iPad of 2013. Ridiculous Fishing ($2.99 for both the iPhone and iPad version) Ridiculous Fishing is my vote for Best iOS Game of the Year. A ridiculously (no pun intended?) simple Continue Reading →

Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry over the past year: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. As a result, people’s consumption of mobile data nearly doubled. In the United States, consumers used an average of 1.2 gigabytes a month over cellular networks this year, up from 690 megabytes a Continue Reading →