consumer electronics

consumer electronics - News, Features, and Slideshows

Features

  • 8pen: Android keyboard app tries something new

    There are apps that I don't want to like, but do. Then there are apps I do want to like, but don't. The 8pen keyboard, unfortunately, belongs in this latter category. I'm a big fan of innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, but the developer needs to go back to the drawing board with this one.

  • Smartphone specs demystified

    Retailers use various marketing and technical terms to describe the smartphones they sell. Some of those terms represent meaningful phone characteristics, while others are mostly hype. To help smartphone shoppers understand what they're looking at, we offer definitions of the most commonly used specifications, and explain why they are important.

  • Smartphones in the enterprise: A changing landscape

    As recently as a year ago, many enterprises couldn't have imagined that the iPhone would now be second place in terms of security features that enterprises require, behind only the BlackBerry and ahead of Android and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7.

  • Cloud drives speech recognition forward for Microsoft

    For years, using voice recognition technology on phones or other devices has been a novelty -- something people try once but never again, usually because it works so poorly. But recent developments, including harnessing the computational power of the cloud, have made it more usable and will make it even better in the near future, according to Microsoft.

  • How Android phones will use Near-Field Communication

    The possibilities seemed endless when Google began hyping near-field communication for Android phones last month. Now, we've got some hard details on what the NFC capabilities in Android version 2.3, known as Gingerbread, will do in the near future.

  • What's in the Tech Crystal Ball For 2011?

    Market research firm IDC makes a number of tech-related predictions near the end of every calendar year, but its prognostications for 2011 may well be among the company's most dramatic yet.

  • Samsung Craft: Hands on the first LTE 4G phone

    It was pure coincidence that I happened to be in Las Vegas on the very day MetroPCS launched the country's first Long Term Evolution (LTE) services, so I took the opportunity to chase down and test-drive the Samsung Craft phone, MetroPCS's sole LTE device.

  • Galaxy Tab will soar on Android's key strengths

    As the details of Samsung's Galaxy Tab are gradually revealed, it's becoming increasingly clear that many of the tablet's most desirable features derive from its use of Android--or Linux, that is--which, after all, is the basis for Google's winning mobile operating system.

  • The wristwatch will rise again

    Conventional wisdom says people don't wear wristwatches anymore -- especially young people. The story goes that because we now have cell phones, we no longer need to lash anything to our wrists.

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