A little under a year ago, a started named Nest Labs announced its first product, a high-tech thermostat which learns from your usage, nudges you to conserve energy and can be remote-controlled from a smartphone, tablet or web …
Gadgets
Motorola Sees Room for Smaller, High-End Smartphones
With the exception of Apple’s iPhone, the smartphone market has been dominated lately by the idea that bigger is better. If you want a top-of-the-line Android smartphone, you’re practically forced to have a screen that measures …
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Sony’s Super-Slim PlayStation 3: One Step Forward, One Step Back
Last week Sony released a surprise three-quel PlayStation 3 — an even slimmer, lighter rendition of its six-year-old games console. It then dropped that into a new bundle, raised the price by $20 and declared it “the ultimate …
Pono: Can High-Quality Audio Sell Neil Young’s Portable Music Player?
Having conquered rock and roll, Neil Young is setting his sights on consumer electronics with Pono, a portable music player and accompanying high-quality audio service coming next year.
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Review: The Screen Makes It the Best E-Reader Yet
We live in the era of gadgets that want to do it all. The typical smartphone of 2012, for instance, isn’t content to just be a phone. It also wishes to be a PC, a still camera, a camcorder, a music player, a gaming console, a …
Madefire’s Digital Comics Come to the iPhone
Among many other things, the iPad is one of the best ways ever devised to read comics. And one of the more interesting ways to read them on an iPad is with Madefire, an app which lets you download “motion books” — serialized …
Needed for Google’s Next Nexus 7 Tablet: More Storage
Now that Amazon and Barnes & Noble have announced their latest cheap tablets, it’s become clear that Google’s own offering, the Nexus 7, has a storage problem.
The $200 Nexus 7, which launched in July, comes with just 8 GB of …
Google Discounting Popular Apps to 25 Cents over the Next Five Days
Google Play – formerly known as the Android Market — has passed 25 billion app downloads. A large majority of those were from me, I admit. I get so frustrated playing Angry Birds that I uninstall it and swear I’ll never play …
Barnes & Noble’s New Nooks: The Cheap Tablet Wars Continue
In the short history of post-iPad tablets, the holiday 2012 season is shaping up as an important moment — the first time that there will be a bunch of decent low-priced models to choose from. You’ve got your Google Nexus 7. Your …
BlackBerry 10: Good Enough Won’t Be Anywhere Near Good Enough
So help me, I want to be excited about BlackBerry 10, the all-new operating system powering the BlackBerry handsets which are now supposed to show up in the first quarter of 2013.
I was keeping an open mind about it almost a …
Finally, You Can Buy Your Very Own Zoltar Machine for $9,000
I won’t pretend that this is the first Zoltar machine to ever be made available for purchase and subsequent private enjoyment inside a single-family home. These things were probably flying off the shelves back in 1988.
But …