Category: Cell Phones

So, you've decided to quit smoking. That's a great first step, but where do you go from here? Do you hurl your cache of Lucky Strikes into the incinerator? Call your local hypnotist? Or do you just blaze through an entire pack in one sitting, until even the faintest smell of tobacco sends you into a fit of dry heaves? We can't help you choose a path to carcinogenic emancipation, but we can tell ...

If you terminated your landline phone service recently, count yourself among a growing number of Americans transitioning to a purely mobile existence. According to a new Citi Investment Report from analyst Jason Bazinet, nearly 30-percent of all U.S. households have now disconnected their landlines -- up from 25-percent just one year ago. As Business Insider explains, the "wireless substitution" ...

Share Since March, at least, we've known that Facebook Places has been coming. We also knew that, despite its built-in audience, Facebook would have to offer more functionality than established location-based services like Foursquare if it hoped to succeed. Finally, after months of testing, Zuckerberg and crew have taken the cover off Places, and entered a brand new realm of usage. You'll be ...

Plastic surgeon Dr. Frank Ryan, the man who turned Heidi Montag into a tragicomedic freak of science, died in a car crash on Monday after driving his car off of a cliff in Malibu. And, according to one of Ryan's former flames, texting might be to blame. Charmaine Blake, Ryan's ex-girlfriend, recently revealed to People that the surgeon was tweeting about his border collie just before his fatal ...

Advertisers and retailers have been looking for new and unique ways to leverage the recent influx of GPS-enabled smartphones in attracting customers and gathering important information about their shopping behaviors. Foursquare introduced some new ideas, but retailers wanted to take it a step further. Enter Shopkick. The new app turns shopping (and violating your privacy) into a game that, ...

Share With the fall semester around the corner, eBay has launched a mobile app for its discount site Half.com, which scans barcodes to locate the best deals on textbooks and other back-to-school products. According to CNET News, users snap a picture of a barcode (say, that expensive Biology 101 textbook), and the free iPhone app scans it using RedLaser technology, then trolling Half.com's ...

Earlier this summer, Barnes & Noble slashed the price of its e-reader, and last month announced a Nook desktop app geared toward students. Now the big-box bookseller is re-branding and revamping the iPhone, iPad and PC versions of its Nook apps as part of the continuing e-reader war. According to Engadget, the formerly titled Barnes & Noble e-reader products now sport the 'Nook' brand ...

Engineers at the University of Washington are currently testing a new device that, if successful, could drastically alter the ways in which deaf and hearing-impaired people use cell phones to communicate. The tool, called MobileASL, uses compressed video signals and motion detection technology to discern American Sign Language, and then transmits images across cellular networks. So far, UW's team ...

It's no secret that the Android Market is considerably smaller than Apple's App Store, but this shouldn't get Android users down when searching for the Twitter app that will maximize their micro-blogging. There are more than enough high-quality Twitter apps available in the Market, and, as Android continues to grow, the offerings will only get better. Here's a list of some apps that let us tweet ...

Okay, so he's not exactly a violent mob boss, but the world has now learned a valuable lesson: don't cross Justin Bieber. While it's not quite breaking someone's legs, the floppy-haired, Segway-riding teen heartthrob decided to make one boy's life a living hell when he tweeted the kid's phone number to roughly 4.5 million followers. Allegedly, Kevin Kristopik hacked the account of one of ...

The luxury feature phone market is one that we'll truly never understand. It seems to us that slapping diamonds and gold on phones still stuck in 2004 is a waste of both money and raw materials. But our smug attitude isn't enough to stop companies like Gresso from pushing these suckers, adorned with some of the rarest goods on Earth, to status-craving moneybags. The $1 million Las Vegas Luxor ...

We've all lost a high-tech gadget or two to that most low-tech of the natural elements: water. (Or, in the recent case of this writer's laptop, coffee.) Always miles ahead of us stateside folk, who have alternately used hair dryers and bowls of quick rice to dry out our devices, the Japanese have implemented the Dryer Box, a sort of clothes dryer for drowned gadgets. The copy-machine-sized ...

Starting today, you'll be able tag where you've been (or where you will be going), update your friends on your travel plans, and actually purchase your tickets all in the same place -- as long as you plan to fly Delta. The airline has opened an online Ticket Window, which lets customers purchase tickets through Facebook. Delta is the first airline to offer such a service through the social ...

It was shockingly last minute, but Google decided to organize a little press conference today. On the menu were a pair of new features for Android that close a few of the remaining performance gaps between iOS and Google's mobile OS. Although there was no mention of video chat (as many speculated), and although we were denied a peak at the next generation of Android (dubbed Gingerbread), we did ...

The greasier among you take heed: your touchscreen cell phone may be vulnerable to smudge hacking. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania (.PDF) have found that, with a camera and some basic photo processing, they can map taps and swipes on a cell phone's screen, thanks to the thin layer of oil left behind when you hold the device to your face. With just a little increase in contrast and ...