Here are some words I never thought I'd be writing again: There's a new phone from BlackBerry that you might be interested in. This time, it's called the KEYone.It's not that I'm biased against BlackBerry. I strapped the first one to my hip when it came out in the early 2000s, before smartphones were invented and the only other way to get your email when you were away from your computer was on a two-way pager. (Kids, gather 'round. Gramps is telling his stories again...)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Innovative apparelImage by Keoni Cabral / FlickrTime was, you could slap a couple of sensors and a battery into a plastic wristband, layer some software around it, tell the world you were in the wearables business, and watch the money roll in. Those days are long gone (although there are still the inevitable bottom feeders fighting for scraps). Now, wearables are actually doing useful and interesting things, with lots of innovation on display.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In some ways, the smartphone business resembles the movie business. The general public knows more about the major releases from big companies because that's what the companies push and the media writes about. But in both the phone and movie industries, there are hundreds of smaller releases targeted at very specific markets -- and if you're not in those markets, you may never hear about them.As a result, the majority of smartphone reviews you'll read about are for top-of-the-line flagship phones selling for roughly $800. It's a little unusual for a manufacturer to make a big deal about phones in the second or third tier of the market. Yet that's just what Huawei is doing with the Mate 9 and Honor 6X, two phones that represent good-to-excellent value but would otherwise not set the world on fire.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google Home, the company's new voice-controlled interface to the internet, is hardly the first to appear on the consumer market. But it may be the best -- although "best" may not yet be good enough.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The new Moto Z phones are pretty remarkable for some innovative things they can do -- and for something important they left out.
Motorola is one of the oldest brands in electronics. The company invented car radios (hence "Motor-ola") and was the first company to build cell phone infrastructure and the phones themselves. In the early days, Motorola's phones were flat out the best you could get. Over the years, the company lost its way, with the exception of a few pretty good phones in the last couple of years. Now, after several ownership changes, Moto is part of Lenovo.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you've reviewed tech products for as long as I have, you'll have learned that categories of products have archetypes. These days, for example, laptops are (for the most part) slim black boxes and monitors are thin glass rectangles. Mobile phones, which used to have clamshell designs, are now all metal (or metal-looking) slabs with a glass front. And home wireless routers tend to be small black boxes bristling with more antennas than an NSA surveillance van.The Starry Station wireless router breaks the mold. A white polycarbonate-over-metal triangular prism with a base measuring 7 x 3 in. and standing 6.25 in. high, it has a 3.8-in. LCD touchscreen you can use to see and control the device's operational status. The device retails for $350 (Amazon price - What's this?).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dan Rosenbaum