News Blogs

"I have two 360s and a PS3. I need to be able to walk into a room and just... go."

That's Mrs. Violence, the 23-year-old who just scored $25,000 in The Controller, a taxing Battlefield 3-inspired competition put on by CNET sister site GameSpot.

There's just one catch: for much of the contest, she couldn't actually play the game.

Throughout the eight-episode contest, which began on October 21, Mrs. Violence and five other prominent gamers were paired with video game noobs playing Battlefield 3 for the first time.

While the pros coached their apprentices in preparation for tournaments, Mrs. Violence and her fellow gamers endured grueling physical challenges inspired by the game, such as crawling through mud, participating in mock firefights, and taking a crash course in bomb disposal. It wasn't until the last episode that Kelley got her hands on a controller, destroyed her final opponent, and split $50,000 with her noob counterpart, Severn.

Not surprising for the San Diego native, who averages 10 hours of gameplay per day and has competed in many gaming competitions, including MLG (Major League Gaming) and WCG (World Cyber Games). She's also the top female Gears of War player and mingles at the top of the MLG charts.

Growing up in a house full of male gamers, Kelley was naturally turned on to the world of hard-core gaming--hence her name, Mrs. Violence. She can't get enough, and she'll admit: she's pretty damn good.… Read more

The successor to the full-frame Nikon D700 and Canon's follow-on to the EOS 5D Mark II were widely expected to put in an appearance of some sort during 2011. They didn't.

It appears as if the D800 will be a 36-megapixel camera that will launch in early 2012. What Canon's prosumer follow-on (5D Mark III?) will look like and when it will debut is anyone's guess. The combination of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami and Thailand flood tragedies contributed to significant delays throughout the photographic industry.

Other cameras were announced but are still not widely available, apparently … Read more

Jawbone has halted production of Up, its fitness wristband over battery issues and has offered customers full refunds, regardless of whether they've encountered problems.

And the company is even allowing customers to keep their devices if they receive a refund. In essence, customers could tap the refund program to offset the cost of the device, even if their Up has no issues.

"I think most people will do what's right," said Travis Bogard, vice president of product management at Jawbone.

The Up, which garnered much attention at its launch a month ago, is a wristband that … Read more

The iPad may be the world's dominant tablet, but Android devices--especially Amazon's Kindle Fire--are finally making the tablet race a little more interesting.

Now, Windows 8 tablets are limping slowly toward the starting line. Will they have an impact?… Read more

Social networking and a bit of amateur sleuthing have reunited a Canadian firefighter with the camera he accidentally dropped to the bottom of the sea during a family vacation more than a year ago.

Stephen Wood was sure he'd said a final goodbye to his Canon EOS Rebel when it slipped from his hands into the Deep Bay off the east coast of Vancouver Island last summer.

"We figured the camera and the pictures were gone. We didn't even bother trying to retrieve it," Wood told CNET today. "It was on when it went in the water, and [it was] salt water, and at high tide, I think it's roughly about 60 feet deep there. It was also like 9 o'clock at night so it was dark." Not to mention that Wood and his wife had a baby in tow.

Conditions, in other words, were hardly ideal for a gadget-retrieval operation, so Wood accepted that he'd seen the last of the cam he'd received as a wedding gift from his firefighter pals. … Read more

A story on CNET's top tech turkeys rounded up the 2011 technology equivalents of dropping a Thanksgiving turkey on the floor right in front of a slobbering mastiff while your in-laws look on in horror.

We've had some spectacular tech fails this year ranging from the mildly disappointing (what, no iPhone 5?) to the epic (Sony PlayStation Network hack).

Hundreds of thousands of subscribers jumped ship from Netflix after it flailed around with big price increases and the stunningly ill-thought-out Qwikster spin-off. Now Netflix's stock is taking a nosedive.

RIM got red in the face after a multiday outage of the BlackBerry network that impacted customers around the world. That didn't help the company's reputation after RIM's quiet year on the hardware front.… Read more

Want free two-day shipping on Amazon but don't want to pay for it? Well, if you know the right person, you don't have to.

That's right, last year around the holidays I offered up a little Amazon Prime tip for folks planning to do a lot of last-minute online shopping on Amazon.com. Now, with the holidays approaching again and a lot of people interested in the Kindle Fire, I thought I should update the story with some additional info.

Here's the deal. If you own or are considering purchasing an Amazon Prime membership ($79 for … Read more

Three remodeled Sony Stores are popping up soon, in California, New York, and Texas.

Consumers can check out the transformed Sony retail experience on December 3 at the South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, Calif., the Houston Galleria in Texas, and the Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, N.Y.

When Sony quietly dropped the name SonyStyle this year, it was merely the beginning of a major shift in retail strategy for the consumer-electronics giant. Things shifted even further when Sony shut down more than a dozen of its retail stores in the U.S. amid a painful fiscal year. There was hope within the company that a new Sony store design would reinvigorate the consumer experience, which has fallen to the wayside as rival Apple continues to build a juggernaut retail phenomenon. … Read more

I know there are many people whose eyelids are fluttering at the prospect of the new Google Galaxy Nexus phone.

There are slightly more people, though, who will never have heard of it.

Which means if you're going to produce an ad that says, roughly: "Hullo, this is the new, frightfully exciting, earth-shuddering phone from your Google buddies," then perhaps that ad should project your thought.

Instead, we are offered something that might well have been for a school, a retreat, or a local Green Party candidate.

It has pretty, caring young people enjoying their lives to … Read more