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OK, I'll admit it. The iPad Mini hasn't left my hands in the last three weeks. It's been no contest, really. While the larger fourth-gen iPad has sat alone by my bedside table, the Mini has gone on field trips on the bus, gotten dragged in my jacket pocket while I dropped my kid off at school, been coddled at the cafe over breakfast, and slipped alongside my laptop on work excursions.

As I predicted when I reviewed it, the Mini's had a hard time leaving my hands, because few places seem inappropriate for it. At a Kindle size, it's bedroom-friendly. It'll set up nicely on a kitchen counter. It slides into otherwise lesser-used front pockets on backpacks. And it might be the best gaming handheld Apple's ever made, based on the sheer size of the screen and its thin, two-hand-friendly frame.

But, what does that mean?… Read more

Apple's iPad Mini event was received by onlookers with mixed reviews, so has the company lost its edge? We'll break down everything Apple didn't tell you at the iPad Mini keynote presentation.

There were plenty of exciting hardware releases, including all-new iMacs, Mac Minis, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display, but it was the updated, fourth-generation iPad that caused the most controversy. Just seven months after the "new iPad," we're getting another? I'm throwing out the Bad Apple.

Did Apple reignite your passion for technology with its latest keynote address? Or … Read more

Here's one way to recover from Apple's lightning-speed product cycle -- trade in your now "obsolete" third-gen iPad for some cash.

Trade-in site NextWorth said it saw a 1,015 percent increase in iPad trade-ins yesterday after Apple's announcement of a new iPad. The company didn't say how many total iPads that jump amounts to, but it wouldn't be a surprise if a lot of burned Apple owners ran to a trade-in site following the news. The new device comes just seven months after the third-generation device's release.

A similar spurt of activity happened on another swap site, Gazelle.com, and the company said trade-ins jumped 700 percent today, a 450 percent increase from yesterday when the Apple news hit. At Gazelle, 70 percent of the trade-ins were for third-generation iPads. … Read more

I told you the new dock connector change was awful.

Apple unexpectedly unveiled a new fourth-generation iPad today, just six months after the birth of the cheekily dubbed "new iPad." That's the shortest planned obsolescence window I've ever seen from Apple, and CNET's Roger Cheng is not alone in feeling burned at spending $500 (or more) on a gadget that's just been significantly upgraded at the same price.

Make no mistake, though -- the suddenness of the iPad update has nothing to do with the faster A6X processor, expanded LTE support, and 10-hour battery … Read more

Thanks mostly to Asus, keyboards and tablets are kind of a thing. It started with the first Transformer, continued with the Slider, and Asus hasn't really looked back since then. And why should it? The Transformer line has been very good to the company, even if the actual keyboard costs up to $150 extra (in addition to the tablet). The Slider isn't as popular, and its prices start at nearly $500.

So there's definitely room for a cheaper Android tablet/keyboard combo. Enter Archos. In November the company will launch its 101 XS, a $400, 10.1-inch … Read more

Archos has officially announced their latest venture into the Android tablet market with the Gen10 XS series. The line consists of three tablets starting with the Archos 101XS. The 10.1-inch tablet is set to be released in North America in November with a $399.99 price tag.

The lineup also includes the Archos 97 XS and Archos 80 XS tablets which will be released in late 2012, although no pricing information has been announced. The Gen10 XS tablet line will sport 1.5 GHz smart multicore processors and 1GB of RAM.

The tablets come with Android 4.0 and … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- Over the past two decades, hackers at Defcon and the feds have been circling each other suspiciously. The nation's top "spook" -- National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander -- giving a keynote at the hacker confab, shows just how much tensions have mellowed.

"I've spent 20 years trying to get someone from the NSA" to speak at Defcon, said Defcon founder Jeff Moss, who serves on the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council and is chief security officer for ICANN. "It's eye-opening to see the world from their … Read more

Interest in big data continues to grow in terms of both downloads of connectors to software packages and in software infrastructure to power big data, primarily in the form of NoSQL databases and Hadoop-related extensions, according to a report.

The report, released today to coincide with the Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., comes via open-source business intelligence provider Jaspersoft. The second-quarter report measures demand for popular data sources for storing, analyzing, and visualizing big data and uses stats from the JasperForge community site.

Key findings:

Help me, please. I'm waiting for the future to arrive.

I feared a lull at this year's E3 before I even got on the plane. Games pushed back, executives claiming no new hardware. "No new hardware" is a mantra I've heard a lot lately, from colleagues as well as from industry insiders. Even from gamers, who certainly don't like the idea of spending up for a new console.

Well...we need next-gen. And it's bound to arrive. But when? Please say soon. I've been patient. … Read more