plus

If you love taking your music on the road but don't want to pay a premium for a portable Bluetooth speaker, wired speakers, such as the My Mini Plus from Nakamichi, are a great option. Sure, tiny speakers won't give the highest musical fidelity, but technological advancements have made speaker drivers, amplifiers, and rechargeable batteries small enough to fit into itty-bitty enclosures.

The My Mini Plus from Japanese lifestyle audio company Nakamichi is one of the more recent portable speakers, and is shaped in a perfect cube that measures about 2 inches all around. It also comes in a choice of eight colors and weighs a bit less than the Apple iPhone 4S. … Read more

Designed extra-tough for extreme conditions, Sprint's Kyocera DuraPlus will be available to consumers on March 11 for about $69.99 after you sign a two-year contract on Sprint's Direct Connect PTT network and send in for a $50 rebate.

As CNET's own Brian Bennett reported, the device is designed to meet the U.S. military's brutal survivability guidelines.

It can "withstand exposure to dust storms, shocks and vibrations, drenching rains, plus extreme swings of temperature." And don't worry if you accidentally drop this one in the pool--it can be submerged in up to … Read more

I used to have hundreds of DVDs. They lined an entire bookshelf. I knew I never watched many of them; besides, the future was digital, wasn't it? It was 2006. My iPod Video told me so.

I sold about half my discs to the departed Kim's Video up the street, and then--pressured a bit by my family needs and small apartment--I did the unthinkable: I tossed out the remaining boxes and stuffed the discs in a binder.

It felt like sacrilege for my treasured and somewhat hard-to-find discs--my Canadian version of Cronenberg's "eXistenZ" with a commentary track, my various out-of-print Criterion movies. I gambled that I'd never really play these discs many more times, what with Netflix instant streaming and iTunes movie rentals.

Mostly, I was right. Then came "Kiki's Delivery Service."… Read more

Maybe it's because I signed up for Google+ out of professional curiosity and have not returned to it after the first couple of weeks I signed up and made a few G+ friends and circles, but I have found little to no use for Google's new Search plus Your World feature. It delivers personal search results from the friends you follow on Google+ and Picasa. Thankfully, it's easy to remove these results for a particular search or disable the feature for all searches.… Read more

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

BARCELONA, Spain--Amid all the Samsung Galaxy devices shown so far at MWC, these three barely saw the spotlight, if at all.

Well, it's time to turn on the diva lights for the Samsung Galaxy S Advance, Samsung Galaxy Mini 2, and Samsung Ace Plus, even if for just a minute.

Although none of these phones is a flagship product (the Mini 2 is a downright simple Android starter phone,) they have their place in the mobile ecosystem.

Besides, it's always fun to see which phones are bound for other pastures.

Nvidia's Tegra 3 processor will be making an appearance on a host of mobile devices this year, and when that happens, it will no longer come with its clumsy architecture branding.

The chipmaker announced yesterday that it has ditched "variable symmetric multiprocessing," "companion core," and even "ninja core," to describe Tegra 3's architecture. Nvidia will now describe it as the "4-Plus-1" architecture.

"The reason is that, the more popular this technology became, the more our customers wanted a name for it that's unique and descriptive," Nvidia wrote … Read more

During CES 2012, the surprise appearance of OnLive Desktop was an intriguing idea for Windows lovers: rent a Windows 7 computer remotely and stream the whole experience to your iPad.

Helping the cause for the first iteration of OnLive Desktop was its price: free. That version had only 2GB of cloud storage, and the Windows 7 environment ran only a suite of Microsoft Office applications (sans Outlook), but for the cloud-curious and those who lack a word processor for their iPad, OnLive's streaming solution is a clever way to explore a mobile office.

OnLive was slated to release a Pro version with more dedicated servers, 50GB of storage, and access to an assortment of other applications, including a Flash-enabled browser, for $9.99 a month; that's hardly inexpensive, and likely to appeal largely to business executives with expense accounts. Today's launch of OnLive Desktop Plus is a surprise half-step: for $4.99 a month, users get the same 2GB of storage, but added access to that long-promised Flash browser; Microsoft Internet Explorer is included; and users also get Adobe PDF compatibility, and Dropbox support. … Read more

Parents buy products for their children on a daily basis, trusting the various companies to put out a safe product. But how do you know if a product is later found to be defective and has a recall? Not all recalls are broadcast on the nightly news, and going to the local store to view the message board of recalls isn't exactly convenient.

Enter Recalls Plus.

Recalls Plus allows parents to enter products, an age range, or allergens to monitor for recalls. The service will then alert you if there is a new recall pertaining to your specific product … Read more