test

Introducing a great new headphone resource: Inner Fidelity, created by audiophile and technician Tyll Hertsens. When I met Hertsens about 10 years ago he quickly became my prime source for information about headphones. Now with his new Web site, everyone has access to Hertsen's knowledge base.

He made a big splash with one of the site's first reviews, the Beats by Dr. Dre Solo headphones, and let's just say Hertsens didn't love them. You won't have to read between the lines to learn how Hertsens feels about a set of headphones. He also did a … Read more

There is no plane I feel safer in than a Boeing 747. Its sheer size and its apparent effortlessness offer something no other plane seems to manage: the ability for passengers to relax.

And they don't seem to drop out of the sky all that often either.

However, Boeing is introducing a new and more economical version of the jumbo jet, the 747-8. So, in order to test its capabilities and secure safety certification, Boeing conducted an experiment to see just how well the new plane could abort takeoff.

They loaded it with almost 1 million pounds of weight … Read more

Italian technology blog iSpazio has kicked off what is sure to be the first of many tests of the newest iPhone release from Apple--the white iPhone 4. The blog ran tests on the proximity sensor as well as the infamous attenuation problems suffered by the AT&T iPhone 4 and the Verizon iPhone 4.

The delay in the availability of the white iPhone 4 has been largely attributed to problems with the white paint. Specifically, the way the paint was interacting with Apple's new glass technology was causing problems with the proximity sensor and allowing light leakage when … Read more

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said today that the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf performed quite well in its first-ever crash tests on "mainstream" electric cars.

According to the IIHS, the Volt and Leaf earned the highest rating of "good" for front, side, rear, and rollover crashes. Both vehicles qualified for the organization's Top Safety Pick award, given to vehicles that deliver "state-of-the-art crash protection."

"The milestone demonstrates that automakers are using the same safety engineering in new electric cars as they do in gasoline-powered vehicles," the IIHS said in … Read more

Perhaps you, like me, enjoy a glass of wine. Especially if it's a larger glass, at least half full of good wine.

Perhaps you, riding on your usual wave of intelligence and sophistication, believe that you can always taste the difference between cheap wine that deserves a box or a hole in the ground, and expensive wine that deserves another year or two in a dimly lit cellar.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in England, believes the mathematical likelihood is that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Wiseman, you see, decided that … Read more

At CNET we've recently made some much-needed tweaks to our TV testing procedure for 2011, including the addition of complete calibration charts and a mostly new Geek Box with results of our measurements of TVs. The new review format debuted with the Samsung UND6400 review we posted earlier this week; scroll down to the bottom of this page for a peek.

A few of the new measurements we now publish include black level, primary color luminance level, and color of gray in very dark areas. The charts, courtesy of Spectracal's respected Calman 4.2 software, take it a step further, showing at-a-glance grayscale, color, and gamma information both before and after calibration.

Owners of the TV can try out our detailed picture settings, which we still publish with every review, if they want to get close to our calibration.

If you're interested in learning more, we've also updated our comprehensive How We Test document, which goes into plenty of detail about the tests and the logic behind them. And as always, we welcome your comments on TV testing and TV reviews in general.

Read the How We Test: TVs or check out the video below for more.… Read more

A Web performance company has concluded that a high-end Android smartphone, Samsung's Nexus S, is faster at Web browsing than an iPhone 4. Apple, though, says the company's methodology has a significant problem.

Blaze Software concluded after loading 45,000 Web pages from Fortune 1000 companies over 3G and Wi-Fi that the Android phone is faster than the iPhone. The test concluded the Nexus S was 52 percent faster on average, beating out the iPhone 84 percent of the time.

Nonsense, said Apple.

"Their testing is flawed. They didn't actually test the Safari browser on the … Read more

Editors' note: The video battery results for the Motorola Xoom were corrected from the original post. The original post contained results not in line with our final testing methodology. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

During the deluge of iPad 2 coverage last week, you may have missed CNET's handy tablets table. In it we gave an overview of the major non-Windows tablets already released and those soon-to-be released.

For the few tablets we actually have in the CNET Labs, we're able to go a bit more in depth with what each has to offer. … Read more

A second mysterious, robotic space plane was launched into orbit by the U.S. Air Force today, after the first craft safely returned to Earth late last year following a secretive months-long mission and speculation about its potential military or intelligence uses.

The second Boeing-built X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, or OTV, left Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 2:46 p.m. PT, atop an Atlas V rocket, Boeing said.

"History was made in December when the X-37B became the United States' first unmanned vehicle to return from space and land on its own," Craig Cooning, vice president and general … Read more