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Whether they consider it bling or just a tool, people typically buy phones based on features and carrier plans. But if you're looking to add benign environmental and societal impact to your feature wish list, GoodGuide has got the data.

GoodGuide launched on Thursday cell phone ratings that rank individual models and manufacturers on health, environment, and social attributes. The new category joins others already on the site, including cleaning products, food items, personal care products, and home appliances.

The ratings cover 576 phones and are based on publicly available information, said Chief Scientist Bill Pease. Altogether, 150 factors … Read more

Happy Chinese Lunar New Year! According to the lunisolar calendar, this year's animal zodiac celebrates the rabbit, the fourth animal in the 12-year cycle. Jeff can't get enough talk about Chinese cultural traditions, although this day of celebration is a little bittersweet for me thanks to a present I received today from Amazon.com.

Rabbit Mothers aside, Verizon subscribers and AT&T haters are celebrating today for the release of the Verizon iPhone. Early reviews are already in, and it turns out the Verizon iPhone is indeed...a phone; which is more than we can say for the AT&T version.

CNET's cell phone expert Kent German already ran anecdotal testing to compare the data and call quality of the Verizon handset, and Big Red's version definitely has the advantage in almost all of the trouble-prone test sites in San Francisco. Keep in mind that this may change depending on your location, but if you were waiting to see if Verizon would deliver on its promise for better service, it did.

Like a good Apple fanboy, Wilson already has a digital copy of News Corp.'s experiment iPad-only newspaper, The Daily. He played around with it for a little while before the show, and even though he refuses to say anything bad about it on the recorded segment, I'll throw him under the bus to tell you that he wasn't entirely happy about the loading speed of the category carousel on the front page. We're also wary of a daily newspaper that updates itself at noon every day...is this today's news tomorrow?

We can't say anything too incendiary about The Daily since we live in fear of Peter Ha, a friend of the show who's also the tech editor for the good afternoon paper. He's booked to guest host tomorrow's episode of The 404, so we'll wait to grill him on it then.

Google also gave its Android Marketplace a makeover yesterday, and although it's been criticized in the past for being too difficult to install and pay for apps, the company hopes to change that with a new interface that allows users to access the store with their Google IDs. You can search for apps on desktops or laptop computers, and the apps will automatically download and install on your Android phone.

The new Android Market will also allow in-app purchasing, so you can add levels to games and other enhancements to existing apps over Twitter to all your friends. Check it out at http://market.android.com.

Mubakalar finally approves of a few voice mails that we listen to after the break, so keep them coming! The phone number to call is 1-866-404-CNET.

Finally, if you're looking to back up your data so this doesn't happen to you, consider today's Deal of the Day, brought to you by Kodak.

It's the Western Digital 1TB Portable USB Hard Drive for $99.95 from B&H Photo and Video. The drive is portable, easy to use with any USB 2.0 port, and is made from recycled materials to decrease your digital footprint on the environment. Enjoy!

Apple has said many times that the iPhone and iPad are gaining popularity with enterprise-level businesses. We've heard most recently that the iPad is either being used or tested for use at "more than 80 percent" of Fortune 100 companies, according to Apple COO Tim Cook. Today, a company that makes enterprise software is providing additional evidence that corporate customers are warming to the iPad, with details on which industries are embracing it already.

Good Technology makes enterprise software for mobile devices (Good For Enterprise), and over the last year has been tracking which devices its clients … Read more

It's the kind of skill normally picked up only on the street, but Machine Project, a nonprofit community space in Los Angeles, held a workshop covering the basics of lock mechanics.

"The Good Kids' Guide to Being a Bit Bad: Cars Edition" taught a group of children, aged 7 and up, the ins and outs of breaking into and hot-wiring cars. Instructors and writers Tom Jennings and Jason Torchinsky introduced the pint-sized students to the tools of this illicit trade, such as putty knives and coat hangers, and explained how they can be used to trigger locks … Read more

Music is all around us, it's just that very few people actually listen to it. Sure, you have music in your car, iPod, or computer, but is the music just a soundtrack to other activities? If music, a la carte, can't hold your attention from time to time you're definitely not an audiophile. Worse yet, you're missing a lot.

Think about it: the people who made the music sweated the details, agonized over the sound, the mix, and the performance for weeks or months. The composer tweaked the work to the nth degree, and still, very, … Read more

Web sites hawking pirated software and other digital goods are luring in about 53 billion visits each year.

That's according to a report (PDF) released yesterday by MarkMonitor, a company that protects online brands for its corporate customers.

Piracy sites made up the majority of the 53 billion visits, while those selling counterfeit goods such as fake prescription drugs and luxury items accounted for a considerably smaller amount of traffic: about 92 million visits a year.

MarkMonitor identified 43 sites as engaging in digital piracy. Among them, three sites--Rapidshare.com, Megavideo.com, and Megaupload.com--accounted for about 21 billion … Read more

Digital audio won the popularity contest years ago, and nowadays almost every sound you hear coming out of a speaker is digitally encoded. Sound is always digital, whether it's on your phone, computer, radio, TV, home theater, or in a concert hall. I'd go so far as to say most people never hear analog recordings anymore. Unless you're a musician, or live with one, virtually all the music you hear live or recorded is digital.

Digital audio eliminated all of analog audio's distortions and noise-related problems. In that sense digital is "perfect." When analog … Read more

Music was forever changed in 1983. Up to that year we had lived in a digital-audio-free world, where musicians and the music industry flourished in a state of pure analog bliss. Vast numbers of people actually listened to music--without doing anything else--on a regular basis.

An analog recording corresponds the variations in air pressure of the original sound. A digital recording is a series of numbers that correspond to the sound's continuous variations, but the numbers have to be reconverted to analog signals before they can be listened to. No wonder analog and digital sound so different from each … Read more

eBay has won the latest and seemingly last round in a lawsuit filed by jewelery maker Tiffany over alleged trademark infringement.

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday refused to hear an appeal filed by Tiffany over a 2008 court decision that found in favor of eBay in a trademark infringement lawsuit.

Initially filed in 2004, the suit from Tiffany alleged that eBay should be held liable for any trademark infringement from the sale of phony goods on the auction site. But in a July 2008 ruling, a U.S. District Court found that trademark law could not be used to … Read more