quality

I don't expect the Roomba to do windows, but it'd be nice if it did a little more around the house. Students at the Rhode Island School of Design have come up with a vac hack that expands the little robot vacuum cleaner's repertoire. They've tricked out a Roomba with an indoor air pollution sensor.

The hack promises to take one more household chore off your hands. Vacuum? Check. Track down sources of volatile organic compounds? Check.

Getting a Roomba to sniff out air pollution isn't much of a stretch. As the students note on their Roomba project page, the autonomous bots travel all around the rooms they're set loose in. Might as well have them assess air quality wherever they go.… Read more

You get what you pay for, or so the saying goes. In the case of SmoothDraw, that particular truism isn't so true. This free painting and drawing software delivers features and quality that we'd only expect to find in something we'd have to pay for, and we think that anyone who likes to create digital art should check it out.

The program's interface is intuitive, with toolbars down the left side and across the top. SmoothDraw comes with a wide variety of tools, including various pencils, pens, airbrushes, paintbrushes, hatch brushes and so on. There are … Read more

Netflix has unveiled a new feature that lets mobile users change their video quality as a way to manage how much bandwidth they use under their mobile data plans.

The feature, called simply "Manage Video Quality," is specifically aimed at 3G and 4G users concerned about bumping into the caps on their data plans.

Since March, the feature has been available universally in Canada, where the data caps tend to be lower. Over the past week or so, Netflix has rolled out the feature in the United States, but only on a limited test basis, so many members … Read more

Reports of the death of the CD have been greatly exaggerated. With sales hovering around 326 million units in the U.S. in 2010, the CD still generates a sizable hunk of income for the music business. You may not give a hoot about that, but if you care about sound quality, it still makes sense to buy a great-sounding CD player. I buy one or two CDs a week on average, and as I recently pointed out, it may be a very long time before iTunes or Amazon ever get around to selling CD-quality downloads. Why waste your money … Read more

LONDON--Please, the collective camera industry pleads, give us something besides megapixels to rate our cameras. And one industry consortium hopes to do just that, at least when it comes to mobile phone cameras.

Megapixels are an imperfect, though not irrelevant, measurement of image quality. Reducing pixel size to squeeze more on a sensor can have the effect of reducing the quality of the data each pixel captures. Thus, particularly in the mobile phone market where sensors already are small, total megapixels isn't a be-all, end-all measurement.

But by the end of the year, the fast-growing mobile phone segment of … Read more

Despite the iPad 2 not shipping with a display that matched the pixel density of the iPhone 4, a new report by DisplayMate says the tablet holds its own against the phone's display in a number of other areas.

The Apple iPad 2 and iPhone 4 LCD display "shoot-out," which posted earlier today on DisplayMate's site, ran a number of tests on the iPad 2's display, comparing it to the iPhone 4 as well as the iPhone 3GS--all products made by Apple.

DisplayMate's conclusion is that while the iPad 2's pixel density of … Read more

Verizon Wireless has the best wireless service in terms of phone call quality in many parts of the U.S., according to a J.D. Power and Associates survey released today.

The semiannual study measures wireless call quality based on seven factors: dropped calls; static/interference; failed call connection on the first try; voice distortion; echoes; no immediate voicemail notification; and no immediate text message notification. About 26,000 wireless subscribers were surveyed between July and December 2010.

For the 13th consecutive reporting period, Verizon Wireless ranks highest in the Northeast region. Verizon Wireless also ranks highest in the Southeast, … Read more

No matter how fancy a smartphone is, it's not worth much if it doesn't make decent calls. You may have music, apps, and the Internet, but connecting to a carrier's network and enjoying satisfying audio clarity is much more important.

For much of its life, AT&T's iPhone hasn't received rave reviews as a phone. Many users, particularly those in dense urban areas, have long complained that making a call and keeping it once they're connected could be difficult. Those issues caused a lot of consumers to look to the long-rumored Verizon iPhone … Read more

It took a long time for me to work up any enthusiasm for the original digital consumer format, the CD. Coming from an all-analog perspective, first-generation CDs and CD players in the early 1980s didn't light my fire. The problem wasn't that they sounded "bad," it was that CDs robbed music of its soul and emotional connections. LPs' sound engaged you; the CD's sound was too easy to ignore. People put music on, and started reading, talking, working, anything but actually listening to music.

That's why I waited six years to buy my first … Read more