Gadgets

When I pour a beer, I'm always aiming to minimize the mound of foam on top. Apparently, there are people who covet that foam, who can't get enough. Those are the same people who can't wait to buy the $40 Sonic Hour, a new gadget that ramps up the foam factor at the push of a button.

Sonic Hour appears to be the work of the same people who created the Professional Beer Foam Making Mug. They've just gone a little more high-tech this time. While the mug used a little hammer to physically excite the beer bubbles, Sonic Hour uses the power of ultrasonic oscillation.… Read more

Loyal BlackBerry keyboard addicts may not have long to wait. Reportedly, a leaked memo from Canadian carrier Rogers pins the launch date for BlackBerry's Q10 phone as April 30. … Read more

The Nokia Lumia 920 is now the best-selling handset running Microsoft's Windows Phone software. At least that's what specialty Windows Phone application advertising firm AdDuplex says.

Indeed according to AdDuplex, and reported by Windows Phone Central, the Lumia 920 enjoys 14 percent of the entire Windows Phone market. That may not sound like much, but Nokia will be glad to learn its Lumia 800 also grabbed a 14 percent slice of the pie. And right behind that sits older Lumia devices such as the 710 (13 percent), Lumia 610 (11 percent), 820 (8 percent), and 620 (7 percent). … Read more

The home computing revolution of the 1980s and '90s was defined by a battle between two titans: Apple and Microsoft. After its IPO and the introduction of the Macintosh, Apple was riding high.

The company started losing the PC market in the '90s, though. Microsoft released Windows 3.0 as a cheaper alternative to the Macintosh in 1990, but it was the release of Windows 95, which brought a comparable GUI (graphical user interface) to PCs, that really hurt Apple. And Apple also suffered from a lack of vision, owing to the absence of its visionary leader, Steve Jobs, from … Read more

DALLAS -- Samsung has opened a new front in its battle for smartphone supremacy: the storefront.

The Korean electronics giant plans to set up mini Samsung stores inside all U.S. Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile venues within the next couple of months -- just in time for the Galaxy S4 launch. The "Samsung Experience Shops," which start rolling out Monday, will be in 500 big-box Best Buy stores and all 410 Best Buy Mobile locations by early May. Best Buy's remaining 550 large-format Best Buy stores will feature the shops by early June.

A larger … Read more

As covered in my introduction, I've been living with four different activity trackers as part of an ongoing test. It's time for a close-up of how one of them works: the Nike FuelBand. The tracker has managed to be both my favorite and least favorite of the devices.

The FuelBand is a simple, lightweight device (about 1 oz.) that you wear around your wrist. I found it fairly comfortable, quickly forgetting I had it on, even when typing.

The band costs $150 and is available in three slightly adjustable sizes. Data can be synced via a … Read more

Baseball season is here and it's Opening Day. That means baseball fans across the country will flock to the ballpark in order to root, root, root for the home team. Except that's not entirely true. Just like there was the "The Base Ball Polka" before there was "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," the order of events sometimes gets mixed up. The real reason millions of fans will go see a game this summer is because that is where the hot dogs and giant soft pretzels are; a baseball game just happens to … Read more

A Facebook media event invitation the company released last week might be saying more than originally thought.

Last week, Facebook sent out an invite for an event it's hosting on Thursday. On the invitation, the company says, "Come See Our New Home on Android." Other than making clear that it the event will be Android related, the company provided no additional details.

However, the invitation's message might be coded to include the name of a new product the company has been working on, called Facebook Home, Google news site 9to5Google reported, citing people who claim to … Read more

Decisions, decisions; life has enough of them. Sometimes, the best course of action is to opt not to choose. Take a hot summer day, for example. After a long hot day at the beach or the park, there comes a time to choose what the cool-down treat is to be. Naturally, having gone through a long day of decision making regarding which sandwiches to bring to the park or whether to barbecue at the beach, the finishing touch should be an easy one to make.

Just in time for the warm weather months, Nostalgia Electrics has released not one, but … Read more