next

How much is your iPad 2 worth on trade in?

Looking to sell your iPad 2 before picking up an iPad 3? A number of sites can offer you a decent deal.

NextWorth is providing healthy trade-in values relative to those of similar services. The site is currently willing to pay the following prices for an Apple iPad 2 in good condition, meaning it's fully functional but not brand new out of the box.… Read more

Social goes big on Opera Mini

BARCELONA, Spain--The maker of the second-most popular mobile browser in the world has given its feature-phone fans something to tweet about, as Opera Mini Next debuted and brought several smartphone features to "dumb" phones.

The big new feature that's kicking off the inaugural build of Opera Mini Next, the developer's preview of the browser, is "smart" page called Home. Home will live next to Opera's Speed Dial, its customizable collection of regularly visited Web sites that occupies top billing across all Opera browsers, and it serves a similar function. It will let you … Read more

Can a startup competition ID the next Facebook? Not likely

There's no doubt that there will someday be another round of superstar entrepreneurs on the order of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Steve Jobs. But can a group of judges in an arbitrarily cobbled together "American Idol" for startups be the ones to identify them?

With its Startup World competition, which it announced today, The Next Web clearly thinks that the answer is yes.

"It's inevitable there will be the next Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, or Facebook," The Next Web wrote this morning in its announcement of Startup World. "… Read more

Acer teases tablet with highest screen resolution yet

LAS VEGAS--Not content to rest on the laurels of its recently announced A200, Acer today unveiled a new Iconia Tab tablet, featuring a screen resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels (1080p).

Typically, tablet screen resolutions top out at 1,280x800 pixels, but thanks to the faster speed of quad-core processors (Acer didn't reveal which quad-core CPU the new tablet would be using), look for high-res screens like this (and even higher) to become a trend over the next year.… Read more

CNET's Next Big Thing of 2012: The ecosystem. Should we fear it?

When is a phone just a phone? A TV just a TV? A Blu-ray player just a Blu-ray player? How about last year? Because in 2012 and beyond, the next wave of consumer electronics evolution is all about the "ecosystem."

That concept, in fact, is the topic of CNET's Next Big Thing Supersession at CES 2012. We'll be talking about this idea of the ecosystem, and how it's changing the landscape of consumer electronics--and turning media and service companies into hardware partners, if not actual hardware makers.

We'll talk one on one with Google'… Read more

Apple snagged NeXT 15 years ago

On December 20, 1996--15 years ago today--Apple announced that it would acquire NeXT. Oh, and its CEO was part of the deal.

That CEO of course was Steve Jobs, as CNET reported.

"Jobs...will leave his post as Next's chief executive to become an 'adviser,' reporting directly to Apple chairman and CEO Gilbert Amelio," CNET said.

Daniel Kunstler, at that time an analyst with J.P. Morgan, may have had the most prescient understatement of the decade (at least). "I really don't see any downside to Steve Jobs returning to Apple," he said.

The $… Read more

CNET is the official streaming media partner for 2012 CES

Every year, CES gets better and better. And every year, CNET has the pleasure of bringing the biggest tech show of the year straight to you.

For the 2012 International CES show, we're pulling out all the stops to bring you more video, news, photos, blogs, and reviews than ever before.

For starters, we're the official digital media and live streaming partner of CES this year. That means that we're going to live stream the heck out of this show, including every major press conference and the coveted Best of CES Awards from the CNET stage. Plus--and … Read more

Aldebaran's Nao robot gets more lifelike

Just in time for Christmas, France's Aldebaran Robotics has upgraded its Nao humanoid robot, making it better at obeying orders for the big cleanup.

Nao Next Gen is the latest version of the popular research robot, and it's looking more and more lifelike.

The 23-inch droid has been outfitted with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and two HD cameras linked to a field-programmable gate array for faster processing of both video streams. Intel Capital led a $13 million investment in Aldebaran earlier this year.

It also boasts better speech recognition with a program called Nuance, allowing Nao to pick out individual words in a conversation. … Read more

Five gifts for the wiseass in your life

There's always at least one person on your holiday shopping list you put off as long as possible because he or she is such a pain to find something for.

You know these kinds of people. The insufferable wiseacre who insists he's easy to shop for when he's constantly looking for weird movies no one has heard of (more accurately, ones no one wants to watch), or talks about how he needs to add to his collection of '70s and '80s TV commercials. They're like gift hipsters. It would be too easy to just get them something readily available.

These are the people for whom gift cards were created.

Ah, but it doesn't have to be that way. With a minimum of fuss, you can get something unusual for that precious snowflake in your life without having to leave the house. Here, in no particular order, are five Crave-worthy ideas that don't involve your online shopping history being inexorably linked to movies with titles like "Blood Freak" or "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies." … Read more