stories

Products like the $139 Iriver Story HD are a challenge to review. Why? Well, because it's a perfectly decent, reasonably priced product that has one glaring drawback: it doesn't have any significant advantages over its closest competitors, the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo Touch Edition. So, why buy it?

Iriver would like to have you think that the Story HD's higher-resolution (768x1,024 pixels) display should be a mitigating factor in your choice. That has enabled the company to tout it as the world's "highest-resolution 6-inch e-reader." Except for the additional resolution, however, it's … Read more

Nintendo just announced disappointing sales of its 3DS hand-held gaming device, and a discounted sticker price to go along with it. Is an $80 drop and 20 free games enough to build momentum for the tepid gaming device?

Check out today's show to find out, and to also hear about an AirBnB user's home getting completely thrashed, the hubris of Domino's 7x7x7 deal, and our tips for Colin Farrell in the remake of the movie "Total Recall."

Back at CES in January, we got an early look at Iriver's Story HD, a new e-ink-based product that the company was touting as the world's "highest-resolution 6-inch e-reader." Well now, that e-reader is set to launch July 17 with the Google eBookstore on board, making it the first Google eBooks e-reader.

The 7.3-ounce Story HD, which retails for $139.99 and sports an electronic paper display made by LG, offers XGA (768x1,024 pixels) resolution and has 63.8 percent more pixels and faster page turns, thanks to an advanced processor from Freescale Semiconductor … Read more

Pulse News gives you all the news from your favorite Web sites laid out in an intuitive interface. News sites are laid out vertically so you can swipe up and down to the latest news from all sites quickly, or you can swipe horizontally to read more stories from the same site. Each story heading has the headline and an included graphic, making for a more elegant approach than other news readers that show only text links. Touching a story heading gives you either a text-based summary, a mobile-optimized version for easy reading, or a way to view the story … Read more

Toy Story 3 Windows 7 Theme is a free theme pack with high-resolution images from the movie "Toy Story 3" as well as sounds. However, we were unable to hear the sounds on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 installations.

Like other free themes from Windows7Theme.net, Toy Story 3 Windows 7 Theme installs automatically when you decompress its download. We minimized our browser window and were pleased to see Woody's smiling face. The 10 still images from the movie are indeed very high-quality HD images in wide-screen format (1,920x1,200-pixel resolution). We opened the Windows … Read more

In this episode, we talk about how cable companies' attempt to port their services to digital apps both frustrates and confounds us, the debut of the NFL 2011 iPad app, what's new in Netflix streaming, and how busy broadcast news was this week--from the royal wedding to the reported death of Bin Laden.

Bonus: You can download the show's theme song as a free MP3 here for a limited time! … Read more

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Kyocera sees double

Facebook is replacing Craigslist for prostitute recruitment and matchmaking

Fixed Sandy Bridge chipsets will ship in mid-February

Win $10,000 in this Internet video safety contest

White House proposes new copying rules

Facebook firing case will settle

Strange Rain is pretty hard to describe without actually playing with it, but we'll give it a shot. The primary function of the app is to give you a break from your hectic life by displaying a mesmerizing scene of rain falling from the sky. The iPhone screen acts as a skylight, so you're looking straight up as rain drops fall and hit the screen. You can slightly affect the raindrops as they fall by touching the screen and moving your iPhone, and tinkly music from a haunting melody plays amid soothing storm sounds, every time you touch … Read more

Your Facebook content may soon find its way into ads on the social network.

Facebook unveiled details yesterday about a new advertising initiative called Sponsored Stories. The effort allows advertisers to find mentions of their brands--either through Places check-ins, recommendations in a news feed, likes, or actions in a Facebook application--and repurpose them as advertisements on the site.

Facebook said that if a person currently checks in at a respective company's store or "likes" a brand page, the action often gets lost amid all the other content a user's friends may see. Sponsored Stories solves that … Read more