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Smartphones are hitting the mainstream market. And that means old and young want a piece of the action. But at more than $1,000 per year for service, a smartphone may not be the best choice for every consumer.

In this edition of Ask Maggie, I help a reader decide if he should get his parents smartphones or if he should spare them the hefty monthly service fees and get them new basic feature phones. I also help another reader decide if there is a less-expensive alternative to Verizon that will allow him to keep his unlimited data plan.

Whether you have been using Apple's latest operating system for the Mac, OS X Mountain Lion, for a while now, or you are just installing it, you'll benefit from reading through some of the tips below. Some of them are ways to improve on the overall experience, while others will bring back past functionality. Let's get started, shall we?

Preparing your Mac When upgrading the operating system, no matter your platform of choice, it's always a great idea to not go into it blindly. Be prepared, and more importantly, make sure you computer is prepared. Some … Read more

Apple's introduction of Auto Save and Versions in OS X Lion was one of the more controversial modifications made to the operating system, partially because as part of the changes Apple removed with the age-old Save As command and replaced it with an unfamiliar "Duplicate" option. While applications such as Office that include their own document-handling routines maintained the Save As option, those that rely on Apple's central document-handling libraries lost this function.

The inconsistency of the Save As and Duplicate features between programs confused and disappointed a number of OS X Lion users. Even though … Read more

One of the changes in OS X Lion from prior versions of OS X is its autosave and versions features, which offer a different approach to document handling within applications. Unfortunately these changes bring with them a difference in how users interact with their documents, and have resulted in the removal of the commonly used Save As feature that many have grown accustomed to. While Save As has been removed, the approach to it is not that different and you can still restore it to an extent by using the system's support for custom keyboard shortcuts.

Instead of a … Read more

Although we haven't reviewed this phone on C Spire's network, you can read CNET's LG Marquee review for Sprint and Boost Mobile, which is the same phone.

If there is one thing that startups can learn from the rise of Facebook it's that making sense of data you collect is where the money is.

Lots of companies collect data and do nothing meaningful with it. But thanks to new tools and the realization that knowing more about what your users are doing is the way to monetize, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage the information collected.

In case you've been living in a cave, Facebook has filed to go public at an enormous valuation, based largely on the fact that the company has … Read more

NirSoft's RunAsDate is a small, free tool that lets you run applications using a different time and date stamp than your Windows system, yet without changing your Windows system time. It can change the date and time of multiple programs running simultaneously, each with different time and date settings. We can think of several reasons for wanting to do that (debugging log files, for example) so in any case, it's a useful capability to have around. However, it's not designed to extend shareware trial periods, which use different means of keeping track of such things.

Both 32-bit … Read more

I've been a big fan of Samsung's laptop designs, going back to the QX401 last year. While I had spent extensive time with the sleek Series 9 and diminutive Series 3, I was away on vacation when the Series 7 was first introduced. Now that one has arrived at CNET's offices, it seemed like a good time to do a quick first take, based on my first few minutes with the laptop.

Sleek metal: clean cut, brushed lines, very solid. The Series 7 is more impressive than I expected, more along the lines of an Apple MacBook Pro, and the way the HP Envy looked to our eyes for the first time. It's also a wide laptop, but that keyboard goes edge to edge. … Read more

Houston, we have a health problem.

About 30 percent of adults in the U.S. have at least two chronic health conditions. Roughly half of a panel of surveyed patients are not complying with doctor's orders. And more than half of Americans could be obese by 2030.

In the coming years it's going to be more important than ever for doctors' offices to be able to automatically track their patients across a variety of parameters, from age and ethnicity to conditions and diseases, and even to compliance levels. Dallas-based health management firm Phytel is hoping that the platform it's unveiling today … Read more