polls

Where exactly do most people accidentally ruin their iPhone?

If you guessed the toilet you'd be wrong, says a new survey.

According to device warranty provider Squaretrade, most people -- 21 percent to be precise -- damaged their device in the kitchen. The runner up, at 18 percent, is the living room, followed by the bathroom at 16 percent.

All in all, 51 percent of iPhone accidents happen inside the house instead of out in the wild, says Squaretrade. To find that out, the company tapped Survey Sampling International and asked 35 questions to 2,004 iPhone owners in … Read more

What does a 120-year-old Thomas Edison cylinder record player have in common with a brand-new $299 Big Jambox Bluetooth speaker? Both play music in monophonic sound. Everything old is new again.

Home audio was strictly a single-speaker pursuit from the dawn of recorded sound through the late 1950s, when stereo changed the way we listen to music. Multichannel home theater's popularity peaked in the late 1990s, but starting with iPods and sound-bar speakers, mono was back in style. More recently sales of battery-powered, mono Bluetooth speakers started to take off. While these lo-fi systems may contain stereo pairs of … Read more

In the past week, CNET has reviewed three separate media devices, each costing $300, and one of them was a television. And guess what: the TV wasn't terrible.

The three products were the TCL L40FHDP60 ($309), the 3M Streaming Projector ($299), and the Apple iPod Touch ($299). Seeing them all together got me thinking: which one of these would I actually buy if I had the money? Is there something else I'd rather do with my $300?

Until we find out whether the Apple iPad Mini exists, I cast the net out a bit farther and two other … Read more

With Apple's new round of iPods comes a fresh round of questions about the usefulness of dedicated MP3 players. Smartphones these days can all hold a decent amount of MP3s and we carry them with us wherever we go. Do we need a portable device just for music?

The excitement surrounding new iPods is a fraction of that surrounding new iPhones, but Apple keeps dutifully updating the line with new colors, shapes, and capabilities. There are still plenty of other MP3 players from other brands available, too.

I have an old-generation iPod Touch that sits in an alarm clock … Read more

Twitter launched a new star during the presidential debate on Wednesday, but he wasn't wearing a suit and tie. Big Bird from "Sesame Street" was the subject of an explosion of tweets after the topic of cutting funding to PBS came up between President Obama and his Republican rival Mitt Romney.

There was a point during the debate where the phrase "Big Bird" was tweeted 17,000 times a minute. That's some serious action for a fictional creature. He also spawned a slew of satirical accounts. This all just goes to show how Twitter … Read more

There's plenty of places online to watch and kibitz over tonight's presidential debate -- CNN.com, Twitter, YouTube, and many more. But one place offering live streaming and interactive features might surprise you: Xbox Live.

Usually known as a place for teenage boys to spend hours playing games like the latest Halo, or for people to watch Netflix streaming movies, the popular service will offer tonight's debate between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and is accentuating it with live interactive polling.

On the official Xbox site today, Microsoft touted its presentation of the … Read more

Hush. Be quiet or you'll startle them. We are observing the annual migration of the Apple fanboys. Magnificent herds gather in patient lines, awaiting the arrival of their newest pack member, the iPhone 5.

It's Friday, but, more importantly, it's iPhone 5 release day. You might be in line, reading news about all the people in line, or back from waiting in line (you lucky dog) with your shiny new smartphone.

I've done my time in an Apple line before, way back when the iPad 2 came out. In my day, we had to wait 5,000 hours in the freezing cold with no shoes, climb Mount Everest to reach the Apple Store at the top, walk back home uphill, and sacrifice a goat to the Verizon gods to get the 3G turned on.… Read more

The iPhone 5 boasts some undeniable improvements over the previous generation. Thinner, lighter, and faster are all good things, though they may not get geeks flooding into the streets and dancing with sheer exuberance.

CNET's Roger Cheng goes into detail on why he thinks the new iPhone is ho-hum and won't wow anyone. In short, he doesn't see anything groundbreaking about it.

CNET reader Renegade Knight sums up the feelings of a lot of iPhone fans: "It's a good phone. Radical redesign of a working design is bad juju. Just keep improving it incrementally and you are far better off than trying to hit a home run with a radical change every year."… Read more

Well, it's official.

The new iPhone is the iPhone 5, and many of the rumors proved to be true: bigger screen, 4G LTE, and a faster processor -- all good stuff, to be sure.

But revolutionary? Not hardly. At first blush, the new model is simply playing catch-up with a number of other smartphones already on the market, without a single "wow" feature that'll have people talking.

The question is, will the iPhone 5 have people buying? And by people, I mean you: Did you already mark your calendar for September 14 so you can be among the first to preorder, or are you going keep your wallet in your pocket?… Read more