AT&T is giving some of its GoPhone customers a little early holiday cheer. Starting Friday, the company’s prepaid customers who renew their $40 and $55 monthly plans will get more high-speed data automatically. The $55 tier will get 8 gigabytes of data, while the $40 plan will receive 4GB — with both plans receiving a …

Now playing: Watch this: Snapchat ‘World Lenses’ warp your reality 1:11 Ready to see the world through Snapchat’s eyes? Snap Inc. on Tuesday updated its iOS and Android apps to include World Lenses, a series of augmented-reality filters you can use with your back-facing camera. The new filters include a winter wonderland, butterfly garden and clouds that puke rainbows, helping …

Amazon may be looking to hire a few housekeepers to spruce up its Prime members’ homes. The e-retailer put up two job postings on an Amazon website last month for Amazon Assistants in its hometown of Seattle. The program, which the company has not announced, would send housekeepers employed by Amazon to help with “tidying up around the home, laundry, …

Can text messages get kids to read more? We’re about to find out. Amazon introduced on Wednesday a new mobile app called Amazon Rapids, which offers hundreds of original bite-size stories for kids for a monthly subscription of $2.99. The twist is that each piece is told as a series of text messages between characters, like the one about two …

Google Tango is here. The 3D-sensing camera technology is available on the new Lenovo Phab 2 Pro phone, offering users the chance to play augmented-reality games, measure objects by pointing a camera at them and adding virtual objects into real-world images. More Tango-powered phones are expected next year. Also on the podcast, we consider other accessories Microsoft could come out …

Amazon Prime has landed in China. The world’s biggest online retailer said Friday it brought a version of its popular Prime membership service to the country, offering unlimited free deliveries of a selection of US-shipped and domestic products for 388 yuan (about $57) a year through its Amazon.cn website. Until February 28 of next year, the company will offer a …

Amazon is in a pickle. It would probably like to raise the fee on its popular Prime membership to offset its skyrocketing shipping costs. That fee, though, already stands at $99 a year, meaning an increase of just a buck would push membership to the psychologically important $100 barrier. Here’s the rub: the inherent contradiction of Prime is that the …

Now playing: Watch this: Apple debuts MacBook Pro 2:05 Apple on Thursday revealed its newest MacBook Pro laptop, which includes a new interactive, customizable touch strip above the keyboard called Touch Bar. “The Mac is more than a product to us,” CEO Tim Cook told the crowd at the Town Hall auditorium at the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters. “It’s a …

The big splash at Microsoft’s product showcase on Wednesday was a bit of a throwback. It wasn’t a new tablet or fitness band or even a laptop. It was an all-in-one desktop computer. While desktops lost the computing crown to smartphones years ago, Microsoft sought to remake its own all-in-one, called the Surface Studio, as a touchscreen-enabled hub for artistry …

The heyday of Apple’s lights-out iPhone growth has passed. Since introducing the hugely popular iPhone 6 two years ago, the tech giant has labored to spark the intense consumer passion it has counted on to make the iPhone an even-better seller year after year. Apple is still struggling to reignite interest. The iPhone 7, which went on sale last month, …