At less than $250 a pop, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet are sure to be hot gifts this holiday season. The new, low-cost tablets are ushering a new era in tablet computing by making these devices more affordable. In fact, they’re so cheap in comparison to other devices on the market …

Cash-strapped wireless subscribers can now get unlimited everything smartphone service for less than $20 a month. So what’s the catch? And is it really worth it? That’s the question I help answer for one reader in this edition of Ask Maggie. Indeed, Republic Wireless’s $19 a month plan requires customers use Wi-Fi wherever they can. While this may be a …

Corporate types are kissing their company-issued BlackBerry smartphones buh-bye. And Ask Maggie is here to help the newly liberated choose a smartphone of their own. Companies large and small are recognizing the benefits of allowing their employees to bring their own smartphones into work rather than issuing them devices. Additional on-device security features and productivity apps on Google Android, Apple …

I am the first to admit when I am wrong. And indeed, I made a mistake a few weeks ago when I mentioned in this column a certain Web site as a place to sell an old iPhone without checking the reputation of the site mentioned. In the October 4 edition of Ask Maggie, headlined Where to unload your laptop …

Editor’s note: We used Cover It Live for this event, so if you missed the live blog, you can still replay it in the embedded component below. Replaying the event will give you all the live updates along with commentary from our readers and CNET reporters. To get the key points from today’s announcement, you can check out a summary …

Cable TV is not dead, but its audience isn’t growing either. Cable operators all over the country have been steadily and slowly losing TV subscribers quarter after quarter. A year ago, some people wondered if Internet TV services like Netflix and Hulu were attracting so-called cord cutters. But Craig Moffett, an analyst with Sanford Bernstein, thinks there are other forces …

President Obama nominated two new commissioners to the Federal Communications Commission late Monday. Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel and Republican Ajit Varadaraj Pai, who each have experience working at the FCC and on Capitol Hill, have been nominated to fill vacancies left by Michael Copps, a Democrat, and Meredith Attwell Baker, a Republican who left earlier this year to take a job …

When it rains it pours. And for Verizon Wireless subscribers, there’s a deluge of Google Android phones about to hit the market. But which new phone is Verizon’s flagship device? In other words, which one is the cream of the crop on the carrier’s 4G LTE network? In this week’s Ask Maggie, I try to help one reader figure out …

Britain’s largest police force is using covert surveillance technology that can shut off mobile phones and intercept communications, according to a report in The Guardian. CBS/AP The article says that the London Metropolitan Police Service bought the technology, which acts like a fake cell tower, from a U.K.-based company called Datong plc. The suitcase-sized receiver reportedly tricks cell phones into …

The spotlight is shining on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform with the recent launch of its Mango update and the new Nokia Lumia series of devices. But new hardware is still weeks, if not months, away in the United States. So what’s an American consumer to do? In this edition of Ask Maggie, I offer advice to one reader who is …