Princess Leia has been my role model since I first laid eyes on her as a little girl in 1977. She pushed her “rescuers” aside, grabbed a blaster and shot at Stormtroopers. Even when her home planet was destroyed by Tarkin or she was forced by a slimy drug lord to wear a drafty metal …

Nothing catching your eye on Periscope? The Twitter-owned live-video app may have the fix. The company has hired its first editor-in-chief to help you sift through the noise. Evan Hansen, a former editor at Medium, Wired and, back in the day, CNET, will take on the newly created position starting in mid-May. Why would a video app need an editor? …

SoundCloud Go has launched in the UK and Ireland, the first countries to enjoy the paid version of the music streaming service outside of the US. After launching in the US in March for $9.99 per month, the subscription service is now available for £9.99 in the UK or 9.99 euros in Ireland. Since it opened in 2007, SoundCloud has …

Editors’ note, May 3, 2016: This article has been updated to remove AskAlexis, which is no longer available. Before Messenger , WhatsApp and Snapchat , texting was the number one way to communicate, and according to the developers behind a new wave of apps, texting is still king. In recent months, there’s been an explosion of chatbots. These services use …

Fitbit wearables lack the features found in smartwatches such as the Apple Watch. But that’s not a bad thing, according to Fitbit CEO James Park. The Fitbit activity and fitness trackers are single-mode devices. The Apple Watch performs a multitude of tasks — time keeping, health tracking, iPhone assisting and computing — and therein lies the problem, Park said. “We …

Like a lot of people, I don’t enjoy editing video. Mainly because I’m not very good at it, but also because I don’t want to sit at a computer to do it. Apparently, many GoPro users don’t want to do it, either, so in February the camera maker went out and bought a couple of apps to help make editing …

CNET’s Cheapskate scours the Web for great deals on PCs, phones, gadgets and much more. Questions about the Cheapskate blog? Find the answers on our FAQ page. And find more great buys on the CNET Deals page. Joshua Goldman/CNET When it comes to quadcopters, very often it seems like you have two choices: sub-$100 models good for bouncing around indoors, …

When we think of the Internet of Things, stuff like Web-connected cars, key-chain finders and door locks are usually among the first things that come to mind. Microsoft is hoping to change that with an Italian company it just purchased called Solair. This is definitely not the type of IoT company you and me will ever buy anything from though. …

The Priv is BlackBerry’s first smartphone to run on Google’s Android software, combining BlackBerry’s dependable security infrastructure with one of the world’s most popular mobile operating systems. That’s not Priv’s only trick, though. Here are 10 things you can do with this BlackBerry/Google mashup. 1. Easy access with your keyboard Always needing to unlock your phone in a hurry? Hold …

Discounts alone aren’t enough to turn Sprint’s ship around. The nation’s No. 4 wireless carrier says it needs to spend resources more wisely. Enlarge Image Some of the shine has faded on Sprint’s aggressive promotions. Sprint Sprint, which reported earnings Tuesday, has been on a bumpy road to recovery after years of customer losses. Its aggressive promotion of 50 percent …

Time for a slightly-spoilery “Game of Thrones” joke. Talking about whether the iPhone 7 will have a headphone jack has become a spectator sport around the rumor mill. The latest comes from AppleInsider, which itself picked up a posting by a French site Nowhereelse.fr, which got its news from the Chinese blogging site Weibo. The rumor is that newly uncovered …

Samsung is beefing up the middle of its UK smartphone range with an update that brings faster charging and a fingerprint scanner for around 200 quid. The new 2016 versions of the Galaxy A3 and Galaxy A5 are powered by Google’s Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system. Both boast a 13-megapixel rear camera, as well as a 5-megapixel camera on the …

Time has released its list of the 50 most influential gadgets of all time, and topping the list is the Apple iPhone. The article, published online Tuesday, notes that smartphones existed for years before the iPhone’s initial release in 2007, but it says: “None came together as accessibly and beautifully as the iPhone.” There are the usual throwbacks like the …

Radiohead took a cue from one of their songs over the weekend and showed us how to disappear completely. But the band’s Web presence was not in limbo for long, and after a couple of cryptic Instagram video clips they’ve revealed their new song “Burn the Witch”. Fans may have felt let down by the British band deleting every post …

It’s turning into the rematch cage-match of the year. Terry Bollea, aka wrestler Hulk Hogan, filed a new lawsuit against the blogging empire Gawker Media, some lawyers and a couple of radio personalities, claiming they conspired to leak to The National Enquirer a recording of him saying racist things about his daughter’s then-boyfriend. Following the comments, World Wrestling Entertainment, the …