Samsung Pay has scored well in South Korea. But how will it fare in the US? CNET Samsung Pay has proven both popular and profitable during its first month of use in South Korea, according to the company. On Wednesday, Samsung announced that its mobile payments system took in more than $30 million in transactions …

Enlarge ImageIs your view of the candidates in virtual reality? Josh Miller/CNET Like to be at the Democratic presidential debate next month but can’t attend in person? CNN is promising to take viewers there through the wonders of virtual reality. CNN said Thursday that it will live-stream the October 13 debate from Las Vegas in full 3D immersive virtual reality. …

Verizon’s new upgrade program promises a new iPhone every year. Andrew Hoyle/CNET Verizon is joining the move toward annual smartphone upgrades. The largest US wireless carrier announced Thursday that customers who purchase Apple’s smartphone when it goes on sale Friday will have the option of upgrading to the latest iPhone model each year. To qualify, customers must choose Verizon’s monthly …

When the world is faced with the horror of a Facebook outage, luckily there are other social-media sites for sharing our collective grief. And so it was that Twitter momentarily got transformed into a worldwide stream of freak-outs and one-liners Thursday morning. Facebook.com showed an error message for an estimated millions of users worldwide, starting around 9:45 a.m. PT and …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET If you use a cloud storage service such as Box, Dropbox or Microsoft’s own OneDrive, you’ve probably noticed that they appear as links in the navigation panel in File Explorer. Maybe you want this (after all, it’s a convenient way to quickly access your files from those folders), or maybe you don’t. If you don’t want this, …

Diagnostic LTE tests in San Francisco using Speedtest.net. Jessica Dolcourt/CNET The US is rapidly falling behind the majority of other countries when it comes to high-speed wireless technology LTE, commonly known as 4G, coming in 14th slowest of 140 countries worldwide. In contrast, the best performing nation for LTE — taking into account a combination of speed and coverage — …

Screenshot by Jonathan Skillings/CNET In recent years Thailand hasn’t shied away from banning websites that slander its leaders or display explicit pornography, but its Internet hasn’t been systemically censored like China’s. That all may be set to change though, as the country’s military government is reportedly laying the political groundwork to dramatically restructure Thailand’s Internet, according to an official government …

When the Apple Watch first launched, it only allowed for 12 contacts to be set as favorites. If you had more friends than that, well, you’re popular; you were also out of luck. With the release of Watch OS 2, Apple now lets you create different groups of contacts, complete with a title. Each circle is still limited to 12 …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET You would think that, because Windows 10 comes with Microsoft Edge preinstalled, you’d be able to ditch Internet Explorer. But you’d be wrong. Because Internet Explorer 11 comes preinstalled on Windows 10 — and no, you can’t uninstall it. But you can turn it off. This Control Panel hack works in previous versions of Windows, too. Here’s …

Have you upgraded to iOS 9? If so, does your phone feel slower? CNET The latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 9, may be causing a lag in performance on some iPhones, mostly on older models. Videos on YouTube channel iAppleBytes that compare the performance of iOS 9.0.1 vs. iOS 8.4.1, the previous version of the mobile OS, …

Asking a friend or family members to borrow a large amount of money is a stressful situation. Who do you ask, and for how much? How do you set up a payment plan that works for all involved? Nothing. But. Stress. Google Wallet, Square Cash and PayPal all offer convenient methods for lending money, but none of them are automated. …

Andrew Hoyle/CNET Apple’s new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus are packed with a whole bunch of new features, but here we’re going to take a closer look at Live Photos. Hit play on the video beneath to see the new images in action. Live Photos is simple — when you take a picture it shoots an extra couple of seconds …

Now playing: Watch this: Facebook brings 360-degree video to the News Feed 2:21 In this tech-roundup: GoPro, Saturday Night Live and Star Wars help Facebook showcase new 360-degree videos. Apple issues first bug-fixing update to iOS 9. BlackBerry’s rumored Android-powered device might now have a name. CNET Update delivers the tech news you need in under three minutes. Watch Bridget …

To tell you the truth, it’s growing on me. When I first encountered iOS 9’s lowercase keyboard, I felt confused and dismayed. Unmoored, if you will, suddenly separated from iOS’s venerable ALL CAPS keyboard. Now that I’m a week in, I’m starting to feel better about iOS 9’s case-shifting keyboard. The lowercase letters don’t look so strange, and it’s easier …

Lucy Kelly via her telepresence robot at the Apple Store in Sydney, Australia. Seamus Byrne/CNET It’s not unheard of for people to pay stand-ins to hold their place in Apple Store launch queues, but why shell out cash when you can get a robot to do it for free? One enterprising Australian woman has outsourced her wait for the new …