Soundbrenner There’s something rather comforting about the wind-up metronome, with its notched pendulum, pyramidal shape and hollow ticking, but it’s not without its limitations. Eventually it winds down and additionally, it’s not very portable. These shortcomings have been effectively circumvented with the advent of digital and smartphone app metronomes, but then there’s the third thing: …

Apple Watch could help the wearables market grow in the next several years. James Martin/CNET The wearables market is set for rapid growth, due mainly to the gadgets you put on your wrist. Wristwear — products that include everything from smartwatches to fitness activity trackers — will dominate the wearables market over the next several years, according to a new …

Now playing: Watch this: Jay Z’s Tidal music service makes star-studded splash 1:14 Streaming music service Tidal relaunched Monday with high-quality audio at $19.99 a month as the artist-owned alternative to the likes of Spotify, backed by Jay Z and more than a dozen other well-known musicians. The star-studded unveiling of Tidal will test whether streaming music’s competitive field is …

Muvee A common problem: you’ve captured a daunting digital pile of photos and videos from a wedding, birthday party, vacation, drone flight, trail ride or the like, and now you want to assemble everything into a slick, polished movie. Welcome to the not-so-wonderful world of video editing — a slow, laborious process that often involves complicated, expensive software. Not today! …

With a little bit of work you can easily take shots like this, too. Aloysius Low/CNET Watching the Aurora Borealis with my own eyes was a huge thing on my bucket list, which is why I traveled recently to a small town called Tromsø in northern Norway to catch the spectacle before the season ended. If you’re planning a similar …

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET Did you know that you can purchase 1,000 Twitter followers for just $12? That’s right: if you’re willing to drop some cash, you can be a bonafide Twitter celeb in less than a week. Or can you? It doesn’t matter whether you have 20 or 2,000 followers — you always want more, because more followers means more …

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray, pictured here at CES 2014, says the new coverage map uses 200 million data points from customers each day. CNET/James Martin T-Mobile is taking a new approach to the staid wireless-coverage map. The company unveiled on Monday its “next-gen” network map, which uses real-time data collected from customers and through third-party sources such as Speedtest.net and …

AT&T AT&T is bringing its speedy gigabit broadband network to Cupertino, California. Launching on Monday, U-Verse with AT&T GigaPower promises up to 1 gigabit per second connectivity to select consumers and small business, starting at $110 a month. A gigabit broadband connection is really, really fast: AT&T claims you can download (legally, I presume) 25 songs in less than a …

The pricey 18-karat-gold Apple Watch Edition James Martin/CNET Those of you eyeing the new Apple Watch will need a reservation to buy one. Customers who simply walk into an Apple Store expecting to purchase the new watch on the spot will apparently be out of luck, according to leaked Apple training documents obtained by MacRumors. Instead, buyers will have to …

Need a plumber, painter or pilates instructor? Amazon is a new source for finding local services. This CNET Update looks into Amazon Home Services and how it will challenge Yelp and Angie’s List. There’s also a new challenger in the streaming space: Tidal is taking on Spotify with plenty of support from big-name musicians. But Spotify has been keeping busy. …

Deezer Deezer, a French music streaming service, is now upgrading its offering in the Asia-Pacific region. Deezer Elite is a new premium subscription tier that allows users to stream songs from Deezer’s library of 35 million tracks as .FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) sound files. The .FLAC format uses 1,411 kbps as standard, which means your favourite songs will be …

Project Spartan will let you capture and share notes on web pages. Screenshot by Nate Ralph/CNET The latest version of the Windows 10 Technical preview has arrived, and it’s offering up an early look at Project Spartan, the browser that will succeed the venerable Internet Explorer. We got our first look at Project Spartan at Microsoft’s Windows 10 event in …

Now that smartphone specs are better than ever, and the competition for your next flagship is even more cut throat, one of the most important features mobile manufacturers emphasize is how well their handsets can snap a pic. Even Apple’s latest “shot on an iPhone 6” ad campaign touts the device’s camera quality with sweeping and dramatic user photos plastered …

This poor radio executive worries he may never make money again. Video screenshot by Leslie Katz/CNET What does denial sound like? A group of hopelessly out-of-touch media executives who have no idea what to make of things like Netflix, Hulu and paywalls, according to Funny or Die. “There will always be a place for real books, bound books, where people …

LG’s 4K Curved OLED TV. LG LG Australia has launched its 2015 range of TVs, pushing its partnership with Netflix, but there’s no word on its promised Ultra HD OLED offering. LG Australia previously showed off its EC970T Curved 4K OLED at an October 2014 launch. Projected for November 2014 for AU$9,999, the unit failed to arrive last year and …