Audeze LCD-X headphones with the Cowon Plenue 1 music player Steve Guttenberg/CNET High-resolution music players have gotten a lot of press over the last year or two, but they aren’t new. Hifiman started selling high-res portable music players 5 years ago, and then Astell & Kern, Cowon, FiiO, Sony — and just recently Pono piled …

Sarah Tew / CNET The Withings Activite Pop , formerly one of my favorite fitness watches when I reviewed it back in January, is finally coming to the US this Sunday. My enthusiasm for the $150 watch — which includes a built-in pedometer and sleep tracker — was tempered, recently, by a broken glass dome. And it wasn’t just me: …

Deep listening David King When you’re listening to speakers the sound comes from “over there,” but with headphones where is the sound? A lot depends on the recording and the headphones. With mono recordings the sound is centered inside your head, with stereo the sound picture is more complicated. Vocals, or any sound mixed to appear centered between the left …

Pop, crack. Scott Stein/CNET Editor’s note: Withings has responded, and I learned why the watches were breaking. Withings says new batches of the Pop won’t suffer this problem. I woke up knowing I needed to address the Withings Activite Pop, a product that seemed great at first but customers are reporting has a shatter-prone glass crystal. I opened my bedside …

Apple and Samsung’s flagship phones, the iPhone 6 and Galaxy S6 , are sure to dominate the smartphone world this year. Both phones are remarkably similar, in design, features and cost, but there are some telltale differences. If you’re looking to switch phones this year and have your sites on either the iPhone or Galaxy S6 , we’ve built a …

Lovers of Samsung Galaxy smartphones have a lot to be excited about. The latest flagship phone from Samsung is available for preorder starting this weekend. With a sleeker design, a better camera and easier-to-use software, the new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge are being called Samsung’s best smartphones to date. But truth be told, the Galaxy S5 was no slacker …

Nicole Cozma/CNET Your contacts on Facebook and Twitter are probably sharing some interesting news stories, but sometimes they’re hidden among all of the game posts or random 140-character thoughts. As a solution, Nuzzel offers a service that can help you sort through the feeds and uncover the most interesting news stories. Previously, the service was only available on the Web …

Matt Elliott/CNET Google has offered a way to reduce data usage with Chrome for iOS and Android for more than a year, and now it is delivering the same proxy compression technology to Chrome on the desktop with Data Saver. It routes your Web traffic through Google’s servers, where pages are compressed before being sent along to you. As a …

A look at the age makeup of the top social networks. ComScore On Snapchat, if you’re under 35, you’re in good company. A whopping 71 percent of Snapchat’s US-based users are between the ages of 18 and 34, a new study from research firm ComScore shows. That easily topped Facebook and Twitter, which are made up of 38 percent and …

Sol Republic Given the choice between cheap headphones that sound decent and premium headphones on sale for cheap, which would you take? I think most of us would opt for the latter, which is why I’m grateful to reader Chris for sharing this deal — one I otherwise might not have spotted. While supplies last, and ending March 31, Motorola …

The Neo N2 smartpen, shown here with the Livescribe 3 and Equil Smartpen 2. Photo by Rick Broida/CNET The NeoLab Neo N2 smartpen debuted on Kickstarter about eight months ago, where it smashed its $20,000 funding goal and raised nearly $360,000. Although backers have already received their pens, the N2 officially went on sale earlier this week. The big question: …

Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer, Mike Schroepfer, talking about Facebook’s drone program. Facebook It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…a giant Internet router? That could be the reaction later this year when Facebook gets its high-flying, wide-wingspan drone off the ground. At its F8 conference on Thursday, Facebook revealed that it had made a first test flight of an unmanned aerial …

Editors’ note: We’ll be alternating between our old-fashioned comments-based giveaways and our newfangled Twitter-based giveaways, so please be sure to read the rules carefully every week. This one’s for the tweeters. And you’re getting one in this shade of blue by the way. Incipio Congratulations to William F. of Chandler, Ariz., for winning a Tylt gadget-charging backpack and other mobile …

“Our financial viability is no longer in question,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen says. Sarah Tew/CNET You can’t keep BlackBerry down. The struggling smartphone manufacturer posted a surprise profit on Friday for the second quarter in a row, eking out gains thanks to a massive cost-cutting effort and an adjustment to the value of its investment in a broad patent portfolio. …

James Martin/CNET Sometimes it seems like smartphones can’t bring any new or notable innovations to the table. For the iPhone, a big design change and lots of improvements hit last fall, and — if Apple stays true to form — we’ll see an “S” update this year that means a more sedate list of internal changes and a nearly unchanged …