All smart TVs have streaming apps, like Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, and so on. Media streamers are nothing but streaming apps. Sure it’s convenient to use your TV’s built-in services, but are they the best experience? Probably not, actually. More to the point, is it worth getting a media streamer if you already have a …

Dendy Cinemas has put a launch date on Dendy Direct, its new video on demand offering. The service will begin operation on August 6 and will sell or rent videos with no monthly subscription fees. Dendy will vary its pricing according to file resolution and the age of the film, but it estimated that a rental of the SD version …

Samsung’s Galaxy S5 may still be the top end of the company’s mobile line. Andrew Hoyle/CNET Samsung’s long-rumored Galaxy Alpha — also known as Galaxy Prime or Galaxy F, depending on the rumor — may not be the flagship handset to take on the iPhone 6 as some initially thought. The upcoming Samsung smartphone, believed to be known as the …

Amazon It looks like Amazon is about enter the competitive mobile payments space by introducing its own credit card reader. That’s the assumption being made by 9to5Mac, which has obtained internal Staples documents that seem to show an “Amazon Card Reader” will go on sale in the near future for $10 (roughly £6 or AU$11) alongside existing card readers from …

T-Mobile CEO John Legere. T-Mobile Just last month, T-Mobile started offering its customers more streaming music. Now — just in time for the back-to-school shopping season — the wireless carrier is following up with more data. The company said starting Wednesday, customers can sign up for its four-line Simple Choice plan at $100 per month and get more than twice …

The iPhone 5S. Apple Amid the mad dash to reveal features of the iPhone 6, the latest report on the expected smartphone focuses on its connectivity capabilities. AppleInsider over the weekend said the anticipated iPhone 6 will include NFC, also known as near-field communications. The technology is most often discussed in connection with mobile payments — with people swiping their …

Pelican Imaging As Lytro prepares to release its latest light-field camera to the world, Pelican Imaging has released a set of sample images from its own camera array that’s designed specifically for smartphones. Capturing the depth information of an entire scene, these images allow you to refocus after the shot has been taken and play around with other aspects like …

Firefly attempting to scan a Fire Phone box. Jason Cipriani/CNET The Fire phone, Amazon’s first smartphone, isn’t simply a phone. In addition to giving users access to Amazon Prime (and all of the included services) for a year, the Fire phone has a few tricks up its sleeve. The first of which is called Firefly. Building upon the bar code …

Apple MacBook Pro Retina Apple Apple’s MacBook Pro Retina, which was last updated last year, may be getting a small refresh, an image out of China suggests. Over the weekend, someone apparently snapped a photo of a promotional board at an Apple store in China showing updated specs on the company’s MacBook Pro Retina model. After the photo surfaced and …

Tropfest unites thousands of film lovers every year.Image by Eva Rinaldi, CC BY-SA 2.0 After starting life as an informal film festival that gathered screen buffs in Sydney’s Tropicana Cafe, Tropfest has grown into a global sensation as the world’s largest short film festival. Now Tropfest is reinventing itself for the Twitter generation, launching a competition to find the world’s …

Mark Wilson, Getty Images Republicans and Democrats in Washington have finally found an issue they can rally around: making cell phone unlocking legal again. The big question is whether the new soon-to-be-law will actually do what politicians promise it will do, which is offer more consumer choices. On Friday, the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that …

More than 1.5 million Vodafone customers are expected to be better off under a new plan that will see the provider re-allocating its 850MHz spectrum holding to boost 4G coverage across Australia. The plan was announced following news that Telstra and Optus have begun offering access to 700MHz 4G networks in a select number of cities and regional areas across …

Now playing: Watch this: Exploring with tech outdoors 12:21 It’s time to start using your smartphone for more than just music during your workouts. But do a quick search for “fitness” in the app market, and the results are daunting. So, to get you started, CNET’s The Fix tested three of the most fun — and useful — workout apps …

The Tizen-based Samsung Z smartphone is facing another delay. Nate Ralph/CNET Samsung is running into further trouble trying to get its Tizen smartphone off the ground. The company announced Monday that it would postpone the rollout of its Tizen-based Samsung Z phone in Russia. The following statement shared with CNET revealed the latest information but not too many details: To …

When Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos announced its first smartphone, the Fire, he discussed how much time and effort his team had put into perfecting a new feature called Dynamic Perspective. Bezos explained how the three-dimensional interface made possible by four front-facing cameras offered a new method of interacting with a smartphone. He was right, but unfortunately for some, the stuttering …