Matt Elliott/CNET The wife and I finished “Breaking Bad” on Netflix a month back and after a period of mourning — not for Walt but for the greatest TV show of all time being over — we turned to Xfinity X1’s on demand offerings to find a suitable replacement. We have found that many on …

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is housed at the Central Government Building in Tokyo.Wiiii/Wikipedia Commons The Japanese Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry has plans to remove the SIM locks for mobile phones that are currently in place which prevent customers from using another SIM card on their devices. This is based on a report from Jiji Press, in …

Jeremy Bachrach, far right, with his friends and little brother outside The Oaks mall in Thousand Oaks, Calif., the night before the original iPhone launch. Courtesy of Jeremy Bachrach Seven years ago, Jeremy Bachrach, then a 17-year-old high school student, waited in line outside a mall in Thousand Oaks, Calif., with his 12-year-old brother Harry. They’d been there for more …

Early R&D isn’t always pretty… Google+ / Mike Elgan The first few smartwatches to run Android Wear, Google’s wearables platform, are fairly slick and streamlined if a little bulky-looking on the wrist. But they’ve come quite a long ways from the apparent early prototype above. The image was taken Wednesday and shared to Google+ on Saturday by Tech News Today …

Andrew Jones with the new Pioneer SP-EFS73 tower speakers Steve Guttenberg/CNET I was taken aback by Dolby’s recent announcement that Atmos sound will be “coming soon to a home theater near you,” because as far as I can tell most consumers want fewer, not more home theater speakers. Atmos adds height speaker channels to existing 5.1- and 7.1-channel home theater …

The Nexus 5. Josh Miller/CNET Google is putting to rest any speculation that it would be killing off its Nexus line of smartphones and tablets and replace them with a new program called “Android Silver.” “People just get excited by concepts and forget why we do things,” Google executive Dave Burke told ReadWrite. “We are still invested in Nexus.” He …

Copy Bubble’s floating clipboard bubble. Nicole Cozma/CNET Switching between apps in Android isn’t too difficult, but it’s still not the smoothest feature on the platform. When trying to copy text from one window and add it to another, you can only do one section of text at a time. And going back and forth between the two can start to …

Now playing: Watch this: Navigating Android on your wrist 2:42 When you receive your Android Wear watch, you’re bound to be eager to get it up and running as fast as possible. So for now, while you wait for the shipment notification, familiarize yourself with the setup process. Related stories Friday Poll: Do you want an Android Wear smartwatch? How …

The LG G Watch is due on July 7. Josh Miller/CNET While smartwatches have been big news in the gadget world, there still aren’t a ton of them wandering around on people’s wrists in the wild. Google hopes to give the smartwatch market a boost as the first Android Wear gadgets finally reach consumers. The $229 LG G Watch and …

Jason Cipriani/CNET Android users have been able to install third-party apps from nearly day one on a Pebble smartwatch to enhance music playback capabilities found on the watch. One such enhancement was the ability to control playback volume from your wrist. iOS users, on the other hand (no pun intended), were out in the cold when it came to controlling …

Google is the latest technology giant to make some noise about smartwatches and the broader realm of “wearable” technology. But is now the right time for consumers to jump on the bandwagon? During the Google’s opening keynote for its Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco this week, the company took the wraps off Android Wear, software that will power …

Nyrius Planning to mount your TV on a wall? Hope you like cables, because you’re probably going to be looking at a lot of them snaking out from the back. And even if you run them inside the wall, here’s hoping you can place all your connected components — cable box, Roku box, game console, and so on — close …

Samsung Gear Live, set for release on July 7, includes customized clock faces by Samsung, including the one here. Josh Miller/CNET SAN FRANCISCO — Android Wear, Google’s new software for wearables, is designed to provide a “pure” Google experience, but it doesn’t quite spell the death of preloaded apps and services from device makers. Samsung executives said the Korean company …

Legendary Disney animator Glen Keane has teamed up with Google’s ATAP for a cutting-edge cartoon called Duet. Seth Rosenblatt/CNET SAN FRANCISCO — When Regina Dugan of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects division took the stage to kick off the second day of Google I/O on Thursday, most people probably weren’t expecting a motivation speech and a bit of profanity along …

The LG G Watch (right) next to a Caravelle-made analog watch. Josh Miller/CNET The most divisive debate rippling through the smartwatch community is not about software, price point, or battery life. Rather, it centers on a simple design choice: should watch faces be round or square? That couldn’t have been more evident than when Google Senior VP Sundar Pichai wrapped …