Surrounded by hundreds of miles of icy water, Tina Haskins still found a way to connect with her dog, Kona, who was thousands of miles away back home in New Jersey. A marine scientist conducting research on plankton in Antarctica, Haskins used an app to track the activities of Kona, a blue-eyed Australian Shepherd, throughout …

Now playing: Watch this: Samsung Gear Fit gets its curve on 1:18 BARCELONA, Spain — It’s been a whirlwind week for our team of reporters at Mobile World Congress: we have taken hundreds of briefings, sat through hours of press conferences and bought you all the news, hands-ons, pictures and video that we could muster. Today our crack team of …

Texting or chatting on the phone while driving is illegal in California, but the law seems still to be catching up with technology when it comes to other aspects of smartphone use behind the wheel. A court of appeals has reversed an earlier court decision that ruled map reading on a cell phone was taboo under the law, according to …

BARCELONA, Spain — Mobile World Congress will always have its fair share of high-end, gee-whiz devices and crazy concepts, but apart from the high-end Samsung Galaxy S5, MWC 2014 belongs to the humble low-cost phone. Best low-cost phones Nokia X, its first Android phone Nokia 220 is unabashedly simple Nokia Asha 230, the cheapest Asha yet The $25 Firefox phone …

Jason Cipriani/CNET The Genius Bar is typically the best place to visit when having issues with an Apple device, but don’t forget to make an appointment first. Each time I make a visit to the store, I stand and watch as customer after customer comes in, thinking Apple takes walk-in Genius Bar appointments quickly. More often then not, the customer …

BARCELONA, Spain — Samsung likely will join the 64-bit processor club this year, but it doesn’t have the technology ready just yet, CNET has learned. “64-bit is very important … in the sense that there’s a real demand, whether you need it or not,” Kyushik Hong, vice president of marketing for Samsung’s system LSI business, told CNET at Mobile World …

BARCELONA, Spain — Mozilla will take over some responsibility for issuing Firefox OS updates that carriers today have, a move that could help users avoid the fate of Android phone owners saddled with older operating system versions. “We are pushing that envelope,” Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich told CNET. “We think we can get people on Wi-Fi upgrading through Mozilla.” …

Much as I like my new Moto X smartphone from Republic Wireless (read all about my latest experiences), it does have one rather irksome limitation: just 16GB of onboard storage. Thankfully, the Moto is among the Android phones that support USB On-The-Go (OTG), meaning I can plug in an external-storage device like the Meenova or PKparis K’2. (I’m currently testing …

The complaints with wearable fitness trackers are routinely uniform. If a device is slim and sleek, it tends not to provide very useful data beyond counting steps and telling you when you rolled around in your sleep. If it’s powerful, on the other hand, it’s typically bulky and designed at the expense of looking like something you’d actually want to …

BARCELONA, Spain — You would think Sony’s mobile executives would be even a little nervous. After all, for more than the past year, they have been touting one unique feature for a premium smartphone: the ability to withstand dust particles and be dunked underwater. So there must have been some cause for concern when Samsung said its flagship Galaxy S5 …

BARCELONA, Spain — I popped by the Nokia booth earlier today to try out the new Nokia X range of handsets and came away unimpressed. The first thing I did was to try customising the user interface, and while Nokia has added a Windows Phone-like skin, the UI was decided sub-par in experience. You can add widgets like Android, but …

BARCELONA, Spain — Everyone knows how easily you can beat Android’s Face Unlock feature with a simple photograph, but it will take a lot more to crack Chinese smartphone maker YunTab’s solution. Found on the company’s $135 S5 Android-powered smartphone (not to be confused with Samsung’s Galaxy S5), the 5.5-inch handset uses two infrared emitters, a secondary infrared camera to …

BARCELONA, Spain — There’s been no shortage of talk and speculation of late surrounding Ford’s relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft has, since the beginning of Sync, provided the software underpinnings that make the infotainment system work. With millions of Sync-equipped vehicles on the road, it’s big business, and with rumors of a switch to QNX making the rounds, that’s potentially bad …

BARCELONA, Spain — If anything can keep the good ship BlackBerry sailing, it’s BBM. John Sims is the man charged with taking this slice of the BlackBerry pie and make it do two things — grow and make money. He’s been in the role just two short months, but speaking with CNET on the last day of Mobile World Congress …

It’s been dubbed the M8 and even the HTC One 2, but now HTC has confirmed the name of its next flagship phone. The successor to the HTC One will just be called The New HTC One. HTC revealed the name in a bizarre teaser trailer ahead of the handset’s unveiling next month. Rest assured: it continues the company’s quirky …