I love a good magazine. That’s why I’m hoping digital distribution services like Next Issue and Zinio can help usher in the age of the digital periodical. Yesterday, Zinio gave it a little nudge by unveiling Z-Pass, a sort of a la carte subscription option: three magazines for $5 per month. According to the Zinio …

ORLANDO, Fla. — Irony may be funny to the gods of Olympus, but it’s a cruel lesson for us mortals. I found this out the hard way at BlackBerry Live 2013. Within minutes of arriving at my hotel I managed to misplace my lovely HTC One test unit. As a result, my backup BlackBerry Z10 was suddenly promoted to first-string …

Does Google have what it takes to compete with Spotify? Screenshot by Donald Bell/CNET New music services are great at making me feel old. Opening Spotify is like opening the door to some hip cafe where a mustached 20-year old barista takes my order with folded arms and a stamp on his hand from last night’s secret show. I feel …

Prolific French bargain-basement filler Archos has a new 3G Android tablet out — and in line with the rest of the company’s low-cost devices, the Archos 80 xenon is cheap as frites. The 80 xenon is an 8-inch slate with built-in 3G for surfing the Web on the go, and it’ll set you back just £160. Unlike many budget manufacturers, …

So you’ve just received your gorgeous new Samsung Galaxy S4. Isn’t it lovely? After you’ve finished caressing its sleek lines, admiring its gorgeous Super AMOLED screen and gasping in amazement at its insanely powerful processor, you might want to consider taking more control over it — and in Android terms that means rooting. Rooting your device is basically like gaining …

Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET Related stories Google’s Page: We should be building great things that don’t exist Google+ Hangouts gets private chats, history, and an app Google+ photos get new tools, auto adjusts at I/O At Google I/O, the company announced some small updates to its Google Now service. One of those updates added the ability for Android users to …

Your Samsung Galaxy S4 is a precision-engineered slab of technological goodness, but all that power and beauty counts for nothing if you don’t know how to use it properly. That’s where CNET comes in — below are 25 indispensable tips that will enable you to extract every last drop of functionality from your shiny new smart phone, and hopefully enrich …

Google is turning the popular Samsung Galaxy S4 into its latest Nexus phone, running the “pure” Android experience. But at $650 per device, some users question how much that pure Google experience is really worth. On Wednesday, Google announced that a version of the hot, new Galaxy S4 would be added to its lineup of Nexus devices. Google has worked …

Sony Japan has announced the biggest E Ink reader to hit the market, with a 13.3-inch flexible display. Sony’s new 13.3-inch e-reader.(Credit: Sony) The e-reader will be the biggest E Ink display we’ve seen. Previously, the biggest was the Amazon Kindle DX, at 9.7 inches, discontinued last year. The display, called “Mobius”, has been created by E Ink and uses …

Vodafone has a new super-cheap smart phone for your consideration — the Smart 3 is an Android mobile that costs less than 100 quid. Packing a 4-inch display and a 5-megapixel camera, the Smart 3 is priced at a reasonable £95 on pay as you go, available to snap up from Vodafone’s website. The Smart 3, a sequel to last …

Ofcom has criticised the quality of subtitling on live TV shows, proposing a short time delay to improve the situation. “Viewers have made clear that there are continuing problems with the speed, synchronisation, accuracy and presentation of live TV subtitling,” the UK communications regulator says. It’s asking broadcasters what they would think of “the feasibility of delaying live programmes for …

Now playing: Watch this: Use your Galaxy S4 as a universal remote 4:05 Years before smartphones were a thing, Nokia was one of the first manufacturers to add IR blasters to its dumbphones. The use case was pretty limited, though, as the cool factor typically ended after the fun of turning TVs off at Circuit City died off. But IR …

Verizon subscribers eying Nokia’s new Lumia 928 can now pick up the phone either online or offline. Related stories Nokia Lumia 928: A mighty Windows Phone for a great price Windows Phone jumps to third place in smartphone market As previously promised, the 928 went on sale Thursday, available through Verizon’s Web site and its brick-and-mortar retail stores. Selling the …

Bad news for Brits — Google’s raw-Android version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 is launching only in the US. Other nations will have to watch from the sidelines it seems, as Google has told CNET that the Google Edition version of the S4, which made its grand debut at Google’s I/O conference last night, will be US-only at launch. The …

Android scooped up more than half of all ad impressions seen by Millennial Media last quarter, according to the ad network’s new MobileMix report. For the first quarter, Android won 52 percent of all impressions (the number of times a mobile ad is displayed), up from 49 percent in the year-ago quarter. In second place, iOS accounted for 39 percent …