TiVo. What a brand. Everyone with a DVR has probably slipped up and called their generic DVR a "TiVo" at some point, and now the company's hoping to replace some of those black boxes with genuine TiVo boxes courtesy of a deal with DirecTV. The company announced this week the nationwide availability of the TiVo HD DVR from DirecTV, better known...

What exactly is Dell these days? A PC maker? A smartphone maker? A tablet maker? Dell's been trying a little bit of everything the past few years in an effort to see where traction could be gained, and so it's hardly a surprise to see them delving into yet another market: voice over IP. This week, Dell Canada and Fongo announced the launch...

Although Google is the reigning king of online services with offerings such as Gmail, Google Docs, and an ever-fluctuating lineup of myriad other products, the search giant has not yet introduced a straightforward cloud storage service. According to a report from the Wall street Journal, that’s about to change. Citing “people familiar...

Over the past 10 days, we've discussed the question of used games and how revenue is divided. One of the few points that both GameStop and game developers agree on is that buying a used game doesn't directly benefit the publisher or developer in any way, though there's reason to think that a strong secondary market boosts gaming sales in general....

Intel recently unveiled a special warranty plan that allows users a one-time replacement for a processor they inadvertently cook while overclocking, but it cost a (relatively) small fee--between $20-35, depending on your particular CPU. Gigabyte and CyberpowerPC have partnered to offer Intel’s plan, called the Intel Performance Tuning...

Lenovo's been on a roll as of late, and as a result, it's been rolling in the dough. The PC maker reported pre-tax income of $192 million for its third fiscal quarter ended on December 31, 2011, a whopping 59 percent year-over-year increase and a record high, along with record quarterly sales of $8.4 billion. Those aren't the only personal...

It doesn't take a detective to figure out that today's mobile devices are getting smaller, slimmer, and more powerful, which means less room for heat dissipation and potentially lower battery life. To help with both of those side effects, Micron today introduced a new product category of low-power DDR3 solutions targeted at the tablet and...

Apple iPad launch events are arguably less exciting these days now that Android has picked up its game with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) and the emergence of low-cost tablets like the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, but if you've been itching for a new tablet to come out of Cupertino, it looks like you'll get some relief next month. John...

When it comes to adding a performance-enhancing upgrade to your system, a good SSD can’t be beat, but storage capacity is an ever-growing need as well. There was a time when a 1TB drive seemed grossly (deliciously?) excessive for the average user, but these days anything less than 500GB seems woefully undersized. Even casual users who...

Eastman Kodak announced plans to stop selling digital cameras. Considering Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection last month, this announcement isn't entirely out of the blue. According to the announcement, Kodak will phase out all digital camera sales within the first half of this year. With this phase out, Kodak will then focus on its online...

Who doesn't like free? Vonage, which is still around helping people who love home phones, is finally taking a serious leap into what's next: mobile. The company just announced the new Vonage Mobile iPhone and Android app, which lets users make free high-definition calls and send free texts to all users of the app, worldwide. It works over...

Doing anything special for leap year? Now you are. Microsoft just announced that a Windows 8 Consumer Preview will be made available to the public starting Feb. 29th, between 3PM and 5PM, presumably local time. Oddly, the move is being made in conjunction with the Mobile World Congress trade show, which is obviously focused on mobile, not...

Fresh news out of Taiwan is that Intel and AMD, despite their keen interest in the tablet market, "cannot compete with solutions from ARM in terms of price." The statements, purportedly from various notebook manufacturers, are meant to imply that the two manufacturers (especially Intel) must reduce costs if they ever hope to gain any traction...

For most of the 27 years since the first portable computer was announced, computer power use has been treated as a function of the underlying hardware. Even today, OS-level power optimizations are discussed in terms of whether or not the operating system properly supports the low-power operating modes of the CPU. The idea of optimizing the...