ShakeAlert, the West Coast’s scientific-grade detector, has been in development for roughly a decade—stalled by limited financial resources. However, a new study in Science Advances suggests GPS, found in thousands of smartphones, could give scientists a surprisingly accurate read on seismic activity. And crowdsourced GPS earthquake detection could work alongside existing systems, to help fill in the gap.

If a 128GB microSD card just isn't big enough to put your media collection on your phone, don't worry -- SanDisk is coming to your rescue. It just unveiled a whopping 200GB card (the Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card Premium Edition, to be exact) that makes just about anything else seem puny. You won't even have to give up performance, as it should still transfer about 90MB per second, or roughly 1,200 photos every minute. The price could easily be a showstopper, though.

One of the most annoying smartphone-related chores is having to charge on a daily basis — or even more than once a day, depending on your usage. This means you constantly have to make sure you’ve got your charger with you so that the gadget you’re addicted to doesn’t run out of battery life when you least expect it. While many devices can get you through the day, plenty of others can’t, and smartphone makers have yet to figure out...

Japanese shipments of traditional flip-phones rose in 2014 for the first time in seven years while smartphone sales fell.

Want to get your first taste of Project Ara, Google's modular phone project? You might have to move to Puerto Rico. That's because Google has designated the US territory as the market pilot site for Project Ara. Why Puerto Rico? Well, according to Paul Eremenko, Project Ara's lead, the island is very "well-connected" and has a designated free trade zone that would make it easy to get developer modules from around the world.

Qualcomm says 4K smartphones are just around the corner, and they'll take pixel counts to an -- arguably absurd -- new level.

Project Ara is cool, because the ability to alter your smartphone specs piece-by-piece is attractive. Though we’ve not quite thought about what Ara could be beyond a smartphone — partly because it barely starts up right now — the use-cases for the handheld are nearly endless. At Engadget’s Engage conference, Project Ara chief Paul Eremenko displayed a cool new feature for the device, which could take it well beyond your pocket and into the healthcare field.

Just six months since Google unveiled designs of its Project Ara handsets, engineers have already created the first working prototype. Dubbed Spiral 1, an engineer is shown turning on the device, unlocking it and launching an app during a video filmed at NK Labs in Boston. Individual modules are shown being added to, and removed, from the handset including the LED module, battery, processor, speaker, and a USB port.

Seth Newburg has a phone. It’s a new phone, just a prototype. Almost no one here at Google has seen it yet. Newburg is sitting in a corner conference room in Google’s Mountain View headquarters, fresh off an airplane, with me at his side, and a photographer standing over his shoulder firing through pictures of this brand new phone: a prototype that’s unlike anything anyone has ever seen before. This is a future-of-Google phone. Hell, it’s a future of all phones phone. If things go well.

Amazon has reportedly struggled to sell its Fire Phone smartphone since its release in July. The online retailer is sitting on $83 million worth of unsold Fire Phone inventory, according to CNET. Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak says the company has lost $170 million on the phone.

The most exciting innovation in the mobile market finally has a release date. According to CNET, Google announced today at the Project Ara developers conference that its first modular smartphone will go on sale in January 2015 for the low price of $50. Project lead Paul Eremenko told the crowd that the initial model will be a boring gray device by design, so as not to distract from the additional physical components.

If there's one thing I've learned about Apple's dealings with SIM cards in the past seven years, it's that Apple gets what Apple wants.

In the human-machine relationship, you, fellow Homo sapiens, are commonly designated as the owner, operator, or otherwise dictator of the subservient device in your possession.

Two days after the BlackBerry Passport launched, the business oriented handset was sold out. The number of units sold was 200,000 as BlackBerry played things conservatively in the face of the recent launch of both the Apple iPhone 6 and Apple iPhone 6 Plus.

Qualcomm, Facebook, and other tech companies are experimenting with technology that lets smartphones use their LTE radio to connect directly to other devices up to 500 meters away.

The new system, called OpenPDS, protects your privacy while still letting apps access information they need to work.

Apple's newest phones sold 10 million units last weekend—strange reports of bending aside, they're breaking records left and right. In 2013, the 5c and 5s sold nine million units in their opening weekend, while the 4s sold a paltry four million the year before. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus outdid that in pre-sales alone.

The Sony Xperia Z3 is waterproof. And what better way to test that than take it out of its box for the first time while under water?

Texting while driving with Google Glass is clearly a distraction, a new University of Central Florida study has concluded — but there is a twist. In the study, texting Glass users outperformed smartphone users when regaining control of their vehicles after a traffic incident.

BlackBerry's plans to unveil a square-screened smartphone are further emphasising CEO John Chen's shift away from the consumer market toward business and professional users.