Going into this series, I hoped I’d get back to the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream and be able to romantically wax about where Android came from. How the G1, though dated, still held up the promises made by Google's first Android effort back in 2008. Analytically, it's all true, but time has not been kind to the phone, and using it has made for a pretty rough week, even by my recent standards.

By now you're probably aware of Roku. It's a company that creates streaming video players -- you know, little devices that play Netflix and YouTube on your TV -- as well as an operating system for Smart TVs. We like Roku streamers and TVs a lot here at CNET. Most are cheap and good. Now the company has two new streaming players -- the sub-$50 Roku Premiere and Roku Premiere Plus. And if history is any indication, we'll like them even more. That's because they seem just good as existing players, and they're cheaper than ever.

It’s not quite AirPower, but Belkin’s latest charging dock gives you a convenient way of charging up to three Apple devices simultaneously. The Boostup Wireless Charging Dock has a pair of elevated wireless charging pads to power your iPhone and Apple Watch, and a USB Type-A port for charging a third device, like an AirPods case.

SiriusXM is acquiring Pandora for $3.5 billion. The satellite radio company says it intends to maintain the Pandora service and brand, along with its roughly 70 million monthly active users (5.6 million of which are paying members), which stands at double that of SiriusXM’s existing 36 million subscribers. SiriusXM had previously invested $480 million for a 19 percent stake in the streaming service back in June 2017, leading to speculation that it might intend to buy the company outright. Now it seems Pandora will join SiriusXM’s portfolio...

Amazon first introduced its line of “Alexa Gadgets” — devices that are meant to enhance Echo devices in “fun and playful” ways — with the $20 Echo Button last year, but since then, there hasn’t been much movement on other Alexa Gadgets. That changes today, though, with the Alexa Gadgets Toolkit beta that will give tools to developers to create their own Echo-connected accessories.

Google is allowing hundreds of companies to scan people’s Gmail accounts, read their emails and even share their data with other firms, the company has confirmed. In a letter to US senators Susan Molinari, Google’s vice president for public policy in the Americas admitted that it lets app developers access the inboxes of millions of users – even though Google itself stopped looking in 2017.

China plans to dominate the $550 billion battery market through a recycling monopoly.

Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 12, was released to the public earlier today, and that means it’s a great time to get well acquainted with some of its more useful new features. One of those is Password Autofill, a password manager tool that lets you store login credentials for the dozens of apps and services you likely access more on mobile today than ever before.

Apple announced its Apple Watch Series 4 a week ago and the early reviews that dropped this week are about as glowing as is possible. I’m not shocked by that either, because it was pretty obvious as Apple revealed their new watch that it was the most impressive hardware from their fall event. The reason it’s sad is the fact that it shows how badly Google and its partners screwed up wearables on Android and just how far behind Apple they are.

The following editorial will take you inside the dark world of data brokering, as we expose the backroom deals in which fifteen years of customer data from defunct Canadian retailer NCIX were sold.

A new study predicts 2019 will see 40 billion mobile phone calls, but they also expect about half of those to be from scammers. Tech company First Orion recently announced scammers are picking up efforts in their 2018 Scam Call Trends and Projections Report. Topeka resident Randy Austin said over the years he’s received more and more spam calls.

For almost five years, the only products sold by OnePlus were its well-regarded line of affordable, high-end smartphones, and the accessories that go with them. The Chinese smartphone company has built up a loyal customer base, who follow each new release with a fervor that can only be compared to Apple fans at the launch of a new iPhone. Few Android phones, if any, get city block-spanning lines of prospective buyers when a new model comes out. But OnePlus does, and did.

For Amazon's online sellers, a negative product review can be extremely damaging to businesses selling their products on the retail giant's site. In order to quash bad feedback, some sellers are offering Amazon employees bribes to obtain bad reviewers' email addresses or to erase the negative review from the site entirely, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. According to the Wall Street Journal's sources, this practice is especially common in China...

Google makes billions from their cloud platform. Now they’re using those billions to buy up the internet itself — or at least, the submarine cables that make up the Internet backbone. If you want to measure the internet in miles, fiber-optic submarine cables are the place to start. These unassuming cables crisscross the ocean floor worldwide, carrying 95–99% of international data over bundles of fiber-optic fibers barely the diameter of a garden hose. All told, there are more than 700,000 miles of submarine cables in use today.

Google Podcasts received a fair amount of criticism at launch for a variety of valid reasons, but the biggest issues stemmed from a lack of support across Google's ecosystem. The app, somewhat absurdly, launched without proper Android Auto or Cast support — and offered little else to recommend it, including no option for creating podcast playlists. Now, after addressing the Android Auto issue, the app is beginning to roll out support for Cast.

China is lashing out at Apple after the tech giant failed to use Beijing's preferred name for Taiwan during the company's annual iPhone event on Wednesday. While introducing where its new iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max devices would be available later this month, Apple listed China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan separately alongside the three nations' flags.

On September 20th, FEMA will conduct a test of its Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), which brings together two existing alert systems, the Emergency Alert System and the Wireless Emergency Alerts system. This system will also mark the first time that a “Presidential Alert” will be sent out to a majority of cell phone owners, who won’t be able to opt out.

IT'S AN UNFORTUNATE fact that the pricey pocket computers we carry around with us at all times are prime targets for thieves—as well as very easy to leave behind in subway cars or on coffee shop tables. Now that we all rely on our smartphones for so much, having one stolen or misplaced can feel like the end of the world. But it doesn't have to be, not quite. Here are the preparations you can take before the worst happens, and what to do if it does.

On August 3rd, NYU Residential Life & Housing Services sent out an email to all incoming students with housing plans announcing that they were getting rid of wired Campus Cable due to the fact that “watching TV on your own device on your own schedule has become more prevalent than watching traditional TV at a set time in a fixed location.”

A ate a big breakfast. So if my scans are off, don’t sweat it, I tell myself. And this was immediately following a long, unhealthy weekend (a friend’s wedding). All of the excuses of the first world were available to me as I walked up the stairs in The Assembly, a women’s club in San Francisco, one that looks like it was once a place of worship but now hosts accomplished-looking laptop-clackers and has bottles of sweet-smelling face mist in the bathroom. This is where I would get my body shape and fat percentage measured by a company that has named itself Naked.

Apple has bought Akonia Holographics, a Colorado-based startup dedicated to the manufacturing of displays for augmented reality glasses. In addition to other recent purchases, this is an extremely strong indicator that the Cupertino company is actively working on AR glasses. According to Akonia’s web site, its more than 200 patents result in a technology that can create “thin, transparent smart glass lenses that display vibrant, full-color, wide field-of-view images.” Just the kind of qualities that would be touted by Phil Schiller at a special AR glasses event.

Could we stop worshipping rich men who are jerks? On Tuesday Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla, took to Twitter once again with bizarre comments, saying how “strange” it is that the cave diver who rescued the Thai boys didn’t sue him after he called him a pedophile. The notion that the diver might not want to get into a legal battle with a mean-tempered billionaire seemingly hadn’t occurred to him. (Though the diver’s lawyer is now reportedly preparing a libel suit.)

AI-assisted cameras are one of this year’s hottest buzzwords. The plan is to help us take better-looking pictures, insinuating machines are better photographers than you and I. You’ll find the technology packed into high profile releases like the Huawei P20 Pro, LG G7 ThinQ, and Google Pixel 2, and more. It comes in some different forms though. Huawei and LG use scene detection algorithms to adjust their color profiles and post-processing accordingly.

SliceCharge is a super-thin Qi charging pad that can charge up to three devices at once including two iPhones and an Apple Watch. AppleInsider tested it out for a week leading up to the expected launch of Apple's AirPower.

At The Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America in Vancouver, Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, and Dirk Hohndel, VMware VP and chief open source officer, had a wide-ranging conversation about Linux security, open-source developer, and quantum computing.

With data security and privacy becoming an alarming issue while dealing with the data-hungry companies, ZeroPhone seems like a sigh of relief. ZeroPhone is a Raspberry Pi-based, open-source, Linux-powered handset that has been launched as a project on Crowd Supply; we’ve already told you about the phone in the past. The device promises no carrier locks, no pre-loaded apps and good riddance from harvesting of data without users’ knowledge.

The emails say "WTF."

It isn’t always practical or possible to replace a component of your home with smart tech, so plenty of companies are trying to find ways to add smart features to your life by augmenting what you already have. The latest is focused on your key: it’s called Locky, and instead of adding a smart lock to your home, it adds smart features to your regular metal key. The gadget is basically a housing for your key. Using Bluetooth and some sensors, it’s able to tell when you use it to lock and unlock a door or forget the key entirely and walk away.

The EU has approved Apple’s acquisition of Shazam (via Reuters), the music recognition and discovery service. Apple announced it was buying the company in December, but had to wait on EU approval which launched an anticompetitive investigation to decide whether Apple’s purchase would lock out competition and unfairly elevate Apple Music.

A much-requested feature has finally been added to Android Pie: controller mapping for the Sony PlayStation 4’s DualShock 4. The PlayStation 4 is the most popular current-generation game console on the market, so it’s no surprise there’s a lot of people out there with DualShock 4 controllers who want to use them to play mobile games on Android. The problem with using your PlayStation 4 controller on Android is that the key mapping may not be available on your device.

You'd think smartphone manufacturers would have learned their lesson after being caught cheating multiple times, but that's apparently not the case. UL Benchmarks (aka the Futuremark team) has delisted Huawei's P20 Pro, P20, Nova 3 and Honor Play from 3DMark's charts after internal testing and an AnandTech exposé showed the devices ramping up performance whenever they detected the public versions of benchmarking apps.

August has been at the forefront of home security for several years, impressing consumers with two generations of smart and secure door locks that integrate with third-party devices and work with Amazon Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. So, it was no surprise to hear that the company was gobbled up by security giant Assa Abloy, owners of Union, Yale and other well-known brands.

Device likely won't be needed but Musk is sending it to Thailand just in case.

The notorious torrent index site The Pirate Bay has resumed using users’ CPU to mine Monero (XMR) on their website. On July 4th, The Pirate Bay added a disclaimer at the bottom of their website which stated: “By entering TPB you agree to XMR being mined using your CPU. If you don’t agree please leave now or install an adBlocker” As CCN reported, The Pirate Bay conducted a one-day trial back in September to test out mining Monero using visitors CPU’s. The website utilized a tool...

Apple has updated its 13-inch and 15-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pros today with Intel’s latest eighth-generation chips. It’s also offering up to 32GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD storage — if you’re willing to pay for it. While the base models of Apple’s laptops still cost the same (starting at $1,799 for the 13-inch model or $2,399 for the 15-inch model), the updated MacBook Pro now tops out at a whopping $6,699 for the top configuration. That’s $2,400 more than the best 2017 MacBook Pro you could buy.