Kiran Upadhyay

Chromebooks have become a tech craze as of late, as they are lightweight, capable machines that have a long battery life. Best of all, they’re very cheap for a laptop. The only real downside to using a Chromebook is the restriction of only using the Chrome web browser, but nowadays,  it’s not really an issue . The first successful Chromebook was the Samsung Chromebook (read our  review of the series 3 Chromebook ), which provided good performance and amazing battery life thanks to the ARM-based processor, as well as great build quality at an affordable price. It’s been out for a while, and Samsung has finally released its successor, the  Samsung Chromebook 2 . You can get the Samsung Chromebook 2 in two configurations — an  11.6-inch model  ($319), which is the same size as the original Samsung Chromebook, and a  13.3-inch model  ($399) for people who want their Chromebook to be more of a laptop replacement. We nabbed ourselves the 13...

SD cards are mostly just plastic – put a tiny WiFi chip inside and suddenly they take on a whole new life, allowing for wireless data transfer. But not all WiFi SD cards are made equal. Today, we’re putting three different brands to the test to see which is worth buying. At the end of the review, you’ll get the chance to win the best. We’ve gathered two popular brands, as well as a generic Chinese import, to see how they compare. Each card is Class 10 SDHC, with 16GB capacity. Transcend ($50) Note: Since purchasing these cards for review, the Transcend WiFi SD card product line has mysteriously disappeared, resulting in 404 errors on the Transcend site. There appears to be no way to download updated firmware either. Stay well away from this company – it may be related to  violations of the GPL licensing . The Transcend card includes free SD reader, as apparently some standard readers can have a problem with WiFi cards. The manual recommends you only ...

The Unicode Consortium has just announced the release of version 7.0 of the Unicode Standard, the list of characters "which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards." Unicode 7.0 adds 2,834 new characters to the existing list of 110,187 characters defined by Unicode 6.3, including new symbols for currency, new "lesser-used and historic scripts," and extended support "for written languages of North America, China, India, other Asian countries, and Africa." Of course, the Internet being what it is, what people seem the most excited about are the 250 new emoji characters, listed here by Emojipedia. Notable additions include "hot pepper," "sleuth or spy," "man in business suit levitating," "reversed hand with middle finger extended," and "raised hand with part between middle and ring fingers" (aka the "live long and prosper" thing). The list of emoji also...

When we first stumbled upon the auction for the Guinness-certified "World's Largest Video Game Collection" a few weeks ago, bidding had only reached $50,000, short of the auction reserve price. When the GameGavel auction came to a close late Sunday night, though, the price was significantly higher: $750,250 to be exact. According to the GameGavel price history, the bulk of the bidding action took place last Wednesday, as users "catch123" and "peeps_10091970" rapidly outbid one another from a starting point of $150,000. The final bid has yet to be publicly verified, though, so it's still possible this could be another hoax bidding situation similar to the one surrounding a $100,000 Nintendo World Championship cartridge auction earlier this year. If the sale goes through at this price, though, it will be among the largest single sales of video game items in history. It won't be the largest, though; a 7,000-game set, including "complet...

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has just announced the company's first-ever smartphone, the Fire Phone, at a private event in Seattle. The device is the latest in a growing family of Amazon hardware that includes the Kindle Fire tablets and the Fire TV set-top box. The phone is exclusive to AT&T, and will cost $199 with a two-year contract for a 32GB device and $299 for a 64GB device. The phone will cost $650 off-contract, which is common for high-end smartphones. Amazon's product page indicates that it's available for pre-order now, and will begin shipping to buyers on July 25. For a "limited time," a full year of Amazon Prime membership is included with purchase. The phone has a 4.7-inch IPS display with 590 nits maximum brightness and a 1280×720 resolution, giving it a density of 315PPI. This isn't the biggest or highest-resolution phone there is, but Amazon says it has been "optimized for one-handed use." The phone has a rubberized frame, a glass ...

You can lock every door and window of your house, but if you use a skeleton key the odds are pretty good someone is probably going to end up robbing you blind. The same is true of your passwords. If your passwords are not unique and unbreakable, you might as well open the front door and invite the robbers in for lunch. A few years ago, Damien described a few ways to  come up with strong passwords , like making sure you use special characters and that the password is at least 8 characters long. Still, creating a complex password is only half the job, the other half is actually remembering it. And, is any password truly unbreakable? Not really, but in a recent  interview with Bruce Schneider , Bruce referenced one of his blog posts about choosing a secure password. His advice was to take sentence and turn it into a password. His exact words were, “Choose your own sentence – something personal.” This sounds like a simple concept, but even coming up with a sentence that ...