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Summer smartphone season kicks off this month with CTIA in New Orleans, but the big phone makers have already started revealing the touch-screen goodies they hope will become your latest addiction. I sifted through the recently announced devices and a few that we're still expecting to try and picked the ones most likely to be remembered four months from now -- either as a mega-success, or the tech punch line of summer 2012.

We already know of three blockbuster phones that will be available before most schools are out this month -- Verizon's Droid Incredible 4G LTE from HTC is official; a quad-core Samsung Galaxy S III has been unveiled in Europe and already booked its summer trip to the States we hear, and HTC's flagship Android phone is also here in the form of the HTC One X. Those are the three leading contenders for sweet summer phone of the year, but there's always room for surprises and surprising sleepers. … Read more

The third generation of Core i-series CPUs has been benchmarked, written about, and discussed for months now, but PC makers could only sell them starting April 29.

Even then, only the very high-end models, the quad-core Core i7 chips, are currently available. The more mainstream dual-core Core i3 and Core i5 processors found in most laptops won't get updated until sometime in May or June (and then probably won't be physically available for some time after that).

A handful of hearty manufacturers have already put the high-end new Core i7 chips up on their sites, allowing you to … Read more

Taiwanese PC maker Asustek said that its shipments will increase in the second quarter as it bets on a "Happiness 2.0" strategy that aims to create so-called hero products that are must-haves.

The company reported first-quarter net income of NT$5.01 billion, up from NT$3.42 billion a year ago. Revenue was NT$90.91 billion, up 23 percent from a year ago.

By product line, Asustek moved 4.1 million Asus notebooks, 900,000 Eee PCs, and 600,000 Eee Pads. For the second quarter, Asustek projects that it will ship 4.4 million … Read more

It is my sincere hope that this post makes up for some of the benign deceit I've been involved with for the past few years here at CNET. Typically when a new product rolls in the door, we're quick to show you an unboxing, and we'll follow that up with a formal First Look video, but we tend to gloss over the nuts and bolts of setting things up.

Arguably, we've been sparing you the boring, unsexy business of setting up your tech. But I suspect that you're at least a little curious to see … Read more

Online retailer giant Amazon is quickly becoming a device heavyweight.

Amazon's Kindle Fire grabbed a 54.5 percent share in February, almost doubling its share in the past two months and "already establishing itself as the leading Android tablet by a wide margin," according to ComScore (see chart below).

ComScore said its methodology "measures unique devices accessing the Web during the time period noted, including home, enterprise and secondary devices across all age groups."

Samsung's Galaxy Tab was a distant runner-up with a 15.4 percent share in February, followed by the Motorola Xoom … Read more

Yesterday Asus launched its third tablet in a year with the name "Transformer" in it: the Asus Transformer Pad TF300. In April 2011, the Transformer TF101 was released and was followed by the much more powerful Transformer Prime TF201 last December.

With three tablets with the Transformer name out there in the wild, this is a great opportunity to illustrate their differences in a concise manner. Tables help with that, but if you're not a table person and prefer wordy prose, I've got that too.

According to Asus, the new $380 (for 16GB) Transformer Pad TF300 now replaces the TF101 as Asus' "low-end" full-size tablet. The TF101 will officially be available through the second quarter of 2012, and Asus claims it will continue to offer software updates and tech support.… Read more

A truism of Intel chip announcements: Intel releases a new CPU, and with it a new graphics chip or, since Sandy Bridge, a new graphics core embedded in the CPU silicon. Intel then claims said chip/core will provide at least a baseline PC gaming experience. This claim is never true.

Only now it is.

With its new Ivy Bridge CPUs, Intel has introduced two new graphics cores, the Intel HD 4000 and a lower-end HD 2500 core. You will still have a better gaming experience with a budget graphics card, but for at least the HD 4000, Intel finally has an onboard graphics processor with some 3D processing muscle.… Read more

Intel's latest CPUs will be rolling out in various waves over the next few months, but the first wave of higher-end, quad-core processors is finally here.

So far, the biggest impact has been on gaming without a dedicated graphics GPU, with other differences remaining subtle at best.

Of course, this may not reflect future laptops and desktops in the coming months, but it clearly tells the story of Ivy Bridge at launch: this is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.

Check out our review roundup below. For more questions on Ivy Bridge, read our FAQ.… Read more

Laptops updated with Intel's latest Ivy Bridge processors are finally here, but is there as much to be excited about compared with last year's Sandy Bridge CPUs?

Intel hasn't made such dramatic claims this time around as far as pure processor speed, but there are plenty of other improvements including eight-way Hyper-Threading, Turbo Boost 2.0, integrated USB 3.0, and native Thunderbolt support. The only two parts any mainstream consumer's likely to care about are the CPU gains and new Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics, which promise to greatly boost gaming performance without dedicated graphics.

Soon enough our CNET Labs will be flooded with Ivy Bridge laptops, and we'll have more real-life examples of Ivy Bridge products than you can shake a stick at. Until then, we've tested two early examples of high-end quad-core Ivy Bridge Core i7 processors that Origin and Intel have sent us.… Read more