I've remained steadfastly neutral on this whole iPod versus Zune thing. I use an iPhone, so it's easy for me to sit out, but before I got my iPhone, I had both a Zune and an iPod. I liked both quite a bit and still do. They both ...

Black Friday retail results were a pleasant surprise for retailers this year, with sales inching up slightly from the same day last year. A big part of that was the heavy discounting designed to attract consumers.

This LG 32LG30 LCD TV was discounted 33 percent in the lead-up to the

(Credit: iLuv/Jwin)

Earlier in 2008, iLuv made news with its release of the i168, one of the most affordable tabletop HD Radios to date (currently available for less than $100). Now the company is turning its sights toward online audio with the iNT170. The bedside clock radio employs the ...

Click for a slide show of the Apple In-Ear headphones w/ microphone.

(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET Networks)

I've only been

(Credit: Magneat)

The Magneat headphone organizer provides a solution to the most annoying accessory attached to your music player: the headphone cord.

The industry is a few years away from offering high-quality, inexpensive Bluetooth earbuds, so for the time being we're left untangling and tripping over long wires. As ...

The delightfully cheesy Gun O'Clock alarm clock.

(Credit: Gizmine.com)

Thousands of delightfully inexplicable gadgets made only for the Japanese market are hard to come by outside the country. A new site from Japanese importer Dynamism is making it easier for us gaijin to get our hands on ...

The Simplifi combines a bare-bones dock with a bare-bones-card reader.

(Credit: Griffin Technologies)

It's hard to make an iPod dock sizzle, but Griffin's Simplifi barely approaches room temperature.

By consolidating a memory card reader, USB hub, and iPod dock, the Griffin Simplifi has good intentions. Unfortunately, its card ...

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

As expected, Samsung has added support for HD streaming of Netflix video to its BD-P2500 and BD-P2550 players. The upgrade is available as a free firmware update (players should automatically prompt users to install the software update, or DIYers can download it from Samsung's support site ...

As if your company shutting right before the holidays weren't bad enough.

Regional electronics dealer Tweeter, scheduled to close its doors December 7, on Tuesday suddenly closed down all its stores. Six hundred employees at 70 stores were fired immediately. Many employees are still owed back pay, and some customers are still owed merchandise that has already been paid for, according to The Boston Globe, which cites five unnamed store managers and executives.

According to the Globe:

The employees, including roughly 150 in Massachusetts, are still owed at least one week's pay, vacation time, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses that were promised as part of the liquidation sale, said the managers and executives who declined to be named because they are still owed money. Customers are unable to pick up merchandise they had already purchased and the liquidators handling the closing also have not been paid. Meanwhile, there is roughly $14 million worth of goods left in the locked stores.

The Globe's sources say that while Tweeter's owner, Schultze Asset Management, paid off the company's largest creditor, Wells Fargo, it didn't want to continue covering the costs of shutting down the business. So Schultze locked the doors five days early and told managers not to come to work anymore.

Nokia N97

(Credit: Nokia)

Twenty-four hours after teasing us with news of a major product announcement, Nokia officially took the wraps off its mystery smartphone on Tuesday at the Nokia World 2008 conference in Barcelona, Spain. And despite some close guesses, no one got it quite right, so without further ado, let us introduce you to the Nokia N97.

Part of the company's high-end N series of multimedia computers, the N97 trumps all previous models with a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard and a tilting 3.5-inch touch screen (anyone else reminded of the AT&T Tilt or Sony Ericsson Xperia X1?). Yes, there's the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, but the N97 includes phone capabilities and is designed for the "needs of Internet-savvy consumers."

For example, the smartphone provides easy access to a number of social-networking sites, and the Web browser supports streaming Flash videos. The N97 also introduces something Nokia calls "social location," which uses the capabilities of the integrated A-GPS sensors and electronic compass to automatically update users' social networks, or let them share their location via photos or videos with friends.

The Home screen can be personalized with widgets of favorite Web and social-networking sites. Finally, the N97 is fully compatible with Nokia's Ovi Internet services, which include the Nokia Music Store, Nokia Maps, and the N-Gage gaming platform--though these services have yet to fully launch in the United States.

The Symbian-based smartphone also features a music and video player, a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, and a whopping 32GB of onboard memory that can be expanded with a 16GB microSD card.

The quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) world phone is HSDPA-capable handset, but it currently supports only the 900/1900/2100MHz bands (AT&T's 3G network runs on 850/1900MHz, while T-Mobile runs on 1700/2100MHz). There is integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, however.