Personal Tech

You're packing your bags to head out of town for the holidays when you suddenly realize you forgot to buy something for your uncle or your friend Nick at work. It's too late to get something to them by mail, and you'd have to be a fool to brave the retail world to find that perfect gift. So how can you save yourself?

If you have two Benjamins to spend on holiday gear for a loved one (or even yourself), you have a range of choices--including robots, kooky Japanese watches, great graphics boards, brightly colored USB 3.0 storage, and more.

CIO.com's Al Sacco turned to the Twitterverse in search of the best lightweight and unobtrusive, yet protective iPhone 4 cases. Here are seven Apple-smartphone cases that fit the bill.

For years, using voice recognition technology on phones or other devices has been a novelty -- something people try once but never again, usually because it works so poorly. But recent developments, including harnessing the computational power of the cloud, have made it more usable and will make it even better in the near future, according to Microsoft.

Some pretty significant geeky things turned 25 this year. Join us as we honor the most memorable silver geekiversaries of 2010.

Take a look back at the pros and cons of life before HDTV, Facebook and Wi-Fi. You do remember life before texting, don't you?

Wander the television aisles at any consumer electronics store, and you'll see far more LCD sets than plasma sets. While the TV industry has pretty much standardized on LCD displays, which have a brighter picture and use less energy than plasmas, that doesn't mean that plasma is suddenly unpopular among its fans.

Apple fans love the iPhone, but they're not particularly thrilled with AT&T, which at press time was the exclusive iPhone carrier in the United States. Readers rate AT&T last in voice call quality and data speed, while Verizon Wireless is the overall favorite.

When it comes to technology advertising, there are two time-honored schools of thought. The first touts the many virtues of the featured product in an attempt to show that it's superior to competitors. The second makes an end run around reason, hires a celebrity, and has them do something ridiculous in the general vicinity of the product. From Mr. T playing nonexistent classes in World of Warcraft to Chuck Norris passing out, we've found the weirdest celebrity tech ads on the Web.

The Top Picks from the Cool Yule Elves from 2010

Make your Android device run longer, run smarter, and run almost anywhere with this collection of essential apps.

The conventional wisdom is that enterprises aren't impressed by Apple's shiny iDevices, perceiving them as a consumer play. Is that a fair assessment? And if so, could it change in the foreseeable future?