connected

Google+ for Android is a clean and intuitive mobile app that has all of the powers of its desktop counterpart save for the games and a few other minor features.

The Google+ app opens up to a dashboard of icons leading to the different sections of the service: Stream, Messenger, Photos, Profile, and Circles. As a whole, the interface looks and feels very much like the full desktop version of Google+, and navigating the app is incredibly intuitive.

Stream Stream is really the lifeblood of Google+. By default, this section of the app displays feeds for All Circles, Nearby Google+ … Read more

Devices like Apple's iPad are revolutionary for their myriad ways of accessing TV and movies, but discoverability across services is a huge pain. Example: knowing whether any Steven Spielberg movies are on Netflix streaming. Or, is your favorite TV show on Hulu, Netflix, or neither? Is it on iTunes, or maybe even Vudu? Fanhattan is an app that intends to help users tackle this problem by tying together a media-browsing interface and search that doubles as a launcher for those TV shows and movies. The app launched earlier this year, but a recent app update has added more features, including a Facebook connection. Is it the ultimate way to figure out what video to watch on your iPad? Well, it's close.… Read more

Several free Microsoft apps will be hopping aboard Nokia's Symbian phones by the end of the year.

As described in a blog yesterday, Microsoft and Nokia will deliver the apps in the form of free updates sometime during the fourth quarter. The updates will only be available to owners of phones running Symbian Belle, the latest update to the Symbian OS, or to those who upgrade from Symbian Anna to Belle.

The mobile apps and updates scheduled to roll out this year include:

The bottom line: Low-impact performance, strong security, and useful features are the hallmarks of Norton Internet Security 2012, one of the best security suites available.

Review: Editors' note: Portions of this review are based on CNET's review of Norton Internet Security 2011.

Over the past few years, Symantec has completed a course reversal for its Norton consumer Internet security suites. The massive package of security tools works better than it ever has before, with an impressive set of features, some useful new tools including remote management and download stability analysis, and third-party security efficacy benchmarks that are at the … Read more

Back-to-school shoppers looking for a space-saving printer to fit in a dorm room may find a match in Epson's newest desktop printer, the Stylus NX430. The company is so proud of its ultracompact chassis that it's inventing a new category for it, along the same lines as the Ultrabook, except the printer version is being touted as the Small-in-One. Get it?

Despite its small stature, the NX430 competes with larger models with an ample 2.5-inch touch panel and a vibrant screen for light-duty photo editing directly on the machine, superquiet operation, and the mobile benefits of Epson Connect, another proprietary way to print from the cloud by sending jobs to a unique e-mail address assigned to each printer.… Read more

Skype just got so easy your great-grandmother could use it without having to know anything about a sound card or any other input/output doohickeys that are more convoluted than President Harding and his confounding Teapot Dome scandal! (Look it up, millennials...)

Actually, there is one doohickey, but once it's all hooked up it looks an awful lot like a regular old cordless phone--with VoIP hidden inside. (No need to tell great-grandma about that last part, it will only confuse her--apologies to all technologically astute great-grandmothers out there, BTW.) It's the Freetalk ConnectMe home phone adapter for Skype, which connects to any regular old home phone.

You'll need to connect your PC to set things up the first time, but after that, Skype says you'll just need to make sure your broadband connection and phone are hooked into the adapter. If you keep your landline, you'll want to hook that in too, because the adapter allows you to switch back and forth between Skype and a regular phone line.… Read more

Most Internet users probably feel resigned to the speed of their connection, whatever it may be; there's no obvious way to improve it short of giving even more money to your ISP or getting new hardware. Internet Cell Boost questions that assumption by promising to increase Internet speeds by optimizing your network configurations. Although we can't swear that it will work for everyone, it did indeed show a definite improvement for us.

Before we tried Internet Cell Boost we ran a couple of online speed tests to get a baseline for our download and upload speeds. We launched … Read more

TomTom's Live connected navigation service gets more useful with the addition of travel-specific apps by Yelp, TripAdvisor, Expedia, and Twitter. The TomTom Go Live 1535M will be the first device to take advantage of the new functionality, with owners of the Go Live 2353M gaining parity through a software update this fall.

The new apps will live in the Services menu and, to be fair, "Services" is a more apt description of the new functions than "Applications," but we shan't split hairs. What most of the apps do is provide access to a wider selection of points of interest (POIs) than could be preinstalled on the unit, along with secondary information about those POIs.… Read more

There are all sorts of cool things that you can do with the wide array of cabin technologies available in cars today. You can make calls, search for destinations, and even remotely control certain aspects of your vehicle via a smartphone, but could you use your car's cabin technology to rip off a jewelry store?

BMW seems to think that you can and goes as far as to put together a video detailing how to do it in just 10 easy steps using its ConnectedDrive suite of conceptual cabin tech. The video also features the automaker's Vison ConnectedDrive … Read more