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Apple continues to be the industry's top device maker, at least in the number of ad impressions recorded by Millennial Media for its September Mobile Mix report.

For the second quarter of 2012, Apple took home a leading 31 percent of all ad impressions (the number of times an ad is displayed). The iPhone retained its top spot among the top 20 handsets, accounting for almost 16 percent of all impressions.

Samsung captured 22 percent of all impressions to win second place among the top 15 phone makers. The company saw eight of its phones on the top 20 … Read more

iPhone owners continue to be the most satisfied smartphone customers of all, at least according to new survey results from J.D. Power and Associates.

For the eighth time in a row, Apple's flagship phone took home top honors for customer satisfaction. Ranking 849 out of 1,000, the iPhone shined in all of the categories tallied by J.D. Power but scored especially well in physical design and overall ease of use.

Based on two separate studies, the results revealed consumer satisfaction with both feature phones and smartphones in performance, ease of operation, physical design, and features. Only … Read more

Mobile phone customers can choose from even more contract-free plans from RadioShack as of today.

Four new plans are available altogether through Cricket Wireless -- two for feature phones and two for smartphones.

The $25-per-month feature phone plan offers 300 voice minutes, while the $35 plan raises that to 1,000 minutes. Both plans up the ante with unlimited data access, unlimited texting, call waiting, and three-way calling.

The $50-per-month smartphone plan adds unlimited voice minutes and promises that the first gigabyte of data will run at full 3G speeds. The $60 plan offers the first 2.5GB of data … Read more

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about AV receiver feature glut. Today's receiver manufacturers put an inordinate amount of time and money into designing feature-laden receivers, and feature glut might be part of the reason why today's receivers don't sound as good as receivers did in the 1980s. I get it, today's consumers rarely compare one receiver's sound with another receiver, but they can count HDMI connections, so that's where the money goes.

It's not that Denon, Onkyo, Pioneer, Sony, and Yamaha aren't trying to make great-sounding receivers, … Read more

With the release of iOS 6 highly likely in September (concurrent with the expected iPhone 5 announcement), the rumors around unannounced feature changes at tech sites are reaching an all-time high, so I decided to round up some of the big ones here. We already know about the main features in iOS 6 Apple announced at WWDC in June, but this list is more about leaked info that other sites are talking about. Obviously, we can't know for sure if any of these will be true at launch, but it's always fun to talk about what might be … Read more

Nokia has decided to nix plans to launch a new software platform for feature phones, according to a new report.

The mobile company was working on a new software platform called Meltemi to replace Series 40, Reuters is reporting today, citing sources. However, the platform, which was Linux-based, has been quietly discontinued by the company. Reuters' sources did not say why Nokia made the decision.

Series 40 was first introduced in 1999. The platform, which runs on some of the top feature phones in the world, proved wildly popular. Earlier this year, in fact, Nokia celebrated the sale of the 1.5 billionth Series 40 device. … Read more

The number of U.S. mobile phone subscribers switching from feature phones to smartphones is almost at the halfway mark, according to a new report from ComScore.

Roughly 110 million Americans owned a smartphone device as of April 2012, an increase of 44 percent from the previous year. Specifically, 47.5 percent of feature phone owners switched to a smartphone when buying a new device in April -- up from 38 percent at the same time in 2011.

At the same time, the number of American consumers who upgraded from an old feature phone to a feature phone decreased from … Read more

Maybe you don't care how many features a TV has. Maybe you just want to see the coolest design going. Maybe all you want is the best bang for your buck, or the best picture regardless of cost.

Lucky for you, CNET's reviews have subratings. All of our TV reviews are rated according to four criteria -- Design, Features, Picture quality, and Value -- that are weighted, sifted, and centrifuged into the overall star rating.

Unfortunately you can't sort CNET's TV reviews by subrating on the Web site yet, so in the meantime I present the four TVs that would be perched at the top of those sorted lists. Each scored the only "10" we've awarded so far this year in the subratings mentioned above; they're not perfect, but a "10" is as good as it gets. I also list runners-up and potential challengers in each subcategory.

Disagree? Sound off in comments! TL;DR? Click here!… Read more

Recently ditched your feature phone for a smartphone? You're not alone. Two out of three people in the U.S. who bought a new phone in the last three months opted for a smartphone, according to new data from research firm Nielsen.

During the second quarter of this year, "smartphone penetration continued to grow, with 54.9 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers owning smartphones as of June 2012," Nielsen wrote in a blog post today.

According to Nielsen, the smartphones of choice in the U.S. are Android, which has 51.8 percent of the country'… Read more