fitness

Xbox Kinect users can now see how many calories they're actually shedding as they jump, dance, and shake to their favorite games.

Available today as a free download for Xbox Live subscribers, Kinect PlayFit is a fitness dashboard that counts the calories you burn as you play certain Kinect games, including Dance Central 2, Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012, and even Kinect Star Wars.

You can also follow your calorie count over time to see how much you're losing as you do the Zumba or swing that lightsaber.

You can even get credit depending on how many calories … Read more

It was probably 10 years ago when I heard my first custom headphones, and I couldn't get over the sound. It was an Ultimate Ears UE-5 model, and the level of detail was so much better than any previous headphones I'd tried. The custom earpieces' superior noise-isolation dividends were also part of the appeal, because as the background noise level goes down, the apparent detail goes up. With less environmental noise overpowering the subtle/quiet details in the music, I could listen at lower volume levels. Once you've experienced what custom-molded headphones can do, it's hard … Read more

What a week for Panasonic. Of all the products CNET reviewed this week, the company scored the best ratings for both the most expensive gadget and the cheapest. There must be some sort of award for that. (Actually, there isn't, but there should be.)

The Panasonic TC-P65VT50 (affectionately known around these parts as the "VT50") is a 65-inch plasma TV that nabbed the hardest-won praise of all: A glowing review from our own David Katzmaier. Katzmaier gets right to the point in his review, explaining that the whole line of TVs in the VT50's series have &… Read more

LOS ANGELES--Nintendo had already unveiled the Wii U well before E3 started, but there were a lot of things going into this show that we didn't know. Nintendo's keynote spent a great deal of time detailing what the Wii U can do, what its online and app services are, and what games we can expect to see. A small amount of time was also spent on the Nintendo 3DS, but today's event was clearly dedicated to the Wii U.

What we didn't get, however, was a date and price. Not surprising, but anticlimactic all the same.… Read more

Adidas' miCoach service, which is essentially its answer to Nike+, will be playing a major role in the Major League Soccer All-Star Game in July.

According to the company, the MLS game will be the world's "first smart soccer match," allowing coaches to track player performance on the pitch. Adidas hasn't revealed too many details on how the service will work, but it appears that coaches will be able to access real-time player statistics, including speed, acceleration, and power output, from a tablet. The software also provides alerts coaches might need to consider.

Although Adidas calls its player-tracking software the "next step in player performance analysis technology," it might make some sport purists take a step back. The kind of information to be made available to the MLS All-Star Game coaches is unlike anything they've had before. And that kind of data could make the game more reliant upon raw data than instinctual decision-making -- a key aspect of soccer since its inception.… Read more

Spring has sprung and that means summer is right around the corner. If you still haven't worked off those extra winter pounds, it's high time to start before swimsuit and tank top weather cruelly arrives. Luckily, there are new mobile accessories that harness wireless technology, competitive behavior, social media, and other online tools to help couch potatoes catch the exercise bug.… Read more

As an avid gym-goer and outdoor person who's dependent on her music and fitness apps, my phone has become my best workout buddy. (After all, it never flakes on me.)

I'm not alone, and for me and the many others who rely on their phones for fitness, storing our phones while breaking a sweat isn't always a simple task. Sure, you can shove it in your sports bra, stick it in your waistband, or just hold it in your hand, but come on -- that's gross.

Web sites like Amazon are chock-full of workout armbands for … Read more

Unless you've been living under a rock, no doubt you've heard all about Apple's new iPad. It comes packed with plenty of welcome upgrades. Among these are a crisp Retina display, a new A5X processor with quad-core graphics to drive all those pixels, and an optional 4G LTE connection for swift cellular data. What slipped under the radar, though, was the iPad's Bluetooth 4.0 support. … Read more

Bluetooth, once trumpeted as the ultimate convenience, quickly proved a headache with plenty of pairing problems and inexplicable connection snafus. Bluetooth 4.0, the newest version of the technology, is about to change all that. … Read more