portable

How many phones does a person need, anyway?

Chances are you're paying more for telephone service than you need to. If you've been tempted to drop your landline but hesitated because you didn't want to lose your old phone number, get ready to save some dough.

NetTalk is one of a handful of VoIP services that port your existing number to an inexpensive Internet-phone account. Visit the NetTalk porting page to determine whether your current number is portable. If it is, you can submit a Number Porting Authorization when you complete your order or afterward by signing … Read more

The WD My Passport, the first-ever 2TB portable drive WD introduced last week, turned out to be pretty impressive.

Despite the fact that it offers the top capacity for 2.5-inch-based drives that use the current perpendicular recording technology, the drive is also compact and light. In fact, it's more compact than the My Passport Studio that offers just half of its storage space.

Originally, it was predicted that for 2.5-inch internal drives -- those housed inside portable drives like the new My Passport -- to reach 2TB, a new recording technology would be required. WD's My … Read more

Editors' note: This blog was originally posted on March 30, 2012, and updated on March 29, 2013, to update the list of devices and add relevant information.

This last Sunday of March is World Backup Day, and you'll see a lot of storage/backup vendors taking this occasion to pitch their products. I am about to do a similar thing, but from a very different point of view: yours.

This is because none of the existing vendors goes as far as guaranteeing the integrity of storage on the products. At most, a vendor would give you a new product to replace the broken one, or in the currently unique case of IoSafe, offer to pay up to a certain amount toward data recovery. I, on the other hand, promise, if not guarantee, that if you follow my advice, your data will be safe.… Read more

If you've been watching "American Idol," you've probably seen a commercial or two for the $399 Beats by Dr. Dre Beatbox Portable audio system, which allows you to stream music wirelessly from your Bluetooth-enabled smartphone or tablet and is available exclusively through AT&T stores. But few people know that AT&T actually has its own portable Bluetooth speaker sans Beats logo. And it's shipping now.

It's called the LoudSpeak'r.

No, that's not a typo. The LoudSpeak'r follows in the footsteps of the Casio G'zOne (see 20 worst-named tech products for reference), … Read more

Gasoline makes cars go, coffee makes people go. And somehow it all goes together.

The fuel that makes us go is nothing like the fuel that makes our cars go. Yet, they both do have their similarities; nobody and nothing is budging an inch until we get what we need. If that means fueling up on the go, then so be it.

While a method for mobile fueling of cars is impractical, humans do not have to look far to find a caffeine fix. Faster than a drive-through window and quicker than a corner cafe, the Handpresso Auto offers up … Read more

Is your 16GB iPad feeling the storage pinch? Are you wishing Amazon had squeezed more than 8GB into the Kindle Fire? Here's the rub: Kindle Fires and iDevices lack expansion capabilities, so you're pretty much stuck with what you've got.

Or not, thanks to the Kingston Wi-Drive. It offers wireless, portable storage for select phones and tablets.

The big downside has always been the price, but Adorama now has the 16GB Kingston Wi-Drive for $44.95 shipped. That's a heckuva lot more reasonable than the original $129.99 list price.

The gizmo measures 4.78 inches … Read more

Western Digital announced late yesterday the first single-volume portable external hard drive on the market that offers 2TB of storage, 500GB more than the second-highest-capacity portable drive of its type, the GoFlex Ultraportable of Seagate.

The new drive belongs to the My Passport family which, prior to this, offered up to 1TB of storage space. Despite the doubling of the capacity, the new 2.5-inch drive remains compact, bus-powered, and portable. WD says it supports USB 3.0 and USB 2.0, and is preformatted using NTFS but can be easily reformatted for Mac OS.… Read more

Do you like wires? Neither do we. And thankfully, you don't really need them anymore when you're using a smartphone.

No matter your preference -- iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry -- any decent modern smartphone is equipped with wireless Bluetooth capability. In addition to hands-free calling with headsets and stereo headphones, phones can also be used as wireless music sources for an increasingly large array of Bluetooth speakers -- perfect for listening to MP3s on the phone, or Web-based audio services like Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Cloud Player, iTunes Match, or anything else.

As someone who uses Bluetooth gadgets daily, I'd frankly feel lost without my handy assortment of hands-free mobile toys. And I've collected a list of some of CNET's favorites. … Read more

The Tivoli Audio PAL (Portable Audio Laboratory) radio is pretty small, just 6.25 by 3.7 by 3.9 inches, and it weighs a little under 2 pounds. It has just one 2.5-inch "full-range" speaker, but the little radio is one of my all-time favorite products. The battery-powered PAL is "wireless," because radio was, after all, the original widespread wireless format.

The PAL is dead simple to use: turn it on, select AM or FM radio, and tune to the station you love. You can also plug an iPod, or any device, into the … Read more