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Instagrille for Pokki is a hybrid Instagram-focused tool that is useful but also frustrating in terms of its requirements. Because it forces installation of Pokki, creates irremovable quick launch icons, and creates a native app-interface on your PC that you may not want, it has its trade-offs, though the interface is decidedly stripped down, offering a useful way to browse Instagram on your desktop.

Installation will take some time as you need to also install Pokki and new menu items are created as the app-interface is generated on your desktop. To open Instagrille, you must open Pokki first and find … Read more

Last year Panasonic introduced intrusive advertising in the form of pop-up banner ads on its Smart TVs, and unfortunately the company has decided to continue the practice this year.

But that's not the only potentially annoying thing about the new interface. When you first turn it on the TV also defaults to a new Home screen filled with apps you'll mostly never use, like a calendar. Your actual TV show is relegated to an inset window until you actively select and expand it.

Banner ads are the way of life for Web sites and many apps, as advertising … Read more

With a rather basic but intuitive interface, SimpleImage for Mac offers more control and customization options for viewing images, videos, and slideshows. In addition to being a viewer, the program offers some useful image editing options, as well.

At around 26MB the download takes a couple of minutes to complete. The program installs in just a few seconds, though, with a drag and drop in Mac's Applications folder. Upon startup the only window visible is the Inspector window, which displays relevant information regarding the file currently opened. Apart from being a typical image and movie viewer, SimpleImage for Mac … Read more

Panasonic has been "kicking goals" for years with its plasma range but has struggled to produce competitive LED LCDs. While its performance is seemingly a bit better than the previous model, which put up one of the worst pictures of last year, the new DT60 still flounders against its 2013 peers.

The DT60 offers a striking design, probably one of the company's best ever, and nifty features such as voice search. Its picture quality is just mediocre though, for while color is better than last year, black levels are similarly poor -- and I simply expect much … Read more

TAIPEI -- There have been plenty of Haswell laptops unveiled at Computex here this year, but so far only one model comes with a 3K screen.

At 2,880x1,620 pixels, the MSI GT60 3K Edition's 15.5-inch display boasts a high 213 pixel-per-inch (ppi) density. This makes it almost neck-and-neck with the Google Chromebook Pixel and Apple MacBook Pro with its Retina display.

A laptop with such high-resolution display will naturally need some serious processing power to drive it. That's probably why the Taiwanese company paired the GT60 3K with an Nvidia GeForce GTX780M discrete GPU (4GB … Read more

Sharp makes some of the biggest TVs in the world, so it's not surprising that the company is applying its plus-size worldview to sound bars.

The Sharp HT-SB60 ($320 street) is a startlingly long sound bar, designed to pair up with TVs 60 inches and up. That length may give it a more balanced look under your own personal Jumbotron, but it also allows the HT-SB60 to produce some fantastic sound quality, surpassing that of smaller sound bars in the same price range. There's also enough space on the back for two HDMI inputs, giving you more flexibility … Read more

The odds are you are not just a face in the crowd any longer. Even if your picture isn't plastered all over social-networking and photo-sharing sites, facial recognition technology in public places is making it harder if not impossible to remain anonymous.

Lesley Stahl reports on the new ways this technology is being used that even has one of its inventors calling it too intrusive. Her "60 Minutes" report will be broadcast Sunday, May 19 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Professor Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon, who researches how technology impacts privacy, stunned Stahl with an … Read more

No one can deny the popularity of sound bar speakers, but I've always been frustrated by their sound quality. There were exceptions; the $899 Atlantic Technology PB-235 and $699 SpeakerCraft CS3 are quite good, but in the more popular $300-to-$400 range the 'bars weren't all that great. Granted, they were a big step up from TV speakers, but their sound was still a compromise, compared with what's available from the better $300-to-$400 Emotiva and Audioengine self-powered stereo speakers (they get hooked up from your TV's stereo analog jacks).

A few weeks ago I spent … Read more

In the event's most closely fought battle in years, the Samsung PNF8500 series plasma TV emerged as the winner of the annual Value Electronics Flat Panel Shootout. It narrowly defeated the Panasonic VT60 and ZT60 series plasmas in the final voting by the public in attendance.

The event, in its ninth year, included a field of three Panasonic TVs (ZT60, VT60, and WT60 LED), two Samsungs (the PNF8500 plasma and UNF8000 LED) and Sony's 4K/Ultra HD XBR-X900A.

The lineup also included a 50-inch Pioneer Kuro KRP-500M, which was used primarily to test Panasonic's claim that its … Read more