When your cool new LTE phone loses touch with your LTE network, the 3G radio inside the phone will immediately connect to the older 3G network for your data service. But 3G is slower, so the downshift needs to be a smooth one—one that doesn’t yank you down to a speed so slow, you can’t continue what you’re doing.

If such a jolt were to happen while you're watching streaming video, your movie might might begin to stutter, playing in fits and starts. It might even stop working altogether.

That’s why a comparison of the major national carriers’ combined 3G and 4G speed is important. The fastest LTE speeds can be easily forgotten if your backup 3G service slows throughput to a trickle.

TechHive benchmarked nationwide wireless speeds throughout March and April, and our 20-city tests show that AT&T’s LTE service and HSPA+ service offer the fastest combination of 4G and 3G for dual-mode smartphones and tablets. AT&T’s LTE service showed average download speeds of 13.15 megabits per second, and average upload speeds of a solid 6.45 mbps across our 20 testing cities.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In this week’s tip, I’ll discuss a cool feature that you may be wholly unaware of—even if you're a long-time Mac user.

In Lion and Mountain Lion, click the Apple menu and choose About This Mac. Yeah, yeah, you’ve seen this before. But now click More Info.

In the old days, you'd be taken to System Profiler, and you’d see a fairly drab list of specs about your Mac—which you can still see in Mountain Lion by choosing Show System Report from the File menu. But now More Info offers a slicker view that puts your Mac’s most important information front and center.

For example, if you need to quickly find out exactly which MacBook Air you have, the Overview screen tells you. Need your serial number? It’s here too—and you can create a text snippet of it by highlighting it and dragging it to the desktop.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

For the third year in a row, we hit the road and tested mobile wireless network speeds across the country, putting the four largest mobile networks—AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile—head-to-head. Our approach to testing wireless service has always been to closely replicate how people use wireless service in the real world, and then measure how well it really works. That’s why we do the testing ourselves, instead of crowdsourcing the testing data, as other studies often do exclusively.

We take great care to measure the various services under similar and repeatable conditions: We use the same devices, so that the comparisons we make afterward really say something about the relative values of each.

Our wireless testing methods and madness

We chose our test cities for their varying population densities, physical topography, and cellular environments.

Our 20 testing cities were Ann Arbor (Michigan), Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City (Missouri), Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Omaha, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose (California), Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Saving a destination in Google Maps makes it easier to navigate to and also lessens the chance for error when entering or trying to remember an address.

Nick Barber

Destinations can be starred from a mobile device running Google Maps or from the Web. After searching for an address or location, click on the pin for the destination and switch on the star icon. Starred destinations will be synched across all Google accounts and devices. Starred destinations are easier to find and will type ahead on both mobile and desktop versions of Google Maps. Starring locations is a good idea for local errands and for vacations and business trips to other states and countries.

When traveling to a place with unreliable mobile data reception or expensive data rates, it’s also a good idea to save an offline version of Google Maps. Once in the application on a mobile device, press the options button and select “make available offline.” Pan and zoom the map until the area to be downloaded is highlighted. Click “done” and the map will be downloaded to the mobile device and be able to be used when mobile data isn’t available.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google had a lot to say during Wednesday’s Google I/O keynote—so would you, if you had three-and-a-half hours to fill. And while new features in voice-powered search functionality, Google Maps, and other pronouncements from the search giant were certainly eye-catching, just how much of what was said at this week’s developer conference should make iOS device owners sit up and take notice?

Quite a bit, actually, though there was nothing that'll cause a parade of iPhone and iPad users to swap their devices for the Android counterparts. With the understanding that Google will still need to deliver on many of the promises it made this week—and that Apple has a developers conference of its own in a month’s time—more than a few Google I/O announcements deserve your attention, even if the only way you’ll give up your iPhone is when it’s pried out of your grip. After all, it’s a safe bet that more than a few people in Cupertino were keeping a close eye on Google I/O this week.

For developers

I/O is a developers’ confab first and foremost, so it stands to reason that Google would start off its keynote highlighting new tools and features with special appeal for software makers.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Panic's $10 Status Board for the iPad is an app that fits a niche so spectacularly, it leaves you kind of breathless. Designed to display and update data from a variety of sources, Status Board offers an amazingly customizable way to display your most important data on almost any screen, from your iPad to an HDTV.

It's important to note that Status Board is a niche tool; it’s not something you're likely to use casually at home or if you only have one iPad. But it is perfectly suited to situations where you want to publicly display specific information that's updated on a regular basis.

Open Status Board for the first time, and the app walks you through a quick setup process to configure and create some of the app's prefabbed status panels. These panels are little rectangles of data you can move, resize, and rearrange in almost any way you choose. By default, the app comes pre-loaded with calendar, clock, and weather panels, and can also display Twitter timelines, RSS news feeds, and the subject line of your latest email messages.

Some of the panels allow you to customize the way your data is displayed. So, for example, your Twitter, email, and news feeds can be displayed as either a list or as a ticker; the ticker shows one message at a time, and it slides across the screen, sits for a couple of seconds so you can read it, then slides the next update into view. I loved the ticker feed, but was disappointed there was no option for adjusting the delay setting to something slower of faster than Status Board's defaults. 

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Searching Google is a quick way to find information, but more advanced functions can help users find more helpful information faster.

Travel is one category where Google is very useful. Type in a flight number such as “United 1111” and Google will return the flight status. Type in “time in Japan” and Google will show the local time there. Google makes converting measurements, be it miles to kilometers or teaspoons to millimeters, easy to figure out as well.

Nick Barber

Forcing Google to return more specific results can be achieved by putting a search term in quotations. For example, searching “chocolate chip cookies” will only return results that have those three words in exactly that order.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A new feature released Tuesday from children’s app maker Kidaptive lets parents track the progress of what their children are l

Error 500

Internal Server Error

Looks like something has gone wrong in the plumbing. We'll be fixing this just as soon as we can.