Stories by Rick Broida

If you use your smartphone or tablet for work, you need to keep your data secure when you're on the go. We look at nine gadgets that try to keep your important data out of the hands of others.

It's no stretch to say that ads are what make the Web go 'round. The content you're reading right now? Paid for by ads. Google, Facebook, Pandora, YouTube? Driven by ads. This is not a new concept: TV and radio have relied on commercials since their earliest days. Because, let's face it, <em>something</em> has to pay for all the free programming and services.

With a starting price of just $299, the unlocked, Cyanogen-powered OnePlus One Android phone beats the bigger brands at their own game.

The mobile-phone industry is in a state of flux. Where once you had little choice but to buy a subsidized phone from a major carrier and pay two years' worth of whatever monthly fees it chose to levy, now you have options aplenty.

The new Leap Motion Controller brings motion control to any computer. The question is: How effective is it, and does it have any practical value?

Last week you learned how to avoid gridlock during your daily commute. Of course, you can't avoid that commute altogether, which is why it's smart to make the most of time you have to spend in the car (or, for that matter, on bus, plane, train, etc.).

If you've poked around PCWorld in recent weeks, you've learned how to download and install Windows 8 on a new hard-drive partition and how to install Windows 8 in a virtual machine. Today, let's talk about one of my favorite approaches for installing Windows 8, well, anywhere: by way of a flash drive.

My wife recently made the switch from a clunky old Android phone to a spiffy new iPhone 4S. When she asked if all her contacts could be moved from the former to the latter, I confidently replied, "Sure, no problem!" After all, Android phones sync with Google Contacts, and iTunes has the ability to do likewise. Easy-peasy, right?

True story: I'd been getting fed up with Firefox, in part because it was acting sluggish and flaky, so I decided to give Google's Chrome browser a try. And by "try," I mean make it my primary browser for a couple weeks.

Reader Patricia has a question: "Why can't application software be put on USB drives instead of [hard] disks?"

As you may recall, Amazon recently unveiled its new Cloud Drive service, which provides 5GB of free online storage. (Elsewhere I explained how you could bump your limit to 20GB for under a buck.) The only downside? To access it, you have to use Amazon's Web-based interface. It's not bad, but not nearly as convenient as, say, a local hard drive.

Among the many reasons I'm partial to Firefox is that Mozilla's browser has long offered a built-in spell checker. (Not that I need it, of course -- we payd riters learnt gud speling in skool.)

Much as everyone loves Microsoft's Windows 7, not everyone has made the move yet. Plenty of folks are clinging to Windows XP for dear life, while others just didn't see enough reason to upgrade from Vista. After all, it's not like Microsoft is giving Windows 7 away for free.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a "feature," but it's definitely annoying.

Yesterday I told you how to tweak Firefox 4 so it would allow incompatible add-ons to run. One of my primary motivations for doing so was the PermaTabs Mod add-on, which I use religiously to keep tabs open from one browsing session to the next. (Ironically, that extension came into being because its predecessor, PermaTabs, was incompatible with Firefox 3.)