users

A lot of smartphones come through our offices here at CNET, and we put each one of them through their paces; some pass with flying colors and others we'd rather take a pass on. However, at the end of the day, it's you, our readers, who are the harshest critics. After all, you're the ones living with and using these gadgets every day, and while we have our own list of editors' favorites, we also definitely pay attention to user ratings and opinions.

In the photo gallery below, you'll find 10 of our readers' favorite smartphones, all of which received a user rating of 4 stars or above. They're presented in no particular order and we've included our bottom line as well as a reader's comment to give you an example of why these devices are so well-loved.

Also, be sure to check out our list of CNET readers' least favorite smartphones.

… Read more

Twitter has long said that its business is growing, but earlier today at a press conference at its headquarters in San Francisco, the company offered up a host of stats to prove it.

According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, whose comments were reported on by Search Engine Land, the service now has 100 million monthly active users worldwide. Out of that group, 50 million folks log in to the service every day, Costolo said.

Twitter's growth over the last several months has been nothing short of astounding. The firm reported, according to Search Engine Land, that its monthly active … Read more

In OS X, the creation of separate user accounts is useful not only for keeping work and private documents separate, but also so users can have their own settings and system customizations that will not interfere with those of other users. User accounts can be added or removed in the Accounts System Preferences (called Users and Groups in Lion), but in some situations, people are finding that they cannot remove some accounts from their systems, and when they try the accounts will show up the next time they open Accounts.

Account access and management problems may happen when you perform … Read more

The four-tuner Tivo Premiere Elite makes its debut, Netflix cracks down on people who stream more than one video at the same time, and Yahoo's board fires CEO Carol Bartz after less than three years on the job.

Links from Wednesday's episode of Loaded:

Windows 8 will usher in yet another revision to the file management system used by millions of people.

A blog post today by Microsoft Director of Program Management Alex Simons details at great length the future of the new Explorer interface, and lessons learned from previous versions.

One fascinating aspect brought up from Microsoft collecting hundreds of millions of anonymous usage reports (from Windows users) is that despite having over 200 commands in Explorer, "the top 10 commands represent 81.8% of total usage" (such as paste, properties, copy, and delete). Many commands go unused.

Microsoft found that the context menu from right-clicking an object is usually the main method of entering commands at 54.5 percent, with keyboard shortcuts coming in second at 32.2 percent.

It was found that the command bar--the most visible feature of Vista and 7's Explorer menu--contains two of the top 10 commands used overall in Explorer, and was only used a measly 10.9 percent during file management sessions. Therein lies the opportunity for change, Simons said. … Read more

Acronis, the maker of the arguably most effective True Image backup software solution, announced today the latest version of its True Image Home 2012. Among other features and improvements, the software now offers file synchronization. This is the first time this feature is included in the company's line of disk-imaging products, which are generally designed to store backups in a proprietary "image" format, which requires backup software for the recovery process.

File synchronization, on the other hand, means that the exact copies of the data are kept in real time at different locations. This allows people to … Read more

Announced just month ago, Clickfree's C6 portable drive is an upgrade to the company's C2N. The new drive now adds the ability to back up the entire system (imaging) and restore it, in case of a crash or virus infection.

Supporting USB 3.0, the C6 is very fast, topping the charts of portable drives. The drive can also be used to boot the computer, a standard way to restore the computer back to its original working state or move the system to a new hard drive.

On the downsize, the C6 stores backups in a proprietary format, … Read more

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Android 3.2 coming to tablets

Google Maps stops traffic estimates

iUsers enables mutliple users on iPad

Microsoft working secretly on social

No more easy passwords for Hotmail

YouTube captions help to make the service accessible to all types of users. With that in mind, if you want to add auto-captioning (based on speech) to every video you load, you can. Or if you want to disable all types of captioning, you can do that too. Follow these quick steps to find out how to get to these settings:

Step 1: Log in to YouTube so you can access your personal settings.

Step 2: Click your username in the top right to open a small menu, and then choose Settings.

Step 3: Choose "Playback Setup" from … Read more