HTC Touch Diamond

On Monday, HTC, the manufacturer of many of today's popular smartphones, announced its acquisition of San Francisco-based design firm One & Company Design, Inc (One & Co). A design company? Weird, right? Actually, not really.

If you've followed HTC over the years, ...

As if your company shutting right before the holidays weren't bad enough.

Regional electronics dealer Tweeter, scheduled to close its doors December 7, on Tuesday suddenly closed down all its stores. Six hundred employees at 70 stores were fired immediately. Many employees are still owed back pay, and some customers are still owed merchandise that has already been paid for, according to The Boston Globe, which cites five unnamed store managers and executives.

According to the Globe:

The employees, including roughly 150 in Massachusetts, are still owed at least one week's pay, vacation time, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses that were promised as part of the liquidation sale, said the managers and executives who declined to be named because they are still owed money. Customers are unable to pick up merchandise they had already purchased and the liquidators handling the closing also have not been paid. Meanwhile, there is roughly $14 million worth of goods left in the locked stores.

The Globe's sources say that while Tweeter's owner, Schultze Asset Management, paid off the company's largest creditor, Wells Fargo, it didn't want to continue covering the costs of shutting down the business. So Schultze locked the doors five days early and told managers not to come to work anymore.

While I'm not yet sold on the idea of cell phones as gifts (really, a two-year contract is the gift that keeps on taking), I have to like AT&T's new mobile phone holiday gift finder.

It's a Flash-based Web site that lets you ...

T-Mobile Shadow II

(Credit: Phone Scoop)

In recent months, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint have done a pretty good job updating its smartphone lineups, but T-Mobile seems to be lagging in this area. Aside from the T-Mobile G1 and the RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip, we haven't seen ...

If you're a regular Crave reader, you know about the runaway popularity of the Asus Eee PC, the grandfather of the Netbook category. But the company's attempts to roll that success into a small-form-factor desktop, the Eee Box, have thus far fallen flat.

That hasn't stopped the ...

You're lost in the woods and it's getting darker. Wouldn't it be nice if the two items most essential to you finding your way out before night falls (not counting a GPS unit) were rolled into one convenient little package? Boston-based designer Owen Song ...

Fujitsu Siemens delivered an early holiday present to its U.K. customers late last week when it announced the "LifeBook4Life" program.

Essentially, anyone in the U.K. who buys a select LifeBook laptop and a three-year warranty will be entitled to trade the system in for a replacement laptop (of "...

Lisa scores a MyPod--wackiness ensues.

(Credit: Fox Television)

Apple's new in-ear headphones are out, and Donald and Jasmine can't help but poke a little fun with the help of a recent Simpsons episode.

Also this week, the MP3 Insiders discuss Donald's favorite gadgets from 2008, as well as which portable audio gadgets make good gifts (and which don't).

Plus, things get a little heated when copyrights and the RIAA enter a conversation on digitizing audio.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

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Originally posted at MP3 Insider

Iomega continues to impress us with its sexy, sleek external hard drives. We just recently reviewed the eGo Helium, a drive catered to Apple fanboys. There's also the eGo Camo that's ...

Like sliding down snowy slopes while standing on thin planks of wood? How about throwing yourself out of planes, or shouting "gnarly!" at the top of your voice? If so, you might want to check out the Oregon Scientific ATC3K Extreme hands-free camcorder--the successor to the ATC2K. ...