Stories by: Yardena Arar

Last October, I wrote about Assurz, a service that-for a small up-front surcharge-would let you return anything you bought at a participating retailer, on very generous terms: no questions asked, a 90-day window, and no shipping charges or restocking fees. Sadly, Assurz is no more. The gist of the story is that Assurz filed for bankruptcy protection in late June after informing its retail partners that it was ending service because of excessively high return rates. What a shock: Whoever came up with the company's business model apparently didn't anticipate that the type of person who'd sign up for the service would be far likelier than the average customer to use it.

Amid swirling rumours about the impending announcement of a 3G iPhone, Research in Motion today introduced its slickest, speediest, most powerful, and most connected BlackBerry to date: the BlackBerry Bold 9000.

Sony Ericsson's Xperia X1 Takes the Windows Mobile Plunge at the Mobile World Congress.

A future version of Bluetooth will be able to increase throughput for sending videos, music, and other high-bandwidth applications by using a nearby Wi-Fi network, the group in charge of Bluetooth development says.

The GPS gold rush is in full swing at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, with industry veterans introducing increasingly sophisticated navigation systems while newcomers try to get a foot in the door.

Wave your cell phone at a Coke machine, hit a couple of keypad keys, and moments later an ice-cold beverage tumbles into your hand. Lack of loose change (or a credit card) becomes no barrier to the pause that refreshes.

Hewlett Packard Monday unveiled its first smart phone, a slimmed-down iPaq that will be among the first Windows Mobile 6 handsets when it appears, probably in late spring, officials say.

Office for Mac users who've been wondering about a new version -- and Office 2007 compatibility -- got some answers on Tuesday as Microsoft said it will ship Office for Mac 2008 by year's end.

To you or me, it's a communications device, good for making phone calls, sending text messages to friends and colleagues, and maybe checking e-mail or looking up something on the Web. But to marketers, your cell phone is an enticing potential conduit to your wallet--and the race to exploit it is gathering steam.

Power-line networks -- networks that use the existing electrical wiring in your residence or small office -- may yet prove the dark horse of home networking technologies.

Customers of the PayTrust online bill pay service are now customers of Intuit, publisher of the popular Quicken, Quickbooks, and TurboTax personal and small-business finance software packages.