Stories by: Yardena Arar

Research in Motion's BlackBerry Storm looks handsome enough, but it will disappoint prospective buyers hoping for a credible touch-based iPhone alternative.

Using the Web to manage your money used to mean logging into a plethora of banks and other institutions to check balances and maybe pay bills. Now various next-generation Web services are building on these basics by offering one-stop account tracking plus tools and advice to help you stick to a budget, reach financial goals, or cope with money problems.

Want to idle away a few minutes--or hours? These sites will help you test your knowledge, name that tune, or write a haiku. You'll wonder where the time went.

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.

BuySafe.com rates e-commerce sites for security and privacy features, and offers merchants that it deems to be up to snuff the option of offering BuySafe's bonding service.

For those who were wondering whether Microsoft's Surface tabletop touch-sensitive computers were going to be anything more than retail sales tools, here's an update: The Surface is making its debut as a bar coffee table in Las Vegas on 11 June.

Apple's announcement of a next-generation 3G iPhone wasn't a big surprise for most people at Monday's World Wide Developers Conference. But the low prices at which the new models will debut -- US$199 with 8GB of memory and US$299 with 16GB -- certainly surprised me.

I'm a big fan of wireless mice, and at home -- where my only PCs are notebooks -- I've been using wireless optical notebook mice for years. All use a dongle, and while the dongles have been getting smaller, they're prone to breakage and sometimes I just lose the darn things.

The Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco's Moscone Center West, doesn't take up a huge amount of space: Startups predominate, and most don't have money for big flashy booths. But there's more cool new technology per square foot here than at many big trade shows.

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.