TechBytes: iPhone Issues

July 14, 2010— -- Consumer Reports is keeping the heat on Apple. In a blog posting, the magazine says it is Apple's responsibility to fix the iPhone's antenna problem at no extra cost to consumers. On Monday, Consumer Reports said it cannot recommend the iPhone 4, despite the fact that it was the magazine's highest rated smartphone. Some bloggers and others now want Apple to recall the device, but many analysts say the company may just ignore them.

Netflix is facing some new competition on the iPad. A new service called mSpot is offering another way to stream movies on the device. The company claims its app loads movies faster than Netflix, and has a wider selection of new releases. mSpot currently rents about 1,200 movies, at a cost of $2.99 to $3.99 each.

Facebook. Twitter. Linked-in. YouTube. Many of us are members of multiple social networking sites. Two new tools can help you keep tabs on all those sites at once. Flock is a web browser, and Yoono works with the Firefox and Chrome browsers. The Wall Street Journal's Katie Boehret says they help eliminate one step when keeping tabs on your friends. "I really like the idea of being able to check what was going on with my friends," Boehret said. "Both programs did a very nice job of keeping content in-line, in a thin panel that ran on the side of the web page, and included photos and lots of updates that refreshed automatically without me having to do anything." Both programs are free.

The Eagles sang "you can't hide your lyin' eyes," and thanks to some new technology that will soon be true. Researchers at the University of Utah have developed eye-tracking lie detection technology. They say it's at least as good as polygraph testing. It's also cheaper, faster and you don't have to attach anything to the subject.