When your cool new LTE phone loses touch with your LTE network, the 3G radio inside the phone will immediately connect to the older 3G network for your data service. But 3G is slower, so the downshift needs to be a smooth one—one that doesn’t yank you down to a speed so slow, you can’t continue what you’re doing.

If such a jolt were to happen while you're watching streaming video, your movie might might begin to stutter, playing in fits and starts. It might even stop working altogether.

That’s why a comparison of the major national carriers’ combined 3G and 4G speed is important. The fastest LTE speeds can be easily forgotten if your backup 3G service slows throughput to a trickle.

TechHive benchmarked nationwide wireless speeds throughout March and April, and our 20-city tests show that AT&T’s LTE service and HSPA+ service offer the fastest combination of 4G and 3G for dual-mode smartphones and tablets. AT&T’s LTE service showed average download speeds of 13.15 megabits per second, and average upload speeds of a solid 6.45 mbps across our 20 testing cities.

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Following months of fevered rumor and speculation, Microsoft finally took the veil off the Xbox One, a console that furthers Redmond's efforts to take over your entire living room experience. The new system will come packaged with an updated version of the Kinect sensor and will be available “later this year." No price was announced.

The presenters on stage at Tuesday’s launch event consistently branded the new console as technology that will unify the living room and bring all of your entertainment—games, music, and movies—into one location. And with a bevy of impressive new functionality, it appears that the One might just be able to assume that role of one central device.

Microsoft is well aware that the television resides at the center of your entertainment universe. And the Xbox One wants to be the gatekeeper for those experiences. All of them.

Xbox owns your TV

Voice commands will be a big part of interacting with the One. While we can assume you'll still be able to navigate via your controller or Smart Glass app, Yusef Mehdi, Microsoft’s senior vice president of interactive entertainment, demonstrated how to navigate the One using voice commands and gesture control with the updated Kinect sensor.

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Sony and Lego are working together on creating a new generation of products that bridge the gap between toys and video games.

A team of researchers at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo is embedding tiny motors, cameras, and actuators into Lego blocks. One demonstration uses two small motorized Lego platforms, one of which is computer-controlled and will relentlessly pursue the other, which can be maneuvered using a wireless PlayStation controller or by hand.

Any combination of blocks can be built up on the platforms, and more platforms can be added. The system could be used to create Lego battles, or simply play tag. The research team has also added actuators that can cause Lego structures to crumble on demand, and camera blocks that can beam first-hand video of the action to tablets and smartphones.

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For the third year in a row, we hit the road and tested mobile wireless network speeds across the country, putting the four largest mobile networks—AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile—head-to-head. Our approach to testing wireless service has always been to closely replicate how people use wireless service in the real world, and then measure how well it really works. That’s why we do the testing ourselves, instead of crowdsourcing the testing data, as other studies often do exclusively.

We take great care to measure the various services under similar and repeatable conditions: We use the same devices, so that the comparisons we make afterward really say something about the relative values of each.

Our wireless testing methods and madness

We chose our test cities for their varying population densities, physical topography, and cellular environments.

Our 20 testing cities were Ann Arbor (Michigan), Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City (Missouri), Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Omaha, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose (California), Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

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Saving a destination in Google Maps makes it easier to navigate to and also lessens the chance for error when entering or trying to remember an address.

Nick Barber

Destinations can be starred from a mobile device running Google Maps or from the Web. After searching for an address or location, click on the pin for the destination and switch on the star icon. Starred destinations will be synched across all Google accounts and devices. Starred destinations are easier to find and will type ahead on both mobile and desktop versions of Google Maps. Starring locations is a good idea for local errands and for vacations and business trips to other states and countries.

When traveling to a place with unreliable mobile data reception or expensive data rates, it’s also a good idea to save an offline version of Google Maps. Once in the application on a mobile device, press the options button and select “make available offline.” Pan and zoom the map until the area to be downloaded is highlighted. Click “done” and the map will be downloaded to the mobile device and be able to be used when mobile data isn’t available.

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When Flickr announced its 1TB free storage giveaway on Monday, the company said it was offering you enough storage to “take a photo every hour for forty years” without filling up your allotment. Not content to wait four decades, hackers are already figuring out how to pack their Flickr storage with more than just photos and videos.

Two Github projects making the rounds on Hacker News Tuesday morning offer the ability to store any file type on Flick including documents, PDFs, and music files. Flickr currently allows only JPEG, GIF, and PNG uploads, as well as a variety of video formats including AVI, WMV, MPEG4, and OGG.

Read our hands-on with the revamped Flickr website

Both projects work in the same basic way: They take any file you want to upload and encode it into a PNG image file. That way Flickr believes you’re uploading an image, even though you’re actually uploading the latest Daft Punk album. The method appears to be working as of this writing, but don’t count on turning Flickr into a mega-Dropbox just yet.

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Google got a leg up on those who would tinker with its digital peepers by demonstrating its own hacks of its gadget at the I/O show for developers this week.

Among the hacks was rooting Google Glass to run Linux Ubuntu—although doing so may not be a good idea.

Unlike some hardware makers, Google encouraged Glass users to hack their wearable computers by showing them how to gain root access to them and running things like Bluetooth keyboards, Android apps, and even the Ubuntu version of Linux.

Google

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Another week, another gloriously inappropriate episode of TechWatch. In this cheeky jaunt, Carlos Rodela reports on the Amazon "coins" that no one wants or needs; a new social media play from Budweiser that's destined for trouble; and new technology that turns your smartphone into a stink bomb.

Because, you know, whipping out your smartphone in the middle of a fancy restaurant isn't sufficiently rude already.

Like what you see? Then make sure to watch the previous episode of TechWatch in which Carlos is haunted by Twitter- and Facebook-inspired hullucinations.