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Here are 9 cool web services which pay you for trading in your phone (or other old gadgets) you have lying around.  In order to help you pick one, we did a head to head acid test by picking 3 phones and comparing payouts from trading in each phone, from each site.

In recent years, almost all the most hyped and popular games have been sequels. And the rise of mobile gaming has been limited, turning video gaming into a solitary exercise rather than the social one she remembered growing up.

In all, Ice Cream Sandwich is a generous complement of clever features. The OS immediately elevates any phone past other Android competitors that may be considered for purchase. Voice dictation still falls far behind iOS, but aside from that and the vastly better selection of apps available for iOS, Android is easily just as enchanting to use, and markedly more robust.

STOCKHOLM - Visitors to a Stockholm hotel will be able to use mobile phones instead of keys to unlock the doors to their rooms.

Repeat visitors during a four-month trial will be able to check in through their phones before arrival and have their phones activated as "keys." They will then be able to skip the registration desk and unlock the door by holding the phone next to it.The short-range radio technology, known as Near Field Communication, is expected to be built into smart phones in the coming years. It is also envisioned for ticketing and card payments. Assa Abloy says it wanted to test the system before expanding it to other hotels, commercial buildings and homes.

But once people have the technology in their own phones, he said, it will save them time at check-in and improve security because the access credentials in a lost phone can be revoked remotely.

LEGOs and Lincoln Logs are for Luddites. Sifteo cubes are the new building blocks. Each cube has a 128-pixel color LCD screen, wireless connectivity, a 32-bit ARM microprocessor, and an accelerometer that responds to tilting and stacking. You can arrange them to create everything from vocabulary puzzles to building challenges, all of which can be enjoyed by as many people as you can crowd around the coffee table.

Sifteo founders Jeevan Kalanithi and David Merrill previewed the cubes at TED 2009 when they were grad students at MIT. The cubes debuted at CES this year. The design marries classic tactility with new hardware and software. “Sifteo cubes are the first gaming solution to deliver truly hands-on play,” Merrill said. “[The cubes combine] the latest in embedded computing and sensing technology with a timeless play style.”

If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard the news, Amazon debuted its $200 7-inch tablet, the Kindle Fire, this week. Make no mistake: It’s no iPad. There’s no front-facing or rear-facing camera, and it’s only got 8 GB of storage. But it’s not meant to be an iPad. It’s a completely different kind of tablet, designed for the pure consumer. That is, it’s designed for consumptive behavior: reading, listening to music, watching video content. The lack of local storage isn’t an issue, either; it’s meant to take advantage of the cloud with services like Amazon’s $80 yearly Prime service, as well as Amazon Cloud Drive. And the smaller form factor makes it extra portable, easy to whip out on the bus or the subway (much like a Kindle).