The Weekender: Surface Pro review, the NFL’s head injury problem, and Amazon’s currency dreams

BlackBerry (it's not RIM anymore, people) needs a hit. Badly. Not only has the company lost its cachet in the smartphone industry, it's lost revenue and customers left and right. It's betting big on the Z10, a thoroughly modern smartphone that runs the company's new BB 10 operating system. Is this handset enough to bring BlackBerry back into the game?

Even as hundreds of millions enjoyed the Super Bowl around the world last weekend, there's a nagging problem: we still haven't solved an epidemic of head injuries among football players that researchers are only now beginning to understand. Jesse Hicks looks at the state of brain protection in the NFL today and where it might be going in the future.

Virtual currencies are the bane of the modern consumer's existence: instead of dealing with cash, companies want you to convert it into a locked-in system at an arbitrary exchange rate. So what's Amazon's motivation for getting into the game with its Coins? Adrianne Jeffries investigates.

Author Phil Lapsley talks blue boxing, the fall of Ma Bell, and why electronic hijinx still scare us.

Microsoft's first tablet, the Surface RT, came out to a relatively tepid response. But Redmond promised the Surface Pro would fix everything — it would be fast and capable, while still keeping all of the things we liked about the Surface, from the handsome design to the Touch and Type Cover support. This is everything Microsoft has at its disposal — we took it for a spin to see if the Surface Pro is the device we've been waiting for.

Though the hashtag was a staple of Super Bowl advertising this year, Twitter — the social network most commonly associated with the hashtag — got nary a mention. How did that happen? Where has the hashtag been, where is it going, and what does it all mean for the future of Twitter?

Valve has become one of the most important names in gaming as a software company, but that's all about to change. TC Sottek looks at how Valve CEO Gabe Newell wants to upend the deep-seated video game world by blurring the line between PC and console entertainment. And even crazier, he might just pull it off.