TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Don’t tell me. You wanted a Mi-Fi personal wireless hotspot, and all your boss bought you was that lousy 3G USB dongle. Well, quit fretting: with just one more ugly chunk of plastic in your stuffed and dorky nylon laptop bag, you can have what you want.

The Wi-Reach 3G Personal Hotspot doesn’t even require that you pull the SIM card from your existing USB modem. The plastic box, which resembles a battery charger, has a USB port inside into which you slot your stick.

Amazon’s Kindle reader is spreading to one more device: The BlackBerry. Like the iPhone version, you sign into your Amazon Kindle account and you can read any books you have bought for Kindle. The beta application will also talk to Amazon’s Whispersync service to keep your place across all your devices.

Kindle for BlackBerry (another awesome bit of naming, guys) joins Kindle for PC, iPhone and Kindle for Kindle, and the soon-to-appear Kindle for Mac. We like what Amazon is doing here: you buy a book once and you can read it on pretty much any device you have. And because many of these phones, iPod and computers can be loaded up with several other e-readers, you aren’t locked in to the Kindle store (unless, ironically, you actually bought a Kindle).

Barcelona — Sony Ericsson has jumped aboard the Android Train at the Mobile World Congress 2010. Of three new handsets announced, two use Google’s phone OS, and only the poor, dull Vivaz still uses the tired Symbian OS.

The Android phones are the Xperia X10 Mini and Pro. The main difference between the two tiny handsets is the slide-out QWERTY keyboard on the pro model. In fact, so similar are these handsets that even their mother, the bigger Xperia X10 releasewd last year, has trouble telling them apart.

Both have touch-screens, small at just 2.55-inches and with a decidedly last-century VGA resolution (240 x 320).

Google’s Nexus One won’t be the only smartphone to run Android 2.1, the latest version of the Android operating system, for too long. Motorola is planning to upgrade the Droid’s firmware this week to include features such as full multi-touch.

The upgrade to Android 2.1 will bring the pinch-to-zoom gesture for web surfing and major applications such as maps to Droid. Motorola will also enhance the Droid’s virtual keyboard, the device’s music app and offer a better news and weather application.

Still pictures? That’s so 20th century.

Camera makers must figure by now that if they don’t have high-definition video, they don’t have squat, and Canon’s latest models are no exception.

Canon added to the pile of pre-PMA 2010 announcements on Monday with its newest low-end SLR, the EOS Rebel T2i. This camera has a new 18-megapixel sensor, a Digic 4 processor, and can shoot full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) at 30fps. It can also shoot standard-def, 640 x 480 video at 60fps, or blast out full-size 18 megapixel stills at 3.7fps.

Olympus has taken the lovely, popular and slightly flawed Pen EP-1 camera, tweaked it to to be more like Panasonic’s equally nice GF1, and in the process created a Frankenstein’s camera, a bloated monster that bears the same relationship to the EP-1 as Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz bore to his Stanley Kowalski.

So, what’s new? The Pen E-PL1 is still an interchangeable lens, Micro Four Thirds (M4/3) camera, but it gains a pop-up flash and a direct video-record button (this button, found on the Panasonic GF1, is wonderfully useful for quick clip shooting).

If you are a non-US resident, and are waiting on the iPad as a replacement for the internationally crippled Kindle, think again. The iBooks application, one of the standout parts of Steve Jobs’ presentation on Wednesday, is US-only. Take a look at the iPad “features” page and you’ll see, in tiny letters at the bottom of the page, these words: “iBooks is available only in the U.S.”

This is a disappointment, but certainly no surprise. Here in Spain, for example, there are still no movies or TV shows in the iTunes Store. Nor is it likely to be Apple’s fault — the company would of course love to sell content to whoever wants it.

A last minute tip from a Gadget Lab reader might be the first actual photo of The Tablet, the savior of the print industry and curer of leprosy and typhoid (but – ironically – not consumption).

Not only are the pictures crisp and clear, they also show the name at last. Behold, the iThing.

These leaked photos, from either Kyle ‘The Yellow Dart’ Smith or Travis Fantina, depending on which end of the email you believe, come with the following testimonial as to their legitimacy:

I may, or may not work for Apple or I may or may not know somebody who does, however I have gotten my hands on 3 Tablet photos which I’m sure you will be able to verify are not fake after careful image analysis.

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With the Apple Tablet likely to change the world as we know it in less than a week, you may be wondering (still) about the merits of a soft, on-screen keyboard. Phil Gyford was wondering the same thing, only instead of just sitting around and lazily pondering (like you) he did something about it.

Phil dug out an old Newton MessagePad, a Palm Vx, a Palm Treo 650 and an iPhone 3G, and typed out a pre-memorized 221-word passage of text on each one, timing each try twice.

It seems that the world has finally discovered that the traditional camera strap is neither comfortable nor practical. The weight of the camera causes neck strain after mere moments, even with a lightweight camera, and when you are walking around it will bounce against your belly.

A new kind of strap is emerging, and the Sun Sniper is the latest in the line of across-the-shoulder designs.