TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

A Hong Kong company is promoting a netbook that sports a backward Apple logo on its case and desktop wallpaper. Oddly enough, the computer doesn’t ship with a hacked version of the Mac operating system.

The product’s description says the netbook ships with a 1.3GHz VIA Nano processor, a 1,024-by-576-pixel display and, get this — either Windows XP or Ubuntu.

The iPhone is set to get a face lift. Apple will show off a new version of the iPhone operating system, iPhone 3.0, on March 17, along with a new version of the phone’s software development kit.

While details are scanty, iPhone 3.0 could include features such as universal search, multimedia messaging and an updated user interface.

Apple will unveil the new OS and SDK at a media event for reporters and bloggers at Apple’s Cupertino, California, campus at 10 a.m.

Hothead Technologies and Kennesaw State University are currently testing an RFID-enabled helmet that tracks the body temperature of a player and promises to lessen dangerous instances of over heating.

In the last decade, companies have looked into developing systems to better measure player temperatures to catch those in danger of heat strokes, as they’ve led to unfortunate deaths.

We love it when you guys take our how-to posts and make them better. In fact, that’s one of the reasons we started the Gadget Lab Flickr Pool, as a place for you to show off your gadgeteering. This time, though, Gadget Lab reader Wilfurd has posted the results of his home made stealth camera bag on a forum.

Not just any forum, but our beloved MSI Wind Forum, the place to learn all about installing Mac OS X on the netbook.

Peek carefully at this picture of a Nikon D300 and you’ll see something unusual. No, it’s not the jaggy lines around the edges of the camera — that comes from the product page. Instead, it’s the little square box to the right of the lens, a tiny Bluetooth receiver which slips into the 10-pin remote terminal of higher-end Nikon DSLRs. Once nestled into place, the Unleashed (its rather odd name) will sip very little power and communicate with any Bluetooth-enabled GPS device, writing the information directly into the image EXIF data.

Asus on Tuesday launched its ultra-thin netbook at the CeBIT computer expo.

Dubbed the Eee PC 1008HA, the netbook measures 1-inch thick, weighs 2.4 pounds and sports a 10-inch screen.

No word on price yet, but we’re going to guesstimate somewhere around $650. Asus also has not yet announced specification details or a release date.

We’ve been complaining for years about the lack of streaming from the iPhone to Apple’s Airport Express. The little white Wi-Fi box can extend your network and wirelessly receive music from your Mac or PC, passing it through an old-fashioned cable on to your speakers.

It would seem, then, that you should be able to send tunes to the speakers from the iPhone or iPod Touch. You can’t. In one of its frequent but inexplicable arbitrary cripplings, Apple has ruled that thou cannot do this, despite it being technically feasible.

AirPhones doesn’t quite fix this — the iPhone app effectively does the opposite, but it is a neat way to replace hardware with software (if you already have the phone, that is). The $5 application (Intel Mac only right now) sits on the iPhone. A companion app (free) is installed on your Mac and beams audio over the network to the iPhone. You can then either hook up headphones (kind of pointless) or jack it into your stereo.

Googlephone developers can no longer use their unlocked phones to load for-pay applications.

Google has put the kibosh on paid application downloads for HTC G1 phone users that are using the $400, unlocked version available to people in Google’s Android developer program (which costs $25 to join). Google had offered these unlocked devices to developers in a bid to help them create apps for the phone.

G1 phones that have been unlocked through other means do not seem to be affected by the ban.

A teardown of Amazon’s Kindle 2 reveals the book reader is thinner and faster than the iPhone 3G (which is, oddly enough, considered a competitor).

Hardware repair company iFixIt disassembled the reader and found a 532 MHz processor — faster than the iPhone 3G’s 412 MHz ARM chip. IFixIt also found the Kindle 2 is thinner than the iPhone 3G, but a hair thicker than the iPod Touch. 

From the looks of it, the Kindle 2 is fairly easy to disassemble.

The mystery surrounding President Barack Obama’s Blackberry has lasted longer than anyone anticipated. But thanks to the deep-dive veteran journalists over at the New Yorker, we can finally know what’s really in there.

A game of Tiny Ninja or perhaps a version of Mario Bros.? No. According to artist Bruce McCall, the President has a dedicated button for everything from a message that lets him know whenever Al Gore is in the viscinity, to a flash alarm that goes off in case Malia and Sasha start jumping on Lincoln’s bed.