TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Just a year ago, Digital Foci’s Photo Book would have been tempting. It’s a combination memory card reader and display, with – essential for any serious photographer – RAW support.

But when we look at the specs we see that it is outdone at every turn by a netbook. The 8" display is smaller, the paltry 4GB of internal memory is clearly not enough — my cameras all have at least a 4GB card inside.

BARCELONA — The only Googlephone to appear at the Mobile World Congress couldn’t even be bothered to turn up in person. HTC and Vodafone made a joint announcement Tuesday of their forthcoming Android-based Magic, formerly known as the G2, but all they provided were tantalizing specs and a few images.

The handset is notable for a few reasons. First, it looks a lot nicer than the G1 from T-Mobile. Second, the Magic will be almost completely exclusive to Vodafone (the Magic will be on Vodafone in the UK, Spain, Germany and France; and non-exclusively on Vodafone in Italy).

Microsoft has restructured its Zune digital music player business which has struggled to find its groove since the device debuted nearly three year ago.

The company has split the hardware and the software teams behind the Zune and says it will work to extend some features of the Zune player to other hardware devices such as PCs, TVs and mobile phones.

Microsoft’s move with Zune is reminiscent of how Nokia transitioned its N-Gage brand from a specific phone to a software service.

With the buzz this week centered on the new Kindle, we’d like to take a moment to remind you of the Plastic Logic Reader — an upcoming large-format reader that poses a serious threat to Amazon.

Due for an early 2010 release, the Plastic Logic is as wide and long as a sheet of Letter-sized paper (8.5-by-11 inches), measures less than 3/10 of an inch thick, and weighs less than a magazine. The actual display area measures 10.7 inches, according to the company. To display text, the device utilizes E-Ink technology, and it will feature a touchscreen for turning pages, typing with a virtual keyboard and navigating the menu.

The reader will launch with an e-content store including e-books, newspapers, magazines, tradejournals and blogs. Plastic Logic, whose factory is based in Germany, has already started forging partnerships.

Firmware updates are the technological inverse of a credit card — pay now, get the goods later. While we like to get extra functions added to our toys after we’ve been playing with them for a while, camera manufacturers usually use them to fix problems they missed while rushing the hardware from factory to store.

Imagine a computer that can process text, video and audio in an instant, solve problems on the fly, and do it all while consuming just 10 watts of power.

It would be the ultimate computing machine if it were built with silicon instead of human nerve cells.

Compare that to current computers, which require extensive, custom programming for each application, consume hundreds of watts in power, and are still not fast enough. So it’s no surprise that some computer scientists want to go back to the drawing board and try building computers that more closely emulate nature.

A Mac running Apple’s next operating system will inherit pseudo-GPS powers, software developers say.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard will utilize a Mac’s networking hardware to triangulate an approximate latitude and longitude of the computer, according to developers tinkering with pre-release builds of the OS.

The OS contains a framework called CoreLocation — the same one used in the original iPhone to estimate a device’s location with triangulation.

News of a location-based feature in OS X comes at good timing, as geo-aware social services are becoming increasingly popular.

A man in China died when his cellphone exploded, severing a major artery in his neck, according to a Chinese daily newspaper.

The man’s identity was not disclosed, but Shin Min Daily News reported he was an employee at a computer shop in Guangzhou, China, where the incident occurred.

Another employee at the shop said she heard a loud bang and then saw her co-worker lying on the shop floor in a pool of blood. She said the victim recently replaced the battery in his cellphone.

Chinese authorities are investigating the death and have yet to determine the model of the victim’s phone and battery, as well as whether they were counterfeit products.

In an eerily similar incident in July 2007, 22-year-old Xiao Jinpeng of Gansu, China died from chest wounds after his cellphone exploded in his chest pocket. The incident occurred at his workplace, an iron mill.

These neat 7" USB monitors from Mimo look to be both cheap enough and handsome enough to be worthy of a place on my desk.

There are two models, both with the same 800×480 pixel resolution — the $200 740 which has a touchscreen, a webcam, a mic and audio in/out connections and the 710, cheaper at $130 but lacking all those extra features.

As SanDisk tries to find more ways to be profitable, the company could kill its older flash-memory based Sansa line of music players and instead focus on promoting its storage cards that come pre-loaded with music.

Instead of the iPod competitors that it has built, SanDisk will be pushing its slotMusic cards business. SlotMusic Cards are microSD memory cards that come pre-loaded with music albums. SanDisk’s recent music players have been designed to promote the storage cards and those players will continue to be available.