TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Possibly my favorite part of Tsor Design’s folding canoe is its name: Adhoc. It perfectly sums up the usage scenario for a boat that will fold up into a backpack.

The Adhoc Canoe weighs in at just 4.1 kilos (nine pounds) and shrinks down to fit into a bag that measures 13 x 23 x 70 centimeters (5 x 9 x28 inches). The frame is fashioned from carbon fiber and the hull made from aramid, a polyamide used in bike tires and body armor, among other things.

Remember Firefox? No, not the bloated open-source web browser, but Craig Thomas’ sleek Soviet fighter plane which had thought-controlled weapons systems. Wouldn’t it be cool if somebody, somehow, did that to a bike?

It turns out that somebody has. Toyota, in cahoots with Saatchi & Saatchi, Parlee Cycles and the boffins at Deeplocal, has come up with the PXP, or Prius Bike. The “Prius” part might be mere branding, but the bike itself is pretty damn awesome, right down to the thought-controlled gears.

Samsung plans a U.S. release for the sequel to its most successful Android smartphone by the end of the summer, according to a senior executive of the company.

“We expect to release the Galaxy S2 in the U.S. market sometime in August,” said Shin Jong-kyun, Samsung president of mobile business and digital imaging, in a briefing with reporters in South Korea on Wednesday. The story was first reported by Yonhap News.

The phone was initially released in South Korea — Samsung’s global headquarters — in April, subsequently rolling out to Europe and southern Asian countries in the months that followed.

If sales of Apple’s iPod are any indication, the heyday of the MP3 player is over and done with.

iPod sales have been steadily declining since their peak at 22.7 million in December 2008, and analysts estimate another 7.2 percent drop over the quarter that just ended.

Apple still commands 70 percent of the MP3 player market, but it’s clear that other mobile devices, namely smartphones and tablets, can do the job of an MP3 player (while performing a myriad of other functions, too).

Close your eyes and imagine that somebody took the second-generation Kindle, colored the plastic to make it look like it had been made in the 1980s and left in the sun ever since. Then imagine that they painted the already horrible keys a brassy gold color.

Now open your eyes and look at this:

Hideous, isn’t it? It’s called the iriver Story HD e-reader, and it’s the first e-reeder that integrates with Google books. Clearly, if Google had any input on the design, it came from the pre Google+ era.

But you can’t judge a book by its cover, right? It’s what’s inside that counts.

PALO ALTO, California — Facebook unveiled three new products at its headquarters here Wednesday: video calling, group chat and a new design for its chat system.

In a major partnership with Skype, Facebook now offers free video calling between connected users of the site. Beginning Wednesday, users will find a Call button in the top right-hand corner of their Facebook pages. After clicking on the button, the video chat window launches on your Facebook page, inside of your browser window.

If your last cellphone purchase wasn’t a smartphone and you’re living stateside, consider yourself in the minority.

So says the most recent data from Nielsen, which claims 55 percent of U.S. mobile phone purchases over the last three months were smartphones. That’s up 34 percent from last year.

“With more compelling features and lower prices, Apple’s iPhone set the trend,” said Gartner mobile analyst Ken Dulaney in an interview.

While it is deemed acceptable to connect a subwoofer to your stereo, and external battery or speaker to your phone or a giant external monitor to your laptop, putting normally essential — and internal — laptop components in external boxes is kind of taboo.

It harks back to the dark days of the 90s, when carrying a laptop meant carrying a black nylon bag containing a heavy Dell notebook, an external DVD burner, a few spare batteries and a power-brick the size of a modern netbook.

If you live in Portland, you do everything on your bike. You take the kids to school. You do the weekly shop. You even bike down to the gas station to fill up a gas can and bring it home to juice your car. And of course you go to the liquor store to pick up some beer.

This last just got a little easier with Portland Design Works’s Takeout Basket, a small alloy rack that you clamp to your handlebars.

Huawei’s new MediaPad proves one thing: That the style of any and every tablet–at least from the front– is fixed. The screen gets a thick black bezel, and is et into an aluminum frame.

Round back the new seven-inch tablet gets a few stylings which are its own. The camera sits in the center, and there are black triangles cut out top and bottom.