TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Forget about cellphones causing car accidents. In the UK, a ridiculous 300,000 car crashes have been caused by GPS. And, according to a survey commissioned by Brit tabloid rag The Mirror, 1.5 million drivers have swerved through traffic when following their sat-nav’s instructions a little too closely.

The list of errors caused by slavishly obeying absurd commands would be hilarious if they weren’t so dangerous: Driving onto a railway line, heading the wrong way down one-way streets, hurtling headlong into ditches, getting stuck under bridges and ignoring road signs.

It’s still pretty creepy when you’re walking downtown and see someone talking to himself — only to realize he’s speaking into a Bluetooth headset. If the Muso iPod accessory takes off, soon even more people will look crazy.

Available in December for $159, DirectVoxx’s Muso voice control gadget synchronizes with your iPod via its included docking station. You’d then press the button on the communicator device and dictate a command: For example, "Pause," "Play Feist’s 1 2 3 4," "Softer" (to decrease volume) and so on; your iPod will obey your commands.

The saga of the 2015 McFly shoes continues.

A couple of weeks after the popularity of the futuristic (yet indelibly fictional) shoes from the movie Back to the Future caused Nike to release their modern adaptation, the real owner and creator of the movie prop has stepped forward with a not too-shocking revelation: The shoe is real (there’s only one boot) and he’s putting it up for sale on eBay.

After placing the starting bid at $1,000 last Friday, the auction has gone up to $2,550 with three days remaining.

The popularity of the iconic shoes has benefited from the growing anticipation of the year 2015, the year the shoes are worn in the movie sequel. Recently, fans created an online petition to pressure Nike into creating a real version of the shoes, but when Nike came out with a fake ‘McFly’ shoe called the Hyperdunks, it caused all kinds of fan outrage in the blogosphere and the real world.

Many were displeased with the Hyperdunks because they saw it as a ploy to use up the cool factor of the movie (we said there’s no way they were the real McFlys), while others were incensed with the limited number of shoes that were madeavailable, in terribly organized events.

Shape Up is yet another novelty alarm clock, one which could be both dangerous and annoying. The alarm is built into a dumbell, and when it’s time to get up, you’re forced to put in 30 reps (of which exercise, we don’t know).

Sounds great, right? After you get the blood pumping, you’ll be ready for the first coffee and cigarette of the day instead of just slumping back into your warm cocoon.

DXG-567V Pocket Camcorder

On paper, the DXG-567V pocket camcorder bitch-slaps the Flip Mino in every imaginable way. It shoots high-def, 720p video; the Mino tops out at (snicker) VGA. It sports a 2-inch LCD to the Mino’s tiny 1.5-incher. It’s available in four colors; the Mino comes in black or white. And while the Mino manages just 60 minutes of recording time via internal storage, the DXG pops cheap-o SD cards for virtually unlimited shooting. Even a paltry 2GB card would net you over an hour’s worth of high-def footage.

Too bad the DXG-567V sucks. Really, truly sucks. Seriously, it’s just awful. If you’re shooting anywhere but outdoors on a sunny day, expect grainy, jerky, fuzzy, and otherwise horrendous video.

(AP Photo/Ed Ou)

As the clock struck 8 on the East Coast geeks who had been sustaining themselves with Doritos, cigarettes and Red Bull (yes, in many respects, it is a day like any other) finally got what they had been waiting for: their hands on an iPhone 3G.

It may not have the revolutionary cachet of last year’s model, and the upgrades and fixes and mods may not have set the review-o-sphere on its ear this time around, but there definitely was plenty of pent up demand for the second coming of the Jesus Phone, the AP reports.

(Left, the Sony Ericsson W890i; right, the Nokia 5310)

From flatscreens to Smart cars to carbon turnout, we’ve seen how a super-reduced footprint can be downright sexy. That statement stands double-true when it comes to something you shove in your pants. For the last week, we’ve been toting two of the trimmest rock ‘n’ talk mobile phones from Sony Ericsson and Nokia.

While drilling for the Olympics, Chinese police in Jinan, the capital of the Shandong Province, seem to have forgotten to check their copyright law. Still, at least the knock-off Segways they’re riding look a little less wussy than the real thing.

We have one question, though: Despite being so small as to look like pea-shooters, those automatic guns presumably still have a big kick. Are these cops just going to tumble over backwards, or is the Segway (fake or not) able to handle the recoil? Answers in the comments, along with captions for the photograph.

If the imaging group at Olympus has its way, we might soon start to take pictures with omni-directional cameras. This will either lead to panoramic, life-altering photo perspectives, or it just might make pictures unnecessarily complicated and so dizzying as to be useless.

Yesterday, Olympus’ Future Creation Lab announced a new 360 CCD sensor/lens combo prototype that will allow photographers to take pictures of 360-degree views.

In this week’s Wired Gadget Lab podcast, Dylan Tweney and Jose Fermoso talk about the incredible volumetric 3-D display from USC that is the first real device for simultaneous viewing of holographic images. They’ll go over this medium’s intriguing new possibilities, including creepy medical applications and engineering diagrams.