TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

The portable computer was born 30 years ago this weekend, when Adam Osborne unveiled the Osborne 1 in San Francisco.

Osborne, a journalist and book author, made the transition to entrepreneur on the strength of his personality, ambition and vision. And for a short few months, his computer company was on top of the world, with one of the steepest revenue growth curves ever seen. A year and a half later, it was bankrupt, a victim of bad management and the now-notorious “Osborne effect,” referring to the sales-stifling result of announcing a next-generation product while the current generation is still on the shelves.

By Olivia Solon, Wired UK

The Terminator, C-3PO, the Cylons, and the Jetsons’ robotic maid Rosie are all highly agile and memorable humanoid robots from science fiction. They are intelligent, nimble, dexterous, autonomous and you never see them plugged into an energy source, waiting to refuel.

Now take Asimo, described by its maker Honda as “the world’s most advanced humanoid robot.”

There is no denying that the robot is spectacular, walking and even running with ease on two legs, responding to voice commands and mapping its environment using camera “eyes”.

One of the coolest gimmicks of iOS is AirPlay, a button you press on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to stream photos, videos and audio to a huge display connected to an Apple TV. Problem is, you can’t normally use this nifty feature without your Apple TV (or an AirPort Express, if all you want is audio).

Enter Banana TV, a Mac app that allows you to use AirPlay to beam your videos and photos from an iOS device to a Mac.

The Rogue Grid from Expo Imaging is a clever, compact honeycomb-grid to shape the light from your off-camera flash. It has two stackable sections which fit together to make a third, meaning that this pocket-sized accessory takes the place of three bigger ones.

You use a grid when you want to precisely place a spot of light in your photo, without extra light spilling over the rest of the picture.

We’ve seen a flood of Android phones so far in 2011. We got our first whiff of the coming deluge in January when we went to CES and saw around a dozen really impressive models on the show floor, all with big displays, 4G radios, beefy processors, and promises of epic battery life. Some had interesting add-ons, like big physical keyboards for thumb commandos, or the Motorola Atrix’s whacky full-sized laptop dock.

Not only does it have a kind of digital/analog display, but the Zoomin Watch — designed by Gennady Martynov and Emre Cetinkoprulu — also manages to be one of the easiest to read watches around, thanks to the inclusion of a pair of tiny magnifying glasses.

Each hand has a miniature loupe at its end, and as they make their slow journeys around the dial, they magnify the numbers beneath them.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a Windows-powered Nokia.

According to the managing director of Nokia India, D. Shivakumar, Nokia is working on a 12 month timeline to release its first set of Windows Phone smartphones.

A 2012 release date likely means that the handsets would run the next version of Windows Phone 7, aka Mango, which is supposed to be made available to manufacturers in late 2011.

According to Shivakumar, the Nokia-Microsoft partnership should bring new life to the fledgling smartphone OS, which made up only 3% of total wordwide smartphone sales at the end of 2010.

Tomorrow is iPad 2 day. We already knew that Apple’s physical stores would start selling the new iPad at 5PM local time across the U.S, and at AT&T, Best Buy, Target, Verizon Wireless and Walmart stores. Now we know when the lazier amongst us will be able to order online: Apple will start selling the iPad 2 from Apple.com at 1PM Pacific. That should mean you’ll get your iPad on Saturday.

Apple has also pulled a neat trick down in Austin, Texas. Many nerds heading to the South by Southwest Interactive Conference — which begins tomorrow — were wondering whether to hang back for a day in order to secure their new toy.

If I was going to buy a non-Mac notebook, it would probably be a ThinkPad. Don’t worry — my reasoning is entirely shallow: I like Lenovo’s machines because of their styling, not their substance. When closed, the brutal, square-edged black cases look amazing, and I always think that you’d have to be an idiot to try and steal one: the owner could batter you about the head and upper body with it and the ThinkPad wouldn’t even show a scratch.

But the new X220 is also pretty on the inside, and its main selling point is a ridiculous 24 hour battery life. That’s enough to let you update Excel spreadsheets while a plane takes you anywhere on the planet.

Owners of the first-gen iPad are rushing to sell their tablets, according to online gadget-buyer Gazelle. In the hour after the new iPad 2 was announced yesterday, the company bought more than 2,000 used iPads. This compares to 1,200 iPhones that Gazelle bought during the entire first day after the iPhone 4 was announced last summer.

Clearly the new iPad’s features –- a thinner, lighter body and a pair of cameras — are enough to make people want to ditch their ugly, fat old iPads and upgrade to the newer model.