TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

This little piggy bank is an electronic monster whose wild mood swings can only be appeased by a credit card. Yes, this might sound just like the behavior of trophy wife of a Hollywood star, but it is in fact a rather sweet project executed by students at the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden.

The Piggy Bank gets agitated when it detects nearby people, or if it is moved.

The Solowheel is yet another take on electric-powered personal transport. It is also just about the simplest possible design you could possibly imagine: a wheel and nothing more.

The wheel contains a 1,000 watt electric motor and gyroscopic controls, making it a kind of minimalist Segway. To drive it, you put it on the road (it has a carrying handle up-top), flip down the foot platforms and step on.

Vincent Riemersma’s beautiful time-freezing photographs are a mixture of skill and old fashioned geekery. The pictures show splashes of colored water frozen in time as they jump simultaneously from a row of wine glasses. The results are clearly impressive. But how were the photos taken?

First, the splashes. To ensure repeatability, time after time, Vincent built a simple rig. Two inline skate-frames and a piece of wood made a rolling trolley which was mounted on a slope.

BARCELONA — Microsoft is prepping a major update for Windows Phone 7, bringing multitasking and a mobile version of Internet Explorer 9 to the mobile operating system.

The update, vaguely scheduled for “later this year,” was demoed today by Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s vice president of Windows Phone.

The biggest new feature is multitasking. Like iOS and webOS, it manifests itself as fast-app-switching. Press the “back” button flip to the last-used app, or press and hold to enter a switching screen.

Like a pint of delicious spring-water submerged in Nikon’s salty, eight-camera press tsunami today, the little gem that is the P300 was almost diluted entirely out of recognition. Thanks to some quick work, the pocket-friendly compact has made it, sodden but still alive, to these pages.

The P300 is best thought of as Nikon’s answer to the Canon S95, a pro-friendly pocket-camera full of manual controls and topped off with a large sensor, great low-light sensitivity and a fast lans.

File under “awesome wish-ware.” The NoteSlate is a tablet that takes the name “slate” rather too literally. It’s an E Ink tablet which comes with a pop-out stylus to write on the screen, and while it also comes in white, the black version looks just like a real slate –- those stone chalkboards on which schoolkids worked in the dreary mists of the past.

Ricoh’s GXR system is about to get a Leica M lens-mount. This will let you take pretty much any of the legendary lenses and put them in font of a tailor-made sensor.

The GXR system, you may remember, is Ricoh’s rather weird take on cameras. The “body” is just a shell with a screen and some buttons. The “lenses” are where the action is, and each lens unit features its own sensor.

The Egyptian government has shut down 88 percent of the country’s internet access amid mass protests. If you’re on the road and away from a computer, fortunately there’s a free iPhone app to tune in to the latest developments.

Available in the App Store, international news network Al Jazeera has a free iOS app with live coverage of the protests, so you can watch the Egyptian revolution unfold on your phone.

The Razer Ferox speakers are – being from Razer – aimed at laptop-toting gamers. But the portable, battery-powered speakers would be good for anyone whose notebook’s built-in speakers aren’t up to the job.

The pod-like boxes actually open up when powered-on, shoving the 30mm speaker-cones out of the top and making room for a bass-resonance chamber, which Razer has chosen over real subwoofers. You’ll also have to contend with a glowing blue light shining out from a ring around the base of the speakers.

While having two battery-powered (12-hours, rechargeable) units means you can get better stereo separation than a single two-speaker box, you don’t gain any real independence.

Like a spindly steel insect, the Rima Light from Dreipuls stalks your desk and plants its legs amongst the detritus carelessly strewn thereon. Unlike an insect (unless it’s a giant, adjustable firefly), the Rima Light also offers ingeniously adjustable illumination.

The four legged structure suspends a semi-cylindrical “bulb” which runs the length of your desk. This bulb has four rings circling it, and these rings form the bounds of the lit part of the tube.