TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

If ever there was a solution to a first-world problem, this is it. Behold, the Omega Headphone Stand, a perfect answer to a question that was never asked.

The stands are exactly what they claim to be, nothing more: a place to keep your over-the-head headphones. If you have been suffering the awful chaos of a pair of expensive cans sitting messily on a table, or even worse, sprawled across a shelf, offending the eyes of every sensitive soul who visits your luxury, minimalist home, then you can stop your painful worrying.

It’s been a while since any worthy comic-book viewers have come along for the iPad, but myComics is most definitely worth a look. The gold-standard for a long time has been ComicZeal, with its huge feature list. Unfortunately, ComicZeal still suffers from a horrible page-turn feel (very important in a comic reader) and an equally lame file viewer.

MyComics to the rescue! It’s minimal in terms of features, but it gets almost everything right.

ShutterSnitch, the iPad app that lets you beam photographs directly from your camera to your iPad, has been updated to version 2, and it adds a whole lot of really neat new features.

First – what ShutterSnitch won’t do: unless you jailbreak your iPad to let it create its own ad-hoc Wi-Fi network, ShutterSnitch requires either a router or a computer to create that network. If you have a battery-powered Mi-Fi, that will work just fine.

So, what’s new? Rob Galbraith, photographer, blogger and gear-head, has been testing v2.0 for some time, and has a detailed run-down on every new aspect. The first big changes are speed and stability: instead of crashing, you can now pump big files into the app, as fast as you like, and it will keep on going. Your collections can be a lot bigger, too: ShutterSnitch will let you put thousands of images together without bogging down.

The extremely popular iPhone and iPad game Angry Birds has accumulated 50 million users who play it for 200 million minutes a day, according to its maker.

Humongous. How did Angry Birds do it? It hardly seems like luck; if you look at it closely, the game’s success was brilliantly engineered.

The company Rovio hit all the check boxes. Angry Birds has a really sharp style, fits in an accessible game genre and features a physics-based gameplay that creates a ton of different situations to keep the game interesting at various skill levels.

Samsung’s 7-inch tablet isn’t “dead on arrival” after all. In fact, Samsung has sold more than a million of them in less than two months.

Released in mid-October, the Galaxy Tab is the first serious contender to Apple’s iPad. It sports a 7-inch touchscreen and runs a modified version of Google’s Android operating system.

“I can confirm 1M Galaxy Tabs sold globally,” a Samsung spokeswoman said in an e-mail statement.

The GymyGym is like a Bullworker combined with an office chair. The admittedly rather comfy-looking chair, comprising a frame laced with bungees in place of seat-squabs, is further enhanced with exercise equipment, meaning you can visit the gym without leaving your desk.

More bungees with various handles and ankle-cuffs sprout from various spots on the chair, letting you work-out your flabby office-bound body.

AirSync, a new feature in doubleTwist, lets you sync your music, movies and photos wirelessly between your computer and your Android phone. It’s like a wireless iTunes, only without the slowdowns, hangs and general frustration of Apple’s “solution”.

DoubleTwist is a media-manager that lets you get content on and off your devices, offering the same seamless iPod experience you get from Apple, only for pretty much any phone, Kindle or even iPods.

Forget Batman: This is a utility belt. The Rocker Stud Snow Toolbelt is a leather and steel multi-tool. The buckle contains both flat-had and Phillips screwdrivers, and the bit that stops the end of the belt flapping about (what is that part called?) contains three wrenches, in 8, 10 and 11mm sizes. There’s even a bottle opener in the buckle’s rim, so you can “impress” people by popping open a beer with your crotch.

For such a utilitarian piece of apparel, the Rocker Stud Snow Toolbelt isn’t nearly as dorky as its name suggests. But its name does suggest (and deliver) something far worse: Studs.

If you ever wondered what a Slingbox would look like if it were hewn from aluminum instead of plastic, here it is: The 06HD from Olive, a 2TB music-server that costs – wait for it – $5000.

That price-tag says one thing: audiophile. And the 06HD is certainly audiophile-buzzword compliant, from its Burr-Brown 24-bit PCM1792 DACs (two of them for the regular output, plus a separate DAC for the headphones) to its stabilized, noise-free power-supply.

If it seems like a lot more than a year that Google Voice has been languishing in the limbo between Google’s labs and the iTunes App Store, that’s because it is. Google’s one-phone-number-everywhere service served as the best example of Apple’s byzantine and opaque app “approval” process.

Now, Google Voice is back, and available as a free download for U.S iPhone owners. With it, you can all but replace the iPhone’s phone app, receiving push notifications for incoming texts and voicemails, read (often hilariously inaccurate) transcripts of those voicemails and make calls to contacts in the iPhone’s built-in address book.