TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

As the economy continues to spiral downward, Apple customers are proving to be as unpredictable as Apple: The MacBook Pro has been the top-selling Mac at several Apple stores in the past week.

Ten out of 15 surveyed Apple retail stores reported the MacBook Pro as its top seller, according to The Channel Checkers. That’s surprising, because MacBook Pros range from $2,000 to $2,800.

What gives? My guess is that there was a sales spike because the 17-inch MacBook Pro just started shipping last week; I’d imagine many were eagerly awaiting that particular model.

Honeywell is such an old company that in order to survive the changing manufacturing needs of the country, it’s been forced to reinvent its product line numerous times. Over the last 103 years, it has sold everything from home thermostats, to Garrett turbochargers, and even cluster bombs and napalm (!).

Now, Honeywell is partnering with Taiwanese company Soyo to launch a new line of LCD televisions. And in order to get the attention in a market saturated with TV manufacturers and decimated by the economic depression, they’ve decided to come out with the high-end, super-sized (303-pound), 82-inch 1080p Altura LE LCD in the next few months.

We’ve been banging on forever that camera makers would have to get creative once the megapixel game was up. And we were right. The latest camera to add some fancy new features is Ricoh’s CX1, a great looking slimline body with a CMOS sensor of "just" 9MP.

CMOS sensors are usually found in higher-end DSLRs, and the decision to keep the pixel count low shows a commitment to image quality over marketing numbers.

Eyeing that $400 netbook? How about getting one for half the price in just a few months?

Freescale is racing to get netbooks out this summer, featuring the company’s chips, that would offer up to eight hours of battery life, be significantly thinner than existing designs and priced under $200.

"We are taking dead aim at the netbook space," says Glen Burchers, marketing director at Freescale."The value proposition that Freescale brings is dramatically lower power consumption and even lower prices."

Netbooks have become the fastest growing segment in the PC market, with about 15 million devices sold worldwide in 2008.

The always wonderful Joy of Tech takes a look at iPhoto’s new face recognition feature. We always wondered why a pair of specs and hair parted on the other side was enough to fool even the woman he’d slept with. I also wonder how Lois managed to get face recognition to work properly. My version of iLife ‘09 is truly useless.

I can hardly ever mention Segways without making fun of them — but the picture above is worth more than 1,000 deprecating remarks. I’ll say no more.

Photo: Break

Palm will drop its long-in-the-tooth mobile operating system, Palm OS, in favor of the company’s new Web OS, which will debut with its upcoming Pre phone.

Palm will focus on Web OS and Windows Mobile for all future devices, company CEO Ed Colligan told investors Wednesday.

The Palm operating system has had a checkered past. The operating system was first developed under the Palm Computing umbrella in the mind-1990s. But when Palm Computing became a subsidiary of 3Com after an acquisition, Palm started to license the Palm OS through a subsidiary then called Palm Source. In 2005, Palm Source was acquired by Access and a year later Palm gained perpetual rights to the OS.

Over the years, Palm OS became stale, while Palm repeatedly tried — and failed — to release a second-generation OS that would enable multitasking, support richer multimedia applications and yet preserve compatibility with the tens of thousands of Palm applications already out there.

Electronics maker Bang & Olufsen is releasing a 500GB digital audio player this month that uses an intelligent ‘music identity’ system similar to Pandora.com’s and Microsoft’s MixView. But sadly, its BeoSound 5 system is likely to only end up in the showcase rooms of America’s richest families.

Fujitsu has expanded high-speed connectivity options for its LifeBook notebooks and tablet PCs.

Four convertible tablet PC models–the LifeBook T5010, T1010, P1630 and T2020–will now support AT&T’s 3G network.
Two other notebooks models–the LifeBook T5010 Tablet PC and the LifeBook E8420–will support
EVDO in the second quarter of 2009.

The idea is to help Fujitsu users get faster speeds during wireless browsing, says the company. 

Photo: Fujitsu Tablet PC (momentimedia/Flickr)

As the Feb. 17 deadline for the digital television switch program looms, the rush to get one of the coupons that will subsidize the cost of a new converter box is on.

And there’s a supply and demand issue there. Retrevo, a consumer electronics exchange, says there are still at least three million people without coupons. Those viewers could be left behind when broadcaster switch to digital transmission in two weeks. At the same time about 11
million coupons are not being used.