TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

HTC launched a new set of developer tools today that could lead to better apps for its Android phones.

The OpenSense software development kit, which is now live on HTC’s developer web site, lets developers design applications that will specifically interact with HTC’s custom version of Android, HTC Sense.

Sense is a custom graphical user interface created by HTC, built atop the Android platform. The Sense interface serves to differentiate HTC phones from devices made by Motorola, Samsung, LG and others.

I have had my eye on Griffin’s stumpy little set of USB cables for some time. They look very useful for traveling, but they cost an absolute fortune. Here in Europe, you have to pay €30, or $43, for three cables you already have. However, yesterday in the Barcelona Apple Store I was son
pleased with my shiny new replacement iPad 2 (swapped out thanks to a dead mic) that I decided to buy them.

If you’ve seen one tablet, you’ve seen ‘em all: a flat slab with a glass front. A few hardware companies want to break that image with a different kind of slate: the hybrid.

It’s based on the idea that your tablet can be more than just an armchair device. Hook your pad up to a keyboard — sometimes provided, sometimes an optional accessory — and it’s an instant laptop solution, a relatively low-cost netbook for times when a touchscreen keyboards may not suffice.

Olympus’ new compact camera, the SP-810UZ, has one genuinely jaw-dropping feature — a 36x zoom. If that number doesn’t mean much to you, try it this way: The 35mm-equivalent focal length range is 24-864mm. Pretty sick, right? As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a 4x digital zoom laid on top,

The giant lens on the front of an otherwise small body leaves no doubt as to the purpose of the camera, and the rest of the somewhat pedestrian specs reflect this.

This bike is the Apple campus bike. The photo above, taken by designer Everaldo Coelho, shows one of the bikes apparently used to get around at Apple’s headquarters at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.

If you were expecting a high-tech machine that looks more like Eve from Wall-E than a silver mixte that could come from any decade in the past 50 years, then you will obviously be disappointed. But take a closer look and you’ll see that this bike is as well suited to its task as an iPad is to its own market.

Panasonic has made an update to its FZ superzoom family. The FZ-47 has a 25-600mm (35mm equivalent) range, a 12.1 megapixel sensor, 1080p video and no RAW capability.

Whenever I see somebody with one of these mongrel cameras I wonder why they bought it. Barely smaller than a budget SLR, bigger than an Micro Four Thirds camera and yet featuring the sensor (usually) of a tiny compact (in this case 0.43 inches on the diagonal, or 1/2.33). The only reason to make a camera this big, with such low-level specs seems to be to accomodate that huge zoom lens.

The FZ-47’s lens is a whopper. The Leica-branded glass offers a 24x zoom, running from a maximum aperture of ƒ2.8 (reasonable) to ƒ5.2 (thank the gods that the camera has image stabilization).

Apple may be preparing to release two major products simultaneously this week: upgrades for its MacBook Air subnotebook and Mac OS X Lion, the latest Mac operating system.

The MacBook Air refresh and the arrival of OS X Lion will arrive Wednesday, possibly at 8:30 a.m. EDT, sources told AppleInsider. The tip comes in line with a report last week published by All Things Digital, which also claimed the products would debut sometime this week.

It has been said that the biggest feature of Google Plus is that it’s not Facebook. However, there’s another feature that may be of interest to all you Gadget Lab photo nerds out there: the photo integration. It turns out that G+ is a pretty sweet way to manage and view your shared photos.

If you have ever tried to share your pictures on Facebook, then you’ll know the pain. And if you have tried to track down other people’s photos, it’s even worse.

Motorola announced on Wednesday that its Android tablet is now available for a hundred bucks cheaper than before, now priced the same as the entry-level iPad 2.

Originally priced at $600, Motorola’s Xoom tablet is now available for $500 in its Wi-Fi only version. The price reduction was announced via Motorola’s Twitter account, and first reported by The Business Insider.

Motorola’s Xoom was the first device to run Google’s tablet-optimized version of Android, (Honeycomb), beating all other major tablet manufacturers to market with its February release date.

Ever wanted to re-make the opening shot of Star Wars Episode IV in Lego, but could never find a Star Destroyer big enough? If you’d really wanted to do it, you probably would have just bought a whole lot of gray Legos and gotten on with it. But for the lazier film makers, we have just the thing: The Lego Star Wars Super Star Destroyer.

This thing is huge. In fact, I have a feeling the minifigs were Photoshopped into the image above because it doesn’t show the scale: the assembled kit is 124.5 cm long, or just shy of 50 inches, and weighs 3.5 kilos, or almost eight pounds.