TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Apple has staked its reputation on tight control of a few carefully designed, faultlessly executed products.

Now, as Apple expands its reach from computers into music, video, consumer electronics and phones, it’s getting harder and harder for the company to make sure all of its products "just work," as its marketing slogan goes. Its growing army of customers is getting more difficult to satisfy, and they’re finding a host of new problems, ranging from tapeless camcorder issues to buggy iPhones.

Njection wants to free you from the tyranny of law. The company maintains a website where users can upload the skinny on red light cameras and speed traps, wiki-style, thus enabling drivers to avoid them, or at least slow down when they are in the vicinity. It reminds me of the scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, when principal Ed Rooney is sprinting along the school corridor, as fast as his hate-filled legs will carry him, and he slows up as he passes each classroom window.

Here at Gadget Lab we’ve been paying close attention to Apple’s recent hiccups, beginning with iPhone 3G activation woes, followed by a buggy iPhone 2.0 release and topped off with three separate MobileMe incidents. We’d like to take this a step further and dig into other issues people have had — and continue to experience — with Apple products and services in recent months.

The best way to avoid a speeding ticket is, of course, not to speed — but if you like to put the pedal to the metal, a GPS device might be your best bet. At least, that’s what a GPS seller is trying to tell you.

Rocky Mountain Tracking, a GPS manufacturer, on Thursday issued a press release recounting the story of 18-year-old Shaun Malone, who is protesting a speeding ticket with the help of an RMT GPS device.

Mind you, this wasn’t an ordinary GPS that guides you to the nearest Starbucks; this particular GPS was a vehicle tracking device — the type used by nosy, distrusting parents.

HP 2133 Mini Notebook

It’s been less than a year since Asus first sprinkled its Eee PCs with magical miniaturizing dust, yet these low-cost, diminutive laptops have already taken off like an F/A-18 catapulted from an aircraft carrier. In the past nine months alone, the industry has produced a spate of "mini-me-too" offerings, including Cloudbooks, Airs, Winds and other ebulliently named subnotebooks.

Seriously, it was only a matter of time before the big boys of computing decided to get in on this burgeoning and potentially lucrative category. Dell has already announced plans to release a cheap (and derivatively named) E mini notebook for $300 in August.

Dell’s E mini-notebook computer, first outed when Gizmodo’s Brian Lam collared Michael Dell sneaking one about the D6: All Things Digital conference, has got a price. The E not only lops a few letters of the name of Asus’ rival Eee PC, it also drops a few dollars, coming in at $300.

Price has been the problem with these mini-notebooks, and Dell is very welcome to bring its budget mass-marketing chops to the party. While not official, the news comes from the usually reliable DigiTimes, which tells us that the E will be available in the last quarter of the year.

The renovated BMW Museum in Munich, Germany, offers one of the largest spaces for focused car-design ogling, and is as large (5000 square meters) an expression of the company’s outsized engineering expectations as it is an interesting new space for art. The latter label comes mostly from the mechatronic piece by ART+COM called the Kinetic structure, an awesome installation project made out of moving, sliver spheres.

UPDATED 9.45AM

After manically clicking on the "Check for Updates" button in iTunes all morning, the 2.0 iPhone and iPod Touch firmware has finally show up. The update will bring all the functionality of the iPhone 3G to your old model — minus the 3G and the GPS of course.

The update is free if you have an iPhone and $10 for the Touch (Thanks, Sarbanes-Oxley).

Canadian telco Rogers has responded to criticism of its pathetic iPhone data plans with a limited time offer. Anyone who signs up for a three year contract before August 31st can choose an extra 6GB of data for $30 per month. That’s on top of the regular iPhone contracts which run from $60 to $115. How much data is 6GB? Rogers’ press release is enthusiastically accurate on this:

[W]ith 6GB of data, iPhone 3G users can visit 35,952 web pages, or send and receive 157,286 emails, or watch 6,292 minutes of YouTube videos each and every month.(xx)

That (xx) is probably a place-marker telling someone to clean up those figures before publishing.

Digital music is great, something very apparent to the frequent traveler. Since moving to Spain last year, I’ve been hopping from country to country and apartment to apartment, carrying my whole music library on my Mac’s hard drive. Compare that to a few packing cases full of CDs and you can see why I ripped all my music before that first, nervous departure.

But how best to get that music back into distinctly analog, air-shifting sound-waves? This post is ostensibly to ask for your help, as I have landed, speaker-less, back on Barcelona’s fair shores.