TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Can’t decide between an awesome pool table which the boys will love, or a dining table/desk which might keep you from becoming single and having to hang out with those boys all the time? Well, here’s some good news. For just $20,000 you can have both.

That’s right. Fancy French pool-table company Chevillotte will sell you the convertible “Very(Tables)”, a table which manages the astonishing feat of looking good both as a desk and as a game.

By day (and night, I guess) you can work and eat on the minimalist aluminum desk.

You may remember the YikeBike, the little electric Penny-Farthing that looks like it should be carrying Tom from Tom & Jerry. And if you saw the fun, foldable commuter machine being “skillfully” “maneuvered” around the Wired.com car park Gadget Lab editor Dylan Tweney, it is likely burned into your brain forever.

The Yike bike is fun. It is also expensive, at $3,800. Around $1,800 of this is thanks to the carbon fiber body, which is the main reason the bike weighs just 10.8kg, or 24 pounds, the same weight as a medium-specced Brompton folding bike.

SAN FRANCISCO — The first Android smartphone came in 2008. Then in 2010, the platform appeared on tablets. Now, Android wants to move into your home.

At its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google showed a sneak preview of its Android@Home project, which will extend the Android platform into household objects. That means some day in the future, you could control home appliances — your dishwasher, the heating system, the lights in your house — using your Android device as a remote control.

“Think of your phone as the nucleus that this all started with,” said Google engineering director Joe Britt in an interview. “We’re opening the platform up to everyone to do whatever they can imagine.”

Little detail was given, but Google explains it has essentially created a framework to control wireless communication between objects in your house.

Here’s just what the world needs: a designer chainsaw. Forget about that dorky and utilitarian Stihl and take a look at the latest thing in lumberjack hotness, the Nok Gear.

The Nok Gear is the perfect “tool” for the country hipster, or “Fakerjack“. Even the description is fittingly pretentious. The designer — Next of Kin Creatives — calls it a “lightweight chainsaw for the functional-luxe tribes.” That, if you were wondering, is a sentence completely devoid of meaning.

Jaryn Miller has tried to crack that age-old problem, locking up a bike. It’s a problem so intractable that even the Lady, normally not given to speaking about such “dull” things, had something to say when we visited a local bike shop. “Somebody should design a strong lock that doesn’t weigh so much,” she whispered in her wonderful Catalan accent.

Miller’s answer is to make the lock part of the frame.

Chinese police have arrested three factory workers accused of leaking the iPad 2’s design prior to the tablet’s release, according to a report.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that assembles electronics including the iPad, suspects the employees leaked the design to Chinese accessory makers, giving them a head start on making iPad 2 cases before the rest of the world.

“The local police on December 26, 2010, arrested three employees that were suspected of leaking the design, and officially charged the three employees for violating the company’s trade secrets on March 23, 2011,” Taiwanese publication DigiTimes reported.

Most phones for old folks offer nothing but a large-text display, big buttons and nothing else. And rightly so: Removing complexity is the point. But what about adding in a few Grandpa-friendly extras? That’s just what the Bluechip BC5i Big Button Mobile Phone does.

The Big Button phone lives up to its name, with big fat buttons on the front, and these are joined by a big orange button on the back. This is the emergency button.

The Safe House is something of a paradox: — a house that is light, airy and open to the outside thanks to windows both numerous and large, and yet almost impossible to break into. How is this done? By the magic power of Transformers.

The home, designed by Polish architects KWK Promes, exists in two states. When you are at home and feeling safe, you leave it open in “vulnerable” mode. One side of the house is all glass, and the open-plan interior is open to the outside world.

Got an iPad 2? Got a cool stylus? It sucks that you keep losing it, right? That you can never find the chunky little pen when you want to write or draw something on the screen? If only there was a stylus with a magnet that could stick to the iPad or the iPad’s Smart Cover. If only…

It turns out that there is.

Microsoft’s new Windows phone platform hasn’t gained much momentum in the market, but the company is rapidly revising the operating system in an effort to catch up with rivals.

The company on Wednesday at its MIX developer conference detailed the upcoming software update for Windows Phone 7, dubbed “Mango,” due for release this fall.

The software update will be compatible with all smartphones running Windows Phone 7.