TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Ready or not, Microsoft is coming to the smart phone party. After years of circling the outskirts of the phone market with various versions of its Windows Mobile OS, things appear to be getting serious with Windows Mobile 5.0. The latest company to join the fun is Lenovo, which has just released its ET980. The ET980 comes equipped with a 4-megapixel camera, a 312MHz processor, 64 MB of internal RAM and a MiniSD slot. Like most Lenovo products, however, it’s unlikely we’ll see this in the U.S.

Generally speaking, when it comes to audio gear, most folks tend to adhere to a few high-end brand names. But if you feel like bucking the trend and getting putting some distance between yourself and the rest of the lemmings, you might check out these cardboard speakers from the Museum of Modern Art. Named for the Japanes phrase “Mujirushi Ryohin” (“no-brand goods”), the MUJI Speakers are an audible expression of your defiance against rabid consumerism.

Tomorrow’s the big day for Adobe. After announcing back in April that it intended to acquire Macromedia, the company announced yesterday that it expects to close the deal by tomorrow, December 3. Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and other Web development tools have long played an important role in shaping the Web as we know it, and many of those apps will undoubtedly continue to play a part in Adobe’s vision for the future.

Move over Moto, Samsung’s cutting in on your slim phone turf. In Korea this morning, Samsung announced that it will be bringing the A900 handset to the U.S. in a deal with Sprint. With Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and a thickness of just 0.6 inches, the A900 may be the first phone to give the Motorola RAZR a run for its money in the American marketplace.

The launch of the Xbox 360 is still six days away, but the folks at AnandTech have already torn theirs apart. And God bless ‘em, too. Their inside look at the upcoming console walks you step-by-step through a complete dismantling of the machine, voiding the warranty in every manner possible. With a few torx screwdrivers, a small flat-head screwdriver, a metal stick, a plastic stick, and some needlenose pliers, you could follow along with their easy instructions.

There’s nothing quite like the joy of trading in an old phone for a shiny new one loaded with cool features. But even with PC sync apps, transferring old address book entries tends to kill the buzz a little. That’s why you need the CellStik. For $40, this little USB drive snaps onto your phone and transfers all your info with a push of a button.

Video blogs aren’t really all that new, but they’re still far less common than some might have predicted. While companies like Audioblog.com began playing with the medium a couple of years ago, bloggers have, by and large, ignored the technology. But a new deal announced yesterday by VideoEgg and Six Apart may broaden video’s appeal in the blogosphere.

The concept is simple: Spend a few minutes rambling into your iSight camera or upload some recent vacation footage, and your visitors can see and hear you in all your glory.

The new iPod may not be able to dispense candy, but neither can this PEZ dispenser MP3 player. Built by Pat Misterovich, a stay-at-home dad with a hankering for noisier novelty candy products, the PEZ MP3 has 512MB of flash memory and works with both Windows and Mac OS X. It’s also compatible with subscription services like Rhapsody To Go. Functionally, it sounds a lot like an iPod Shuffle: no screen, random (or repeat) play. At a price of $100, it’s almost cheap enough to be an impulse buy or a gift for the geek who has everything.

I can’t confirm it myself, but this is a little too cool to pass up. The German tech blog Technology Ninja is reporting that some guy got iTunes to run on his Windows Mobile handheld. The original post is tragically low on details, and the whole thing looks magnificently hoaxy to me. But if it is true, PDAs just got a whole lot cooler.

A few years back, before mobile phones began shipping with integrated music players, I made a lot of grand proclamations about how the PDA would eventually become everybody’s personal entertainment hub. But, partly because the handheld versions of Windows Media Player and Real Player both essentially suck, it never came to pass.

Today at the Microsoft Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Gates and company unveiled the new interface for Office 12. Among the changes you can look forward to are a less cluttered tab-style interface and a redefinition of the word “gallery.”

Office 12’s new menus will look cleaner and more orderly than in previous versions, thanks in large measure to a rethinking of the way content boxes are divided within the various Office applications. Where the menus in past versions were densely packed with buttons that looked remarkably similar, the new version will set aside the entire upper portion of the screen for a spacious array of buttons.