TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Someday, you’ll be able to fit as much data in a small, square CompactFlash card as AT&T carries on its entire network in a week.

In theory at least, version 5 of the CompactFlash standard will allow CF cards to hold 188 petabytes of data. By comparison, that’s equivalent to 188,000 one-terabyte drives, sufficient capacity to contain 2.7 million hours of HD video (two centuries’ worth of the porn industry’s annual output) or more than 7 days’ worth of AT&T’s daily traffic, which currently averages 18.7 petabytes.

There are many kinds of schwag to be had a trade-shows, and high-tech trade-shows like CES and the Mobile World Congress offer equally high-tech junk. Years ago, the branded give-away of choice was the ballpoint pen. Then, when people stopped writing things down, the PR people would try to buy you off with a useless CD.

Then a strange thing happened. USB sticks started to replace CDs as the method to pass on press info, but they were still expensive. Many of the PR people acted like they were giving you a precious 128MB gift, and that you should be grateful, dammit!

This last year has been different again.

Barbie, the favorite of little girls everywhere, has been a teenage fashion model, concert pianist, astronaut and even a Miss America. A computer geek was the one missing career in the 124 that this blonde bombshell has had.

But now there’s a new Barbie, with glasses and a Bluetooth earpiece, and boasting of being a computer engineer.

Barbie designers say they worked with the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering to ensure that accessories, clothing and packaging were “realistic and representative of a real computer engineer.”

“Geek chic,” as they call it, means computer engineer Barbie wears a t-shirt featuring a binary code and carries a smart phone, a laptop case, and tops it up with some stylish pink glasses.

Overall, the effect is very Elle Woods a.k.a Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. Still, I am amazed it has taken till 2010 to get a Barbie that carries around a laptop.

Now that tablets are the flavor of the season, Panasonic is launching a tablet computer. But unlike the sleek, sophisticated Apple iPad, Panasonic’s tablet is a rugged machine built for some tough love.

The Panasonic Toughbook H1 Field is a tablet targeted at maintenance workers, law enforcement and field sales personnel.

“Customers love the ruggedness and the swappable battery concept in our tablet,” says Kyp Walls, director of product management for Panasonic Computer.

The Toughbook H1 has a sunlight readable 10.4-inch resistive touchscreen and runs a 1.8 GHz Intel Atom processor.

Apple has posted a news bulletin for iPhone developers, informing them they may not use the phone’s geolocation features primarily for delivering targeted ads.

What that means is if you’re playing a game that doesn’t use geolocation for gameplay, and all it’s doing is tracking your location to serve location-based ads, it’ll get rejected.

The idea behind Michael Greenberg’s iPad steering wheel accessory is a very good one, but his implementation is a little off.

We can expect to see a lot of accessories for the forthcoming iPad, at least as many plastic widgets as are available for the iPhone. A gamer’s steering wheel will doubtless be one of them, making the slim iPad easier to hold and also making it feel like you’re driving a read car (a real car with no seats, body work, or anything other than a steering wheel, but you get the point).

Apple updated the iPhone software development kit on Wednesday to allow internet telephony apps to work on the 3G network. The little-noticed move effectively unlocks the ability for the iPhone — and the upcoming iPad — to be used as web phones.

ICall, a voice-over-Internet Protocol (VOIP) calling company, said the latest revisions in Apple’s iPhone developer agreement and software development kit enable the iPhone to make phone calls over 3G data networks.

Google Nexus One customers could finally have a fix to at least one of their problems. Google says it will soon release a patch that will improve the spotty 3G coverage that has left many Nexus One customers frustrated.

“Our engineers have uncovered specific cases for which a software fix should improve connectivity to 3G for some users,” a Google employee commented on the company’s Nexus One forum.”We are testing this fix now and initial results are positive.”

Google hopes to offer the fix as a software update by wireless download to Nexus One users in “the next week or so.”

Nexus One is the first smartphone to be sold by the search company itself, rather than a manufacturing or carrier partner.

Above you see two Blu-ray players. On the bottom is the Oppo BDP-83, a $500 machine. On top is the Lexicon BD-30, which will set you back $3,500. Can you spot the difference, apart from the price?

It’s a trick question. There is no difference, at least not on the inside. In a daring matryoshka-like move, it appears that Lexicon simply bought a batch of Oppos and put them in new cases.

In addition to a tablet device, Apple is expected to introduce the next major upgrade for its iPhone operating system in a press event next week, according to reports.

Fox News cites an unnamed Apple employee who claims iPhone OS 4.0 will be a major topic of the Jan. 27 press event along with the fabled Apple tablet. The source did not disclose any details about the software upgrade, but in a separate report The Boy Genius Report cites one of its “trusty Apple connects” who stated the following:

“We’re not commenting on rumors,” an Apple spokesman told Wired.com.