TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

As the netbooks market gets more competitive, design has emerged as a big factor for companies seeking to distinguish their products.

Lenovo’s latest netbook photos show it may just blow its rivals out of the water when it comes to looks. The company teased Monday with pictures of a new netbook called Pocket Yoga. The photos also show a netbook with a nice almost full-sized keyboard that supports a touchscreen for a stylus. It also has a form factor that allows it to be flipped into a small tablet PC.

You don’t have to be a smoker to know the pain of yellowing hardware. Any beige box of a certain age starts to darken and stain like an Englishman’s teeth, turning beautiful retro hardware into the equivalent of a filthy, leering uncle, something to hide, not flaunt.

The reason? Retards. The ABS used for these old machines was rendered flame-retardant with chemical treatments. These chemicals are the ones which cause this unsightly yellowing and until now the only fix was an equally ugly coat of paint.

Update: 04/11 – Apple has approved the Tweetie 1.3 update. The company did not give any reasons for the change of heart.

A successful app in Apple’s app store can net a developer hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the price to pay for that is dealing with Apple’s whims.

The makers of a popular Twitter application for the iPhone called Tweetie have said that Apple has rejected the latest update of their app for allegedly having bad language.

Now the real story? The bad language showed up in the trends feature of the app, which pulls together the most popular keywords that people are twittering about!

Tweetie is one of the many applications available for iPhone users to connect to the increasingly popular social networking site Twitter. Unlike other apps such as Twitterfon that are available for free, Tweetie costs $3.

Loren Brichter of atebits, which makes the Tweetie app, informed his Twitter followers earlier today about Apple’s stance.

An auto-engineering company from Germany has built a prototype car that uses OLED displays on its front and back windshields, the better to communicate with surrounding vehicles. 

EDAG’s ‘Light Car – Open Source’ car is based on the same principle used by phone manufacturers when replacing the physical buttons of their UI. That is, a display can have easily customizable inputs and can increase the surface area for dynamic media.

The best, nerdiest and probably funniest cartoon from the stickman comic XKCD was the sandwich strip seen above. If you don’t get it, then it doesn’t matter. If you do get it, it is quite amazingly hilarious. Sadly, trying it out in real life won’t work — it’s about as likely a transition from comic space into meat space as putting on a pair of glasses, re-parting your hair and expecting to be unrecognizable (we’re looking at you, Kal-El).

Apple has introduced a new Airport Extreme and Time Capsule, and they like to share. Normally, mean old routers keep themselves to themselves and grumble when any strangers try to join in, but two smart new features make it easier for folks to get along.

First is “Simultaneous Dual Band Wi-Fi”, which runs two networks at the same time. Thus you can run a speedy and long-ranging “n” network for all your computers and a separate “g” section so that your iPods and iPhones don’t slow things down. This alone makes the rather expensive router pretty appealing as it means you don’t need to run two separate networks.

The other new trick is called “Guest Networking”, and lets you break off a small piece of your network for friends to use when they come to stay, getting them online without letting them access your adult video collection. At least that’s the official line.

We see this as a tool to help you be a good neighbor.

The week’s big gadget news was the release of the Amazon Kindle 2, an improved version of the online retailer’s popular e-book reader. As reviewer Steven Levy discovered, the Kindle 2 fixes a number of usability and aesthetic problems with the first version. We talk about the Kindle and the prospects for the e-book market, which Cosmopolitan publisher Hearst is even thinking about getting into.

What’s the next step for the netbook? If these sneaked pictures are to be believed, the tiny machines are going slimline, making them even more purse-friendly.

This is the new Acer Aspire One, spotted by a reader of the German news site Netbook News. Thankfully, the anonymous tipster broke the cardinal rule for leaked product shots — he actually managed to keep the camera still and take sharp pictures.

Consumers are now welcome to drop off their old or broken gadgets at any Best Buy store for recycling.

Launched Tuesday, the program accepts most electronics, including TVs, computers and DVD players.

A few restrictions apply: Best Buy is not accepting hard drives, electronics containing Freon, appliances (e.g., microwaves or refrigerators), or TVs or monitors larger than 32 inches.

The program is mostly free, but you must pay $10 if you opt to recycle a TV, CTR, monitor or laptop. However, in exchange you receive a $10 gift certificate from Best Buy.

We view this as a great move from Best Buy. The major problem with recycling gadgets is it’s confusing for consumers: How exactly you can recycle an electronic depends on the type of gadget as well as the manufacturing brand. A well known chain like Best Buy offering a broad recycling program is extremely helpful.

One footnote: If you drop off your TV for recycling at Best Buy, just be careful if you decide to shop for a new one there.

A new application called iShred turns your iPhone into an electric guitar — and it’s pretty damn fun even for experienced musicians like myself.

The $5 app, which launched this week, consists of a virtual fret board and a set of six strings. Mind you, this isn’t a digital representation of an entire guitar neck: That would be pretty impractical given the iPhone’s screen size. There are actually 10 frets, and each one can be programmed to play an entire chord or a single note. You swipe your finger across the touchscreen to strum a chord; tapping on each string plucks individual notes.

At first that might sound pretty lame and limited, but any guitarist knows most rock and roll songs alternate between only a few chords — usually six or seven at most. A lot of the really easy, basic songs I first learned to play (e.g., Oasis’s "Wonderwall" or Weezer’s "Sweater Song") used only three or four chords.