TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Your grandma is not a minority yet. A new survey by the Consumer Electronics Association says that roughly half of U.S. households have a digital television. That’s an 11 percent increase from a year ago, but it still means there are going to be a lot of sets needing converter boxes when TV broadcasts go digital in 14 months.

The association expects digital TV sales to grow 17 percent this year, with 80 percent of those being HD sets.

Half Of U.S. Households Have Digital TVs, Trade Group Says [InformationWeek]

Polymathic wit and Guardian gadget blogger Stephen Fry reviews an electric toothbrush and laments how WC3, the web standards group, is being pressured by Apple and Nokia to turn HTML 5 into corporate monkey markup language. The latter is annoying, the former, astonishing:

"The the Oral-B®, Professional Care™ Triumph™ (with Wireless SmartGuide) Oral-B (”powered by Braun” … is so over-engineered as almost to defy description. A base station, where sits and charges the toothbrush itself, transmits by radio to a receiving element. The receiver substation is a plastic cartouche complete with obligatory LCD screen called a SmartGuide (phrases compressed with UpperCaseLetters such as this are DeRigueur for today’s sad MarketingPerson), which gives a reading of how long you’ve brushed, and how long you’ve got to go in each of the quadrants of the mouth… Although all this wireless tosh is senseless and functionally meaningless, I love it.

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Russia, intent on asserting itself as a Superpower 2.0 in so many ways, is in the finishing stages of building out its own GPS system. Putin Inc. launched a rocket yesterday with the final three satellites the country will need to create a navigation system to rival the American-maintained system relied on by everyone from cab drivers to deer hunters.

The military-run GLONASS (Did somone say something funny, Mr. Comedian? Hmm? Hmm?) mapping system already works over most of Russia and is expected to blanket the world by the end of 2009, once all 24 satellites are operational.

Russia launches final satellites for its own GPS [Reuters]

A trio of value cards from AMD leaked out thanks to Madbox PC over Christmas, identifying the Radeon HD 3450, a $50 model based on the RV620 core and featuring a 525Mhz core clock, 256MB of memory and DisplayPort; the 3470, which ups the clock speed to 600Mhz or more and comes with up to 512MB of RAM and DVI; and the 3650, which is built on the RV635 core, has an 800Mhz core clock and 512MB of RAM.

Her Majesty’s traffic cops are getting ready to nail Britons careless enough to use a mobile phone while driving. New guidelines call for a maximum sentence of two years in jail and an unlimited fine for those convicted of dangerous driving, the most serious form of being a rolling prat. Current laws allow only for a small, automatic fine.

Immigration Minister Liam Byrne was fined 100 pounds last month for chatting on his phone while driving in Birmingham, just the kind of careless behavior that could send one’s MG careening into a wheelie bin.

Things you don’t want to see while being prepped for surgery: Your doctor waving his phone and yelling "I gotta get a shot of this!"

Unfortunately for a patient at the Mayo Clinic Hospital near Phoenix, he got no such warning before a resident used his cell phone to grab a photo of the patient’s penis –noteworthy for being tattooed with the legend "Hot Rod" — during gall bladder surgery. The doctor, who showed the photo to colleagues, is facing disciplinary action. The patient, who says he got the tattoo to win a $1,000 bet, says he feels "violated, betrayed and disgusted." About the photo.

Photo snapped of patient’s genitalia during surgery [Arizona Repbulic]

Environmental blog Inhabitat has roped in some heavy-hitters for its first Green Gadgets conference, dedicated to coming up with ways to fulfill your burning tech consumer lust without creating toxic waste pits in far away lands. Scheduled for Feb. 1 in New York, the confab will include presentations from Sony, Nokia, HP, OLPC and several intriguing artists who work with industrial detritus. We particularly like the idea of feral robotic dogs.

Greener Gadgets

If you’ve been envying a friend’s new superzoom camera, Pentax has a new workaround to add zoom to your current camera. The UA-1 adapter allows owners of Pentax PF-80ED and PF-65ED series spotting scopes to attach just about any compact digicam to the scope.

We’re talking "Look at the tick on that bird!" magnification on these scopes, so this could be an easy (and easy to carry) way to show up SLR snobs at your next Audubon Club outing. The adpater will sell for $70 starting in February.

Oki Digital Imaging is showing off a prototype of new LED technology that could lead to a fingertip-sized projector. The current display uses red LEDs a mere 20 nanometers in size, allowing for a super-dense display that can render images legibly at petite sizes.

Add blue and green LEDs to the display and "a projector with even a size of a fingertip can be produced," according to an Oki engineer.

‘Fingertip-sized Projector in View,’ Oki Digital Imaging Says [TechOn]

MobileComplete, the guys who set up internetworked, remote-controlled cellphones for easy mobile-app testing over the web, created countless graphical phone mockups to embed in their developer’s programming kit. Now they’re letting anyone play with them, pitching web-based replicas as the best way to shop for phones you can’t test in person.

Naming the service Tryphone, it takes the fast, elegant user-friendliness of real hardware and replicates it in slow, crufty web 2.0-tastic form.