TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

There are many places you can buy replacement back panels for the iPhone 4, but if you buy one from the gadget repair supremos at iFixit you get the added benefit of a comprehensive step-by-step guide showing you how to fit it.

Not that you’ll really need it. The iPhone’s delicate glass rear panel is almost as easy to remove as the battery cover on my piece-of-junk Samsung Beyoncé — the only difference is that you need to remove two screws from the iPhone before the panel will slide off, whereas you need only to drop my phone on the floor and the panel jumps off like a squid tentacle hops from a hot iron frying pan.

HP was ready to go to the mattresses in an all-out mobile war against Apple. Instead, HP’s TouchPad was prematurely put to sleep, and the company is still nursing its wounds.

In its quarterly earnings report conference call on Monday, HP stated it wrote off approximately $3.3 billion in 2011 fiscal year costs due to “the wind down of HP’s WebOS device business.”

That $3.3 billion figure is 2.5 times the amount the company originally paid to acquire Palm in the first place.

After Nvidia’s Tegra 2 mobile processor first started showing up in smartphones in January, it took some six months for the powerful chip to become a veritable industry standard in Android tablets and smartphones. Now, with a successor to the Tegra 2 ready to deploy less than a year later, Nvidia aims to repeat history.

According to recently leaked pictures and reports, at least three Android tablets set to launch in the near future will come packing the Tegra 3 processor, Nvidia’s recently unveiled quad-core mobile processor.

Depending on your disposition, there’s an extra pleasure/pain that comes in the box with every camera: the user manual. I like them, and I keep a stack in the bathroom to read whenever, well, whatever. So I’m disappointed to see that the manual for the Lytro light field camera is so simple that it wouldn’t last a single restroom visit.

I’m loath to fetch UPS and FedEx deliveries at the office these days. On any given morning, I half expect to open up the boxes I’ve received to find the vacant, blank face of yet another Android tablet staring back at me.

Tuesday was no different. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus — a mouthful of a name — showed up on my doorstep. It’s Samsung’s fourth entry in the Galaxy Tab series of tablet computing devices.

If you’ve been hoping to stream live episodes of major network TV to your Apple TV anytime soon, don’t hold your breath. In an earnings call on Thursday, CBS CEO Les Moonves said that CBS declined a deal with Apple to stream content to its set top box, Apple TV.

When asked about teaming up with streaming services that don’t pay the network up front, Moonves said, “Frankly, we don’t believe in them.

The Gmail app for iPhone and iPad went live earlier today. After many users downloaded it and reported a bug, the app has now vanished from the digital shelves of the App Store.

Luckily, we were able to download the app during its short availability window, and you can see my first-look impressions here. But for now, here’s the troubling tale of Google’s stutter-stepping app launch.

Around 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Google pushed its Gmail iOS app live in Apple’s app store. But upon first launching the app, I and many others, got a “no valid ‘aps-environment’ error entitlement” error notification. Simply hitting OK and then relaunching the app allowed it to load apparently error-free (at least for me).

However, the app was removed about two hours later. Google’s cloud applications lead Dave Girouard tweeted: “Googla culpa! Sorry but we pushed a bad version of our iOS app for Gmail.

Panasonic may be on the cusp of launching a true pro-level successor to its excellent GF1, according to leaked photos.

Ever since Panasonic started watering down its GF range of Micro Four Thirds cameras after the first model, curmudgeon’s (like me) have been griping. While Panasonic chased the point-and-shoot crowd with the GF2 and GF3, people who like knobs and dials on their cameras (like me) were left considering a move over to the Olympus Pen range.

Now 17 leaked shots (since removed) at the Chinese Mobile01 forum show the GX1, which looks a lot more the GF1 than anything since.

Fitness apps for the iPhone aren’t exactly thin on the ground. Hit up the App Store and you’ll see a confusion of GPS-enabled trackers for running, biking and probably even skipping. What is slightly less common is hardware that lets these apps do more than simply tell you how far and fast you were.

Wahoo, which sounds like something Mario might shout in his more recent outings, is a “run/gym pack” which includes a heart-rate belt and companion dongle that slots into the dock port. It works with Wahoo’s own free app, but will also play nice with most any other fitness app or measuring device on the market thanks to its industry standard ANT+ integration.

Carrying junk in your bike’s water bottle cage instead of filling it with delicious cool, refreshing water is probably as old as the bottle cage itself. Tools, keys and snacks can all be stowed either on an actual water bottle, or a water-bottle sized container. Now, you can so the same with a lock.

The Bottle Lock comes from rack makers Küat, and slides snugly into a standard cage. Inside, coiled like a low-security steel snake is a five-foot long, 8mm-thick cable (1/3 inch).