TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Alex Bell’s iPhone app gives live, accurate updates on just where the trains are in the NYC subway. And it does it without tapping into any of the MTA’s resources.

It’s almost 2011 and you still can’t get live information on arrival and departures for the NYC subway. SubwayArrival fixes that, by gathering data from the phones of people using the app and crunching the numbers. It watches for iPhones that swap to a different cell base-station, that disappear altogether due to a lost signal and that then reappear a long distance away in a short time.

Apple has updated its Universal Dock for iPods and iPhones. Now, instead of being a $50 box full of plastic parts, it’s a $60 box of plastic and aluminum.

Gone is the old white remote, the one that was the exact size and shape of the little cookies that come with coffee in certain cheesy hotels, replaced by the hefty new aluminum model that comes with the AppleTV.

Microsoft may be struggling to sell phones, but over in Xbox 360 land, things are going crazy. The Kinect controller-free controller has sold a whopping 2.5-million units in just 25 days.

The Kinect, which uses a combination of infra-red projectors and various cameras to track puny humans in their living rooms and therefrom control the on-screen action, has been a success since the pre-sale queues on launch-day, something usually seen in only the cultish world of Apple.

If you’re headed to the mall this weekend, Amazon’s new iPhone app might be an ideal companion for comparison-shopping and price checking.

As a bonus — for Amazon — the company has figured out a way to advertise its own products is everyone else’s stores, using a clever application that leverages the key features of smartphones — in particular, Apple’s latest iPhones.

At first, it’s odd, hopping on a bike frame made entirely of wood. After all, I’m used to high-tech composite framed made of carbon-fiber nanotubes impregnated with exotic resins, molded to tolerances of a thousandth of an inch. How could bamboo and hardwoods compare?

Actually, quite well. Renovo sent me its R4, a beautiful work of art, all swoopy lines and stunning finish work. It’s a little bit like riding a perfect piece of furniture — you can really get a sense of the fact that a human being spent a massive amount of time making this thing.

How do you tell if a shoe is a good fit? Take a short walk? Squeeze the front-end with your fingers to make sure there is space for your toes? What about a dangerous, 20-second blast of unshielded x-rays? If you were buying shoes in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, it’s likely that you regularly inserted a tootsie into one of these death-rays.

The wooden cabinets, possibly first built by a Clarence Karrer in Milwaukee in 1924, had the x-ray source in the base, and it would fire upwards through your foot and shoe.

Commercial broadband infrastructure in the US is as poorly tended and updated as the nation’s bridges and highways. Unless you’re a high-frequency stock trader. Then, you get to ride in the fast lane.

“Ultra-fast cables are not built for use by the public,” writes Thomas McCabe, who wrote a recent profile of the technology behind high-frequency trading for Kurzweil AI. “They’re designed by infrastructure companies specifically for HFT firms, who will pay high prices for bandwidth on the fastest cables.”

These companies are building new fiberoptic cables over land and under sea to connect major trading centers and shave milliseconds off trading times.

E Ink’s new Triton line give the company’s displays a long-desired new feature: color. Most of the E Ink team is in Japan this week, demonstrating their new screens in Hanvon’s new e-reader. I spoke by phone with E Ink’s Lawrence Schwartz, who broke down the technology behind the new screens, Triton’s importance for his company, and where their displays fit into the broader ecosystem of readable screens.

“All of our screens have been building towards this,” Schwartz said.

Microsoft’s $150 Xbox add-on, the Kinect, can use face-recognition technology to log you onto your Xbox Live account. But it’s not trouble-free.

To understand why, you need to know how it works.

Kinect effectively has two cameras: a traditional color video camera, which takes pictures and enables conference chat, and an infrared light sensor that measures depth, position and motion. One needs light, the other doesn’t.

With its brand-new Google TV Blu-ray Players and much-loved universal remotes, you might think Logitech would let its well-established business in keyboard and mice coast a little bit. Instead, they’re coming out with a new wireless keyboard with a new wireless charger: the Sun.

Actually, that’s not quite true. The Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750 may have solar in its name, but let’s face it: how much typing on a full-sized keyboard do most of us do in bright sunlight? Thankfully, “solar” here are a shorthand for “powered by any light source whatsoever,” including the bare-incandescent bulb in your dank basement office.