TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Vodafone in the UK has introduced a range of SIM-only tariffs. Hands up if you can guess why. Yes, you at the back there, speak up. That’s right. The iPhone. A gold star for you.

In the UK, you can now get an iPhone from pretty much any carrier, which is good news for new customers. If you already have an iPhone, though, a new handset is little incentive to switch, so Vodafone’s new plans make a lot of sense. There is of course a confusion of different rates and options, but it boils down to this: All plans except the cheapest £10 ($15) per-month option have unlimited texts. Paying anything above £20 also gets you 500MB of data, and you will only be on-contract for thirty days.

Choose to sign up for a year and £25-per-month also gets you a gig of data and 900 minutes of talking.

A strange thing has happened. After years of using a notebook as my only computer, I’m considering going back to a desktop machine. Why? The iPad.

It’s too early to tell for sure, but the iPad looks like it will do almost everything my MacBook does away from the desk: reading, browsing, watching movies in bed. It’ll even take care of the one thing that makes me schlep a notebook with me on vacation: importing and backing up photos.

Apple, which launched its first iPhone barely three years ago, has already become the third largest smartphone maker worldwide, according to an IDC ranking of the top five mobile device companies.

Apple ranked third in terms of market share in smartphones for the fourth quarter of 2009 and the entire year, behind Nokia and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion.

If you were to visit the Wired.com offices, you’d see more than one Timbuk2 bag slung carelessly on the floor, its owner off to grab a beverage from the Beer Robot to start the day. What you wouldn’t see is this new model, the Hidden messenger bag. Why? Seriously, are you asking that? Because it’s hidden, of course.

The Hidden is similar in concept to the foldable, stow-able shopping bags beloved of old ladies the world over.

Apple’s new tablet doesn’t include a camera, but the screenshot above reveals a “Take Photo” button in the iPad’s Contacts app.

Is it a hint that Apple is planning to release a camera-equipped iPad later? Or just a messy accidental result of sharing code between the iPhone Contacts app and the iPad’s? As much as we believe the former will happen eventually, the latter is more likely to be the case.

Apple’s press event, scheduled for Wednesday, is likely to include the introduction of the relentlessly rumored Apple Tablet.

We’ve taken a lot of time to track down the rumors, innuendo and even a few sparse facts about the device since the first whispers of its existence some two and a half years ago.

But now we’re going in a separate direction. Admittedly the five features below are are a little crazy — but their inclusion in the tablet would make it a whole lot more fun. Hey, a gadget journalist can dream, right?

1. Wireless Power Transfer

Power management will undoubtedly be a huge problem with a touch-enabled color screen device (it already is with the iPhone). But what if you never had to worry about charging it up? Imagine this: The tablet comes with a peripheral that looks a lot like an Airport Express.

The BookBook is a MacBook book-case. Designed to look like a heavy, ancient leather-bound tome, the BookBook notebook sleeve is in fact a zip-open, padded leather-bound tome, a vintage hardback disguise for the MacBook.

As I have mentioned/complained before, it doesn’t take long before a perfectly good homegrown solution becomes an overpriced, over-thought commercial product.

Brando’s LED ring-light for SLR cameras is a genuinely clever take on the ring flash. And at just $58, it is also just about the cheapest solution we have ever seen.

The Circular Macro Half/Full LED Light Source fits onto the front of most lenses (adapters for common filter-thread sized are supplied) and offers the on-axis, shadowless lighting of a ring flash. But because it uses LEDs, the lighting is continuos instead of coming in a split-second burst. This has a few advantages: You can use the camera in full auto without any fancy iTTL hookups, as the camera’s meter can see the light and work out exposure normally.

A rather clever programmer has managed to get the iPhone to run interactive apps created using Adobe’s Flash platform. And because it works inside the Safari browser, it isn’t subject to the dictatorial rules of Apple’s App Store.

The software is called Gordon, and it doesn’t actually allow Flash itself to work on the iPhone. Instead, Gordon is a JavaScript runtime written by Tobias Schneider which allows the browser to play and display .swf files (the Shockwave Flash file extension). A runtime is a collection of software that allows the running of code inside it. A helpful analogy is a software emulator for a games console which allows you to play the actual code of, say, Super Mario World on your PC.

Does this mean that the iPhone now supports Flash? Not really. You can’t just visit any site that has Flash, because the hack only works on sites that have installed it. Developers would need to add this runtime to each instance of Flash on their sites (although calling the runtime only requires a few lines of code).

Accelerometers have been inside cameras for a long time now. They’re the little gizmos that tell the camera which way up it was when you took a shot and allow auto-rotation of images. They also help keep the images stabilized, and in some cases they even help with exposure, so that the camera knows which way is up and can guess that the big blue strip at the top is probably the sky.