TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Apple will be expanding its iPhone 4S availability to another U.S. carrier in the next few weeks. No, it’s not T-Mobile, but rather C Spire Wireless, a small, regional carrier that’s popular in Mississippi and pockets of the Southeast. It’s hard to resist that Southern charm.

C Spire, which runs a CDMA-based network like Verizon and Sprint, will begin selling the iPhone 4S “in the coming weeks.” C Spire hasn’t released many details about the announcement, but Jim Richmond, director of corporate communications, said that interested consumers can sign up on the C Spire website to find out more information as it becomes available.

You know the lame new iPhone 4S? The one that almost every tech writer called “disappointing,” or “not a real upgrade.” The iPhone that “only” added a great-seeming new camera, a way faster brain and a startlingly clever AI assistant? Well, Apple shifted four million of them in three days.

To put that in perspective, the iPhone 4 sold 1.7 million handsets in its launch weekend, and the original iPhone took 74 days to reach the one million mark.

In addition, Apple’s figures say that iOS 5 has already been installed by 25 million people, and that 20 million of them have signed up for iCloud.

If you’re a gadget blogger who works from home, the hardest part of receiving deliveries from Amazon is dragging on your pants before you answer the door to the delivery guy. But for regular people with proper jobs, taking time off to wait for UPS isn’t practical. Which is why Amazon is trialling deliveries to public lockers.

The tests are ongoing in Seattle and parts of New York, in Rite Aid and 7-Eleven stores, among others.

Being on Verizon’s 4G LTE network and having a smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard have been mutually exclusive features until now. Today, the carrier revealed the Samsung Stratosphere, a 4G smartphone with a slide-out keyboard.

The Stratosphere targets the business professional crowd, the folks who used to use (or still use) BlackBerries, but are looking to make the transition to Android or iOS.

The Stratosphere features a 4-inch Super AMOLED display with a 5-row QWERTY keyboard underneath.

How do you make sure your solar panel is always pointing at the sun? Well, sticking it in the window would be a good start, and that’s just what Quirky’s new Ray does — literally.

Ray is a combined solar charger and suction cup, meaning you can stick it to the windshield of your car or the window of a sunny room and convert photons into precious electrons.

As with any Apple announcement, the pre-event online rumor mill is running at full steam. Some are serious, some less so, and some are so ridiculous as to make you curse the egalitarian world of online publishing. And through all of it, of couse, Apple never comments on rumors or speculation (or much of anything else). That leaves a lot of unaccounted-for online blathering.

We’ve rounded up some of the best and the worst of the current conjecture, and we’ve given each a plausibility rating to cut through (most of) the nonsense; a score of one means it’s complete hokum, while a 10 means it’s a sure thing.

Apple sure does know how to pack in a lot of gear into a seemingly simple LCD monitor. How do we know? iFixit’s latest teardown, of course!

iFixit took apart Apple’s 27-inch Thunderbolt Display for our viewing pleasure, revealing an iMac-like glass panel that can be removed with heavy-duty suction cups and a host of parts not normally found in an LCD monitor.

In fact, the display itself shares an uncanny resemblance to an iMac display because it’s actually the same model: an LG LM270WQ1, which was used in the iMac Intel 27″ from October 2009.

While other carriers gear up for the upcoming iPhone 5, T-Mobile today introduced a trifecta of 4G products poised to take advantage of the carrier’s 20 Mbps-plus network speeds.

Two smartphones, the Android Gingerbread-running HTC Amaze 4G and the Samsung Galaxy S II, along with a hotspot, the Sonic 4G Mobile HotSpot, were introduced at the Mobilize 2011 conference.

The HTC Amaze 4G is all about the camera. It has 8 megapixels, 1080p HD video recording capabilities, a backside illuminated sensor and a dual LED flash. Touting zero shutter lag, it also comes with some proprietary digital camera features like SmartShot, which takes five photos and creates a composite for the “best” shot and PerfectPics, which creates a separate album of best photos based on qualities such as general picture sharpness and the presence of faces.

And we know all about the Samsung Galaxy S II, but the T-Mobile flavor is slightly different than Sprint’s Epic 4G Touch version.

Remember the Spider Holster? Sure you do, but let me remind you anyway. The Spider Holster is a belt-mount for your camera, letting you hang even the heaviest SLR on your belt securely using a pin screwed into the tripod socket of the camera’s body and a bracket on your belt.

It works great, but the The Capture Camera Clip from Photojojo does the same thing with less weight and without a pin sticking out the bottom of the camera.

Take a popular camera line, whether compact or entry-level SLR, and you can be sure that it’ll be updated every year. Whether it needs to be or not. Sometimes, though, these incremental updates hide some genuinely big changes. So it is with Canon’s new S100.

On the surface, it looks like the S100 isn’t much different from 2010’s S95, itself a rather pedestrian upgrade from the S90. But despite the similarity of specs, there’s a lot to like.