TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

The rumors around the upcoming iPhone 5, expected to be announced this month, are swirling like Quidditch players around a Quaffle. The iPhone 5 will have a bigger screen, smaller bezel, lozenge shaped home button and be thinner than the current iPhone. Or maybe Apple will revamp the iPhone 4 into an iPhone 4S, like it did with the 3G/3GS. Or perhaps it is making an all-new cheap pre-pay iPhone as well as an iPhone 5. It’s all so very confusing.

What if these rumors are mixing up not a new iPhone 5 and a new, low-cost pay-as-you-go iPhone 4S? What if they are instead mixing up an iPhone 4S (faster A5 chip, better camera) and a replacement for the iPad Touch — an iPad Nano, if you will?

Think about it.

Depending on where you are in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s either getting to the end of the camping season, or finally cooling down enough to enjoy being outdoors the whole day. So it might be the perfect time to build the Camping Wind Turbine, a tiny, portable propellor which will charge small gadgets.

The turbine was put together by “ineverfinishanyth” over on Instructables, and is incredibly simple in concept, although you’ll need to do some drilling and sawing to put it all together.

Today Toshiba revealed two new products that verge on the anorexic: A superskinny Android Honeycomb tablet, and a svelte notebook companion.

In case you don’t believe me, Toshiba’s tablet, the AT200, measures in at only 7.7 mm thick. For comparison, the iPad 2 is 8.8 mm thick. The AT200 features a 10.1-inch display with 1280 x 800 resolution. Inside, it’s got a dual-core TI OMAP 4430 processor that clocks in at 1.2 GHz, with 1 GB of RAM.

Just Mobile, the folks behind the chinky Alupen iPad stylus and its accompanying orifice the AluCube, have come up with a handsome, minimal iPad wall mount.

It’s called the Horizon, and it looks like one. Unlike other iPad wall mounts, this one doesn’t require screwing a huge, dorky-looking saucer to the wall first.

It’s winter, and you’re on your bike. The snow is coming down, the wind is finding its way in through even the tiniest gaps in your clothing, and it is bitterly cold. Thanks to your heated handlebar grips, though, you hands and fingers remain soft and warm.

Then, the batteries fail, and the temperatures plunge as fast as the shrinking current. Your digits begin to ice up…

This is the nightmare scenario only possible if you spent $200 on a pair of A’ME Heated Grips, the bike equivalent of those heated hair-rollers. If only you’d thought to buy waterproof, thermal gloves instead, you might save your now frostbitten fingers.

The kit consists of a pair of temperature-controlled grips, adjustable to any of six heat settings, along with a battery pack (you’ll have to find somewhere to put this), the mounting system, cables and battery charger.

United Airlines and Apple announced today that the airline will deploy 11,000 iPads for its United and Continental pilots. This is the first major airline to replace paper flight manuals with electronic flight bags, or EFBs.

“The paperless flight deck represents the next generation of flying,” said Captain Fred Abbott, United’s senior vice president of flight operations, in a press release. “The introduction of iPads ensures our pilots have essential and real-time information at their fingertips at all times throughout the flight.”

Alaska Airlines ditched paper charts for iPads in June, following Executive Jet Management’s lead. The FAA allowed the company’s pilots to use iPads as their primary source of information starting in February. Delta has also been testing out tablets with their pilots. They are first testing the iPad, and then will test the Motorola XOOM.

Unsurprisingly, the kids of my bike-polo playing friends are riding two-wheelers before they get to three years old, but for the children of less bike-obsessed parents, the usual path to learning to ride is through the push-bike. These are pedal-less bikes which the kids sit on and scoot along with their feet.

They are also usually dead boring, either fashioned from wood to a design that would make a Scandinavian mother proud (tasteful, but a total snooze for a toddler) or plain old plastic tat. Enter the Light Cycle learning bike, designed for by Ryan Callahan. As you can see, the Tron-themed light cycle is pretty damn awesome, and its long wheelbase also makes it look like an old Harley or even a miniature Honda Goldwing (Kinda.

All that swiping and tapping on your iPhone takes a heavy toll on the screen, leaving it a streaked and grimy mess.

Apple’s been battling our greasy fingers for years, and a recently discovered patent application describes a new way of making sure our oily fingers don’t mar future generations of gadgets from Cupertino.

In the application, Apple describes a way of depositing an oleophobic substance that bonds with the screen.

Boxee is now available as an iPad app. Like the Boxee set-top box and the Boxee software for Mac, Linux and PC, the app lets you watch both streamed media from the Internet and local movies you have already. Unlike the set-top box, you can’t stream from Netflix or add other sources.

Fire it up and log in to your Boxee account, and then to your social networks.

The best gimmick a restaurant can use is to serve excellent food, hopefully with efficient service. Failing that, the next best thing is… Well, anything really. Stupid menus where you have to read off food combos on a grid and tick the right box, like a math test. Waitresses in tight shorts and t-shirts.