TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Hollywood’s sequel season is upon us. The formula demands that movie studios follow up each blockbuster success with a rehash that doesn’t stray too far from the original script.

And now Motorola may be following Hollywood’s lead. Images that circulated on Monday suggest an imminent follow-up to Motorola’s highly successful Droid smartphone. Technology blog Droid Life acquired images of what look like spec sheets for the Droid 4, the aptly named fourth iteration of Motorola handsets, offered by Verizon.

Be warned: In 2012, your Facebook friend activity ticker could go insane — that is, if Facebook is indeed working on an actual “Facebook phone,” as reported Monday by AllThingsD.

According to AllThingsD sources, Facebook is working with Taiwanese phone manufacturer HTC on the purported phone, which would run “on a modified version of Android” that Facebook has “tweaked heavily” to integrate its social media platform with the device.

The things we’ll do for love.

When Google officially unveiled its newest Android operating system almost exactly one month ago, Matias Duarte, senior director of Android User Experience, told a rapt Hong Kong audience, “While people like Android, while people need Android, they didn’t love Android.”

Everyone knew exactly what he was getting at. Android might be the world’s most dominant smartphone OS with a 52 percent market share among global users, but compared to iOS, and even the upstart Windows Phone, it’s just not very fun.

There’s a lot to like about SLR Magic’s HyperPrime 12mm lens for Micro Four Thirds cameras, starting with that Back to the Future-esque name. It’s manual, it’s metal, and it’s fast.

12mm converts to 24mm (35mm equivalent) on a Micro Four Thirds body, which makes the maximum aperture of ƒ1.6 even more impressive (on 35mm SLRs, anything this wide is usually ƒ2.x). The body of the lens is all-metal, and it has a 12-blade diaphragm for nice, round out-of-focus highlights.

Much to the chagrin of Apple, the recent release of iOS 5 didn’t go off without a hitch. Hordes of iOS users reported battery-life issues, among other bugs. Fortunately a solution will arrive soon, and some beta testers are already sampling the software update.

A small number of iOS 5 users were given early access to an unreleased upgrade, iOS 5.0.1, according to 9to5Mac. The update is supposed to remedy the battery-life issues users have complained about since upgrading to iOS 5, as well as Siri issues, buggy iCloud documents and multitasking gestures on first-gen iPads.

Ever since Amazon unveiled its 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet in September, a lingering phrase has been attached to the low-cost, high-profile device: ”the iPad’s first true Android competitor.”

Unlike all the Android tablets that offer 10-inch screens, roomier storage capacities, built-in cameras and 3G support, the Fire will ship with modest hardware specs. In fact, the Amazon tablet would seem ill-prepared to take on the iPad, if not for a trio of would-be Apple-slaying features.

Chances are, you use your iPad while watching TV. And if you use your iPad to complement your TV experience, you might as well have an app that acts as a friendly companion — nay, an intelligent companion — to what’s happening onscreen.

That app is IntoNow. It analyzes the audio from TV (or even YouTube) to figure out what you’re watching and deliver specifically tailored media to complement your video content. IntoNow has had smartphone apps for a while, but today, it introduces a new iPad app to take advantage of the 70 percent of us who use tablets while watching the tube.

The coaster brake, found on beach cruisers and Dutch-style city bikes, has come to the track bike in the form of the Draft Coaster from SE bikes.

Or should I say “track bike style“? For the Draft Coaster is anything but track ready. It is heavy (26 pounds or 12 kilos), has a hi-ten steel frame and comes with a riser bar, not drops. But no matter, as this is really about having a simple, clean looking bike to get around town.

If the last two weeks of mainstream press coverage are to be believed, the only relevant features in Apple’s new iPhone 4S are Siri, the phone’s remarkable digital assistant, and the new 8-megapixel camera, which delivers near point-and-shoot image quality to Apple’s mobile platform.

But there’s one other feature that’s largely been ignored, even though it too was demoed at the iPhone 4S debut: Apple’s A5 processor, which grants exciting new opportunities for iOS game developers.

Sometimes a gadget can be almost ridiculously simple, and yet still be very useful indeed. This may be the case with the Twist, a pencil sharpener less complex than the pencil it sharpens.

The Twist is just that: nothing more than a sheet of sharpened steel, twisted to put the blade inside and leave a small handle on the outside, giving you something to push against. Elegant, effective and — sadly — non-existent.