TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

A Samsung press conference is two things: Packed with reporters (the lines to get in can be hundreds of yards long) and packed with products. This last is no surprise, as Samsung is one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of anything that uses electricity.

Even so, I wasn’t quite expecting the number of lenses that formed just a small part of the Korean company’s PMA 2010 flood of products.

Barcelona — The only thing Motorola’s new handset will quench is your enthusiasm. As the sole new Motorola handset at Mobile World Congress, it’s the one I have to write about. But the Android-powered Quench (to be called the CLIQ XT in the US) is overshadowed by pretty much every other Moto phone I saw.

It’s a competent phone, with a 3.1-inch, 320 x 480 capacitive touch-screen, a 5MP camera and a decent enough 528 MHz processor. It even has a neat extra on the home button, which doubles as a tiny trackpad. But its boring rounded corners and chunky body scream “ho-hum” (imagine that for a second, will you). Everywhere I looked I saw higher definition screens, sleeker, hotter handset designs and more interesting features.

Doxie is a cheap, simple and easy-to-use document scanner that launched this week at the Macworld Expo. The slim, portable scanner uses USB bus-power to turn paper into PDFs, jpegs or lossless png files, and – here’s the twist – it then sends them directly off to the cloud.

The specs: scans can be done at up to 600dpi in 24bit color, and as fast as 12 seconds per page (if you turn off color and lower the resolution).

Fido Fashion’s dog leash turns your pooch’s energy into electrical energy, a far more useful form of power. The retracting restraint works like a crank-powered flashlight, and the constant winding and unwinding of the leash’s reel generates power.

This power is promptly wasted, sent out to LEDs to light your path of illuminate car and house keyholes (three lights point down, and one up).

Researchers at MIT have demonstrated the first laser that uses the element germanium.

The laser, which operates at room temperature, could prove to be an important step toward computer chips that move data using light instead of electricity, say the researchers.

“This is a very important breakthrough, one I would say that has the highest possible significance in the field,” says Eli Yablonovitch, a professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department of the University of California, Berkeley who was not involved in the research told Wired.com.

Close scrutiny of the iPad which Steve Jobs presented at Apple’s special event last week shows what may be webcam, tucked away in the black screen bezel just like it is on the MacBook Pro.

A screen-grab from the official video of the event shows nothing but a small dot above the screen, opposite the home button. Taken alone, this isn’t much, but compare this with the picture of the iPad leaked just hours before the event (below).

The iPad was supposed to change the face of computing, to be a completely new form of digital experience. But what Steve Jobs showed us yesterday was in fact little more than a giant iPhone. A giant iPhone that doesn’t even make calls. Many were expecting cameras, kickstands and some crazy new form of text input. The iPad, though, is better defined by what isn’t there.

Flash

Many people will bemoan the lack of support for Adobe’s interactive software, Flash.

Panasonic has added manual control and GPS to its popular Leica-lensed Lumix ZS3, and bumped the name and number up to ZS7.

The compact camera is a replacement for the top-of-the-range ZS3, and improves on it in almost every way, the biggest boost being in speed. For instance the new ZS7 has a tiny shutter lag of 0.006 second (that this figure is even included in a press release for a point and shoot is unusual), and faster focussing.

Electronic-book readers are red-hot. After a blockbuster 2009, during which an estimated 5 million devices were sold, a new batch of e-readers are waiting to burst into the spotlight.

The latest generation of devices are easy on the eye, lightweight and packed with some nifty features such as the ability to take notes, make lists and — for some — even watch video. They also offer far better battery life than any netbook or notebook, often come with an unlimited wireless connection for downloading new books, and give you access to libraries of e-books that can top a million titles.

Grand Theft Auto, the pedestrian-punching, car-stealing, ho-beating video game, has arrived – cursing and swearing like a dock-worker with Tourette’s – on the iPhone.

The GTA franchise is best known, perhaps, for scandal and controversy. The infamous “Hot Coffee Mod”, for instance, saw the game enter a rather adult realm.