TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

This set of Lens Filter Coasters would drive my parents crazy. Like tying a slice of buttered toast to the back of a cat and dropping it, the prospect of Joel Malone’s Kickstarter project would put my mother and father into an infinite spin.

Why? Because in their house, you must use a coaster. Always, with no exceptions.

Amidst the deluge of software launches from Apple yesterday, it was easy to miss an update to the company’s “hobby,” the Apple TV. Version 4.4 of the set-top box’s OS is rather conservatively named, as it comes with many iOS 5 features.

AirPlay Mirroring

Before, you could stream video and audio content to the Apple TV from an iOS device via AirPlay. Now, with the iPad 2, the Apple TV supports AirPlay Mirroring, which lets you mirror the entire screen of the iPad 2 on the TV connected to the Apple TV.

It seemed like it would never arrive, but at long last, Facebook has released its iPad app.

One of the key features of the iPad-specific app is its integration with other iOS apps: The Facebook app will send you straight to other apps when you navigate to them from a friend’s news post or status update. For example, if a friend posted a link from The Daily, clicking the link would take you to The Daily app itself. The app also supports high-res photos that you can flip through like a photo album, as well as the ability to see where friends are located via with the Nearby mapping feature.

In Japan, it’s probably safe to say there’s a gadget for everything. And given a somewhat disastrous year, safety gadgets are likely getting more popular. Nope, there’s still nothing that can reliably predict an earthquake, but at least careful (and paranoid) Japanese can watch out for errant radiation — using their iPhones.

Two new detectors have just been launched by Scosche, the RDTX and the HRDTX. The RDTX requires no calibration, and measures background radiation.

Adobe unleashed a suite of services aimed at the growing mobile crowd at its Adobe MAX 2011 Conference today. The apps and services allow creative professionals and hobbyists to do what they do best without being tethered to traditional digital creative tools like desktops or laptop PCs.

It’s all part of Adobe’s so-called Creative Cloud initiative, which provides apps, services and (in the near future) a community surrounding them.

I have no idea why you’d want to buy it, unless you do a lot of typing whilst reading a book, but the Kindle 3 has not only survived the keyboard-culling bloodbath that happened in New York yesterday, it has gotten a new, cheaper price.

$40 is the discount Amazon has settled on if you choose to accept ads on the new Kindles, and $40 is what Amazon has now lopped off the price of what is now called the Kindle Keyboard. The non ad-supported Kindle Keyboard is the same $140 as before.

Despite the name change, I have a feeling that these Kindles will be killed once production on the new models is going at full speed. Just take a look at their place in the lineup. To avoid things from becoming even more confusing, we’ll look only at the ad-supported prices, which is the new default positioning from Amazon. To remove ads from any of these, just add $40.

Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S II, has had a tremendously successful run with consumers since landing on U.S. shores, a prime example of Android’s continued success in the smartphone market at large.

Sales of the Samsung Galaxy S II have reached 10 million worldwide, doubling from 5 million sales in only eight weeks. The Galaxy S II first went on sale in the United States in late August, launching with versions for Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile.

The curtain hasn’t even opened on Netflix’s new DVD-by-mail spin-off company Qwikster, and many customers are already walking out.

The company recently revised its quarterly projections of net subscribers to show 1 million fewer customers than it had previously expected. Much to Netflix’s chagrin, folks are realizing that the king of mail-away media isn’t the only game in town.

We’ve taken a look at some of Netflix’s (and Qwikster’s) main competitors, and judged each service accordingly.

Move over CineXPlayer: There’s a new iPad video player in town. That should probably read “yet another new iPad video player,” but as most of those are junk, this new app really stands out.

It’s called “It’s playing 2.0,” and it’s another one of those video players which will take pretty much any file you can throw at it and play it without conversions to an iOS-friendly format first. My long-time favorite, thanks to ease of use and reliability, has been CineXPlayer, but it lacks crucial support for AC3 sound.

iOS users can now get Google Music Beta on their mobile devices, a feat that’s been available for Android users in app-form for a while now.

iOS aficionados can access Google Music Beta by visiting google.music.com via Safari. It’s an HTML5-optimized mobile web app, not a native iOS app, but it offers all the functionality you’re used to: You can stream all of your cloud-stored songs, shuffle, or search, and you can swipe left or right to switch between songs, artists or albums.