TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Does the name of today end in a “y”? Why, yes. Then it must be time for another iPhone 5 rumor. This one, as unsubstantiated as any other, is worth passing on simply because of the crazy levels of paranoia contained within.

According to Charles Arthur at the Guardian, iPhone 5 units are already installed in carrier facilities and are undergoing testing. Of course, being an Apple product, it must remain secret at all costs, and you can be sure that the handsets weren’t tossed into a Jiffy bag and mailed over to AT&T and Verizon.

Consumers aren’t going as gaga for Google TV as manufacturers had hoped. In fact, people are flocking to return the smart TV set-top box.

Logitech International, maker of the Revue Google TV unit, announced that Revue profits were “slightly negative” last quarter as more people returned the device than purchased it.

In response, Logitech said it is going to drop the price of the Revue from $250 (a price cut from the original price of $300) to $100.

TwelveSouth has shrunken its BookBook MacBook case down to the size of an iPhone 4. It has also added a few pockets into which you can slot a couple of credit cards and your ID, along with a place for a few banknotes.

Unfortunately, the tackiness of the leather-bound book design has grown as its size has shrunk.

The BookBook is beautifully made. The leather is thick but not too heavy, the iPhone (or iPod Touch, if you must) fits snugly and the stitching is top notch.

The mighty hand of Lodsys, a patent firm suing mobile app programmers, continues to come down on iOS and Android developers. Now it’s targeting a major and much-beloved player: Angry Birds.

In the lawsuit, Lodsys claims Rovio has infringed upon “at least claim 27” of their patent, which covers in-app billing technology. Lodsys wants 0.575 percent of any U.S. revenue obtained using the technology.

If your favorite thing about the latest Apple TV is its size, you’re going to love the Roku 2. The already dinky little box has shrunken even further — at 3 inches on each side, it is smaller than the Apple TV and shorter than a pack of cigarettes (both 3.5 inches).

More importantly, the Roku now plays games. Specifically, it can play — among others — Rovio’s Angry Birds. In short, not only can the Roku pull in pretty much any streaming content out there on the web, it can also turn your TV into a game console.

Nikon is showing off a few of its own concept cameras on the I Am Nikon blog. These prototypes were on display at La Cité des Sciences in Paris, and are now conveyed across the world in photographic form for your titillation.

First up is the Multi-Ball (above), a camera with many, many spherical eyes arranged on yet another, larger sphere. Its purpose is to “capture the atmosphere of a scene,” but coming in the wake of the amazing Lyto plenoptic camera, which lets you focus pictures after you have shot them, it looks rather old already.

The Big Screen Camera is just that: a big LCD screen with a pair of handles and a small camera embedded somewhere inside.

Back in April, I wrote about the Pinwide wide-angle pinhole lens for Micro Four Thirds cameras. I liked it so much I ordered one, and I promised to let you know how it worked out. The short answer? Pretty good, for a pinhole. The long answer? Read on.

The Pinwide is a plastic disk that clicks onto the lens mount of my Panasonic GF1 like any other lens. It has a slightly dished conical shape which puts the pinhole back inside the body.

CATRA is an invention of MIT’s Media Lab which uses a cellphone and a cheap plastic eyepiece to detect cataracts. Not only is it cheaper and easier to use than existing solutions, it actually provides much better results.

Cataracts cause blindness by fogging the lens of the eye, scattering light before it reaches the retina. Normally, they are diagnosed using a “backscatter” device which shines light into the eye and measures how much of it is reflected by the cataract. This requires a skilled user, a fancy machine and still doesn’t detect the problem early, nor tell the operator what the patient actually sees.

A big day for photography news today, thanks to the folks at Olympus. First up is the Pen EP3, the fifth iteration of its PEN Micro Four Thirds line, which manages to mix up pretty much everything while keeping it in the original PEN’s retro-style body.

First, the basics. The 12.3MP sensor is almost the same, with tweaks to make it play nicer with Olympus’ own Zuiko lenses.

These classic New York Walk/Don’t Walk signs are being hawked by UK salvage operation Trainspotters. Presumably they’ll be snapped up by Londoners desperate to add a little urban grit to their sanitized, squeaky-clean lofts situated in shuttered, converted schools.

These 6.8Kg (15-pound) monsters were built to survive in NYC, so they’re almost unbreakable, constructed from cast aluminum and tempered glass.