TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

I don’t like to be mean, but it seems like designer Jongwoo Choi has spent a lot of his work life being sent to the kitchen to make the coffee. However, he took these coffee-flavored lemons and made coffee-flavored lemonade. Now it doesn’t matter how many abusive bosses an co-workers place their orders when he tries to grab a quick snack: Jongwoo can carry them all at once.

The unique string of numbers and letters assigned to your iPhone can potentially expose your real-life identity.

Security researcher Aldo Cortesi last week published his discovery of a flaw in the unique device identifier (UDID) stored on each iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

While this device identifier is well-known, it’s not supposed to be connected to a person’s actual identity. But Cortesi discovered that some apps can link the identifier to the phone owner’s Facebook profile, which effectively puts a face behind that string of numbers and letters.

Apple on Wednesday morning released a software update for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices, fixing a flawed location-storage method that raised privacy concerns last month.

The update, iOS version 4.3.3, reduces the size of the file that stores geodata on iOS devices — meaning it will no longer contain a history of location data going back as far as one year ago.

Additionally, with the update installed, iTunes won’t back up the iOS device’s location database file, meaning the geodata will no longer be stored on your computer.

If Rube Goldberg ever built a bicycle, it would look like this crazy machine. Actually, it’s a little more Heath Robinson than Goldberg, but you get the idea: This thing is a convoluted mess. A convoluted awesome mess.

Details are slim, as the contraption was photographed not by the owner (and presumably builder), but by sometime tech blogger Nathaniel Akin.

Smartphone users have had Google Docs on their devices for quite a while now, as long as they accessed it through their browser.

Today, Google introduced the Google Docs app for Android, finally providing a native environment for the service, as well as some convenient new features.

The app lets you create, edit, upload, and share documents from your phone, and allows for near real-time collaboration.

Two Apple customers have filed a lawsuit accusing the Cupertino, California, company of committing violations of computer-fraud laws by recording location data of iPhone and iPad customers.

Vikram Ajjampur, an iPhone customer in Florida, and William Devito, a New York iPad customer, filed the suit in federal court April 22 in Tampa, Florida.

“The accessibility of the unencrypted information collected by Apple places users at serious risk of privacy invasions, including stalking” (.pdf), the lawsuit states.

If Aviiq’s already minimal laptop stands continue to get smaller and cheaper, then soon you’ll be able to order one up for $0 and — one week later — receive nothing in the mail. Maybe you already did. How would you know?

The latest is the Quick Stand. At $40, it’s half the price of the original Aviiq stand, and it is also smaller, measuring up at 11 x 3.25 x 0.375 inches against 15 x 12 x 0.1 inches when folded.

Along with the Motorola Atrix, LG’s G2X is one of the first dual-core smartphones powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor to hit the market. Our first impression after getting our hands on it: Two cores really are better than one.

As soon as we picked the phone up and started scrolling through the app menus, the phone’s speed was immediately noticeable. Switching back and forth between different menu screens was speedier than ever. Playing the Halo-like pre-loaded app “Nova” was a super smooth experience, as the game ran with minimal choppiness while handling some fairly intense animations.

Here’s a telling sign of how hard Research in Motion and Adobe are working on Flash: Just a week before the release of RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook, both companies were still working out the kinks with the tablet’s Flash support and operating system stability.

Wired.com received a PlayBook review unit last week, and during our testing, the tablet choked on a number of sites and games running the popular Flash platform for animations and interactive content.

Adobe’s explanation for the problem: The PlayBook is running pre-release software, including the OS, and RIM and Adobe are still working on some final “code check-ins” to smooth over some issues with the plug-in’s performance.

Eye-Fi has launched yet another Wi-Fi SD card to coincide with the debut of Direct Mode, which is probably the most exciting thing to happen to SD cards since Eye-Fi first started putting tiny radios in them in the first place.

(Head over to our products site to see our exclusive review of the new Mobile X2 card.)

Direct Mode, first seen in a demo at CES in Las Vegas this January, turns the card into a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi access point. Thus, your iPad, iPhone or any other device can connect to it directly. This lets you beam your photos direct from the camera to the iDevice using Eye-Fi’s iApps.

Previously, doing this required a jailbreak and some third party software, and even then it didn’t work reliably.