TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Google’s Maps team has made fantastic advances in surveying and mapping seemingly every square inch of navigable ground on the planet. But for mobile users, those maps have always stopped just short of indoor spaces — until now.

Google Maps 6.0 for Android launched Tuesday with a bold initiative: indoor mapping. Partnering at launch with a selection of businesses and public service structures, the new mobile Maps version allows users to see the entire layout of a mapped building, switch between floor plans if the structure has multiple levels, and locate indoor points of interest like retail stores, bathrooms and ATMs.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…again. The holidays are coming, yes, but we’re talking about the biggest gadget-related event of the season coming in a little over a month: The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And of course, we’ve got to deal with the obligatory wave of speculation that precedes the slew of new products we’ll see in January.

Tuesday’s rumor du jour? Near-Field Communications chips, and the phones that (potentially) love them.

Hands up if you still use a landline telephone. No? Nobody? Ah, there, I see a hand. Well, sir, this post is for you. It’s about the Eclipse, a cordless DECT telephone that looks like a piece of sculpture.

In fact, it was inspired by the old 1970s Sculptura, a rotary dial phone which swooped from base to receiver with a similar looping curve.

Fujifilm’s X100 is a great little camera, a Micro Four Thirds-style mirrorless number with metal body, clever hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder and lots of clicky manual dials. The only problem is that you can’t change the lens.

Rumors, and hints from Fujifilm itself, have pointed to an interchangeable lens version of the X100 for some time.

It’s never easy being a third-party app developer. Besides needing a great app idea, you must master your platform’s SDK, and then work hard to make sure your app has visibility in whatever platform ecosystem you’ve chosen to infiltrate. Enter Microsoft’s BizSpark program, which helps software devs bring their apps to market.

One of the program’s major initiatives is Mobile Acceleration Week, a multi-city road show that’s designed to give guidance and support to Windows Phone Mango developers.

Cult of Mac blogger Michael Steeber filed a bug report with Apple suggesting that it bring Siri to older iOS devices. Apple emailed the following reply:

Engineering has provided the following feedback regarding this issue:
Siri only works on iPhone 4S and we currently have no plans to support older devices.

Now, Steve Jobs was famous for his public u-turns (claiming that nobody wants to watch video on a small screen, or that Americans don’t read anything, for example), but this sounds sincere. After all, why give away one of the biggest reasons to upgrade to the iPhone 4S?

But what of Steeber’s bug report? Take a look — it’s a doozy:

iPhone 4 Users and iPod touch 4th generation users pay a fee of 19.99 to upgrade to a ‘special’ build of iOS 5.0.1 with Siri Final in it, (To avoid hackers hacking Siri onto non 4S devices illegally) **Many iPhone 4 Users and iPod touch 4th generation Users will pay for this special iOS build (5.0.1) which will enable Siri for a fee of $19.99 US dollars

Hmm.

In an effort to divert news attention from its big Lumix GX1 announcement today, Panasonic has also launched a 3-D compact camera. And while you might not care for 3D images and video given the problems of playing them back, the dual-lens camera has some other pretty neat tricks.

The 3D1 has a pair of 12MP sensors behind the lenses, and if you shoot 3-D it’ll use both to make a composite image or movie. But you can also shoot video and stills simultaneously, capturing a movie with one and then zooming in for a 9MP photo with the other.

Kindle owners can now check out up to one book a month from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, free. The service is available to Amazon Prime members, and works on any Kindle device. It is not available on any Kindle apps running on non-Amazon hardware.

This seems to be a lot better deal than the lame and hard-to-use lending service, which lets people borrow your books.

You want it. You want it desperately. You want it desperately, but you don’t even know what it is.

Such is consumer desire for 4G data connectivity in mobile handsets. Call it proof positive that the phone carriers’ marketing efforts have paid off — this despite slow 4G infrastructure roll-outs, and actual 4G data rates that fall far, far below the promise of the 4G spec.

In-Stat, a market research firm, recently announced that 75 percent of more than 1,200 surveyed consumers listed 4G as one of the features that an “ideal” phone would include.

The RoundFlash is — not surprisingly — a round flash. To be more specific, it’s a tent-like collapsible ring-flash adapter that also works somewhat like a softbox. The trouble is, the results aren’t really what you’d expect from either.

A ring flash is a donut of light that sits around the camera’s lens. Because the light comes from all directions, the shadows cancel each other out. Almost: One of the signs of a ring flash is a dark halo of shadow around the edge of the subject.