TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

It seems fitting that, as Olympians caper about on the ice up North, a review hockey helmet turned up in the Gadget Lab mail today. The lid is the brand new Easton Stealth S19 Z-Shock.

For the uninitiated (me), the point of hockey seems to be getting into a fight. And with those big sticks around, it makes sense to have some protective headgear. The S19 manages to be both tough and light. It weighs 325 grams (11.5-ounces), which the blurb says is less than a cup of coffee (the shipping box had an empty Starbucks cup inside to make the point), and giving it a hard squeeze didn’t deform it at all.

The innovation comes from the one-piece construction, which bonds a polycarbonate shell with an expanded polypropylene foam to make a single piece. We’ll have to test things out, but it sure feels light and stiff in the hand.

A team of students at Yale decided to build a spokeless bike for their mechanical design class. One semester later, they had the machine you see here.

The students concentrated on the rear wheel, for reasons of both time and money. The back wheel is where all the work goes on anyway, so if it worked, then the front wheel would be easy.

The back wheel is machined in standard 26-inch size so a stock tire would fit, and inside it you see a belt drive, usually used to replace a chain.

Barcelona — Today I tried out Opera Mini running on the iPhone, and it kicks Safari’s butt. The folks at Opera have a native version of their browser running on the iPhone, and while there are limits due to the way it is built, for sheer speed of browsing, it has Safari beat.

Opera Mini has not yet been submitted to Apple for approval: The demo I saw was of a very mature but unfinished version. But when it does get sent to Apple’s crack team of picky, fickle reviewers, it should, technically at least, pass. The reason that browsers other than those based on Webkit (Safari) aren’t allowed on the iPhone is that Apple bans the running of interpretive code. This means Java, or Flash, or any other runtime is out.

Opera Mini gets around this by doing all the rendering on the server – Opera’s servers actually run web browsers – and sending what are essentially pictures to the phone.

Ever wish your dog could tweet? I sure haven’t. But there’s going to be an app for that this summer anyway, and it’s called BowLingual.

Based on a Japanese gadget of the same name, BowLingual analyzes a dog’s bark and narrows it down into one of six emotions: sad, frustrated, needy, happy, self-expressive and on guard. From there on it attempts to translate the bark into a set phrase to go along with the emotion. The iPhone app includes Twitter integration for dog owners to tweet the transcriptions to their friends.

When Apple’s iPad tablet debuts next month on retail shelves, it could sound the death knell for JooJoo, a tablet from an unknown Singapore-based startup that was once the talk of gadget blogs.

The $500 JooJoo is on target to ship at the end of February, a full month before Apple’s scheduled release date of the first iPads. But despite Fusion Garage’s optimism, many industry watchers are skeptical if customers will actually bite.

The pre-PMA announcements are hotting up, and Nikon has just released the details of its 2010 Coolpix lineup. Like most of the manufacturers compact camera ranges, this one offers a veritable confusion of models, so we’ll just hit the highlights here. Don’t worry: there are some genuine goodies here. The Olympus and Fuji ranges, already announced, were so ho-hum we tore up the press releases already.

The first of the two standout models is the P100, a chunky, bridge-style camera which has Nikon’s new back-illuminated CMOS image sensor.

Monopoly is about to get a makeover. The 75 year old game will be relaunched with a circular board, and no cash. Other than the lack of corners and currency, the game remains unchanged, which should mean that the inevitably marathon sessions will be just as boring as ever.

Apparently, when the game was first designed by fun-haters all those years ago, one of the original concepts was circular. We like this new, more compact version, and the modern design is a lot cleaner.

These photos purportedly show the Apple Tablet, locked down in a security frame. They were sent by an undisclosed source to Engadget and, to my eye at least, appear to be the real thing.

The screen looks to be around 9 or 10 inches and looks pretty much like what we expected: a big iPhone. The Home button at the bottom says to us that this is all about books and magazines, and less about movies (although when you’re watching a movie in landscape format, you don’t do much button pressing). Another cutout at the top of the security frame suggests either another Home button (unlikely) or a camera.

We can see from the screen that there is Wi-Fi on board, and the “No Service” message points to a data connection, although it doesn’t reveal the carrier. Another source tells Engadget that the back of the device will be aluminum, like the MacBook Pro, and that “pricing will run $800 on contract with Verizon and $1,000 without when it arrives in March.” This tallies with what we have already heard.

Apple’s got a lot planned for its Wednesday press event.

While the invitation — “come see our latest creation” — is broad and vague, it’s fairly obvious that the biggest news will be the widely anticipated tablet.

It’s about time. Tech observers have been anticipating an Apple tablet for several years, churning out report after report of rumors and speculation. And Apple has been considering tablet designs since at least 1983.

If you have $200 you were thinking of tossing in the trash, you could instead send it to me. I promise to waste it on booze and Cuban cigars. Or you could waste it yourself, and buy the Aputure Gigtube Instant Digital Screen Remote Viewfinder, a tiny, low-resolution screen on a short cable that duplicates the functionality of your camera’s current screen, only with lower quality.