TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

ANAHEIM, California — The Tascam 424 Portastudio, an old machine from the 1980s which enabled musicians to overdub multiple tracks onto regular cassette tapes, was an essential piece of gear for just about every guitar player or budding songwriter.

Now Tascam has injected new life into the bedroom studio with the new Tascam DP-008. The all-digital eight track, which the company is showing off at the NAMM Show here this week, is the big brother to Tascam’s four-track DP-004 that arrived in 2009.

We wanted to hate Pocket Heat, because it seems like such a terrible, foolish idea for an iPhone application. But we couldn’t, because a) the design and execution, right down to the lovely application icon, is absolutely dead-on and b) it doesn’t actually work any more

Pocket Heat turned the iPhone into a heater. You slid your finger and dial in the amount of heat you needed, and the app would industriously push the CPU and other processes in order to warm things up.

When the lights went out at Microsoft’s CES keynote Wednesday, wags quickly dubbed it the “Black Stage of Doom” — a reference to the so-called black screen of death glitch that reportedly affected a small number of Windows 7 users last year.

Lights at the conference were quickly restored, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s presentation went off without another glitch, but that didn’t stop some audience members from having a field day.

Pocket projectors are going mainstream as HP became the latest company to introduce a compact projector for notebooks.

HP’s pocket projector measures four inches by three inches and weighs less than a pound. It can project an image up to 60 inches from a distance of 8.5 feet, which makes it pretty handy for meetings and for use at conferences. The 858 x 600 SVGA resolution results in crisp images and the 100 lumens bulb, says HP, can offer up to 10,000 hours of usage life.

THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED TO ENTRIES. We’ll announce the winner during the first week of January, 2011.

Gadget Lab has been accused of being somewhat obsessed with the Apple tablet. Guilty as charged! We are obsessed, we admit it.

After all, who wouldn’t be obsessed with a device that promises to revolutionize mobile computing, make our iPhones look tiny and stupid, overhaul book publishing, inject new lifeblood into the consumer electronics industry, and maybe even save the dying world of print magazines upon which our livelihoods depend?

Okay, so we may be going a bit over the top, especially for a product that doesn’t exist — and may never exist.

Updated 12/29 with additional details

Ray Kurzweil, a prolific inventor who is best known for his prediction that machine intelligence will surpass that of humans around 2045, still has a few things to offer carbon-based life forms. Kurzweil has introduced new e-reader software, called Blio, that approaches e-reading from a completely different angle than the current E Ink-based devices like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony Reader.

This toast ‘printer’ doesn’t actually leave any design on your bread other than the delicious bloom of brown crispness that is the Maillard reaction. Instead, you stack slices like sheets of office paper and the machine feeds them through one by one, dropping tasty toast onto the breakfast table.

Got an iPhone, or a 2G iPod Touch? Or any device which can beam out A2DP stereo Bluetooth? Want to connect it to a stereo for some big, room-filling sounds? Finally, in this rather contrived Q&A, are you too lazy to simply walk to the stereo and plug a 3.5mm jack into your device?

If you answered yes to all those questions (except the one about plugging in a jack), then you’re in luck! With Belkin’s tiny little Bluetooth Music Receiver you can stream music directly from your iPhone to the stereo, with no side effects save the premature draining of your battery due to the Bluetooth. Even the plugging in isn’t so painful, as you only have to do it once.

Google is expected to sell the Nexus One Googlephone direct from its site in “early January”. If a semi-secret countdown displayed in huge letters on the Google.com homepage is any kind of hint, then “early January” could mean January 1st 2010.

To see the mystery countdown, go to Google.com and, without entering a query, hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (see, it is still good for something). Up will pop a countdown, currently at around 1,335,200.

Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone application is now available internationally, in “over 60 countries”. The catch is that it it still only localized in English.

When the Kindle e-reader was launched internationally back in October, one of the many aspects that Amazon left out in the rush to make some Christmas money was the iPhone application which allows Kindle owners to continue reading on their iPhones. We posted a workaround to get the app from outside the US, but as it involved creating a US account at the iTunes Store it was far from ideal. Now Amazon has fixed things with the long-awaited international launch of Kindle for iPhone.