TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

This isn’t just any photo of a plate of sushi.

Although the EXIF data for this photo says it was shot with an iPhone 4, the rest of the data says otherwise. According to the data, it was shot with an 8-megapixel camera, as it originally had a resolution of 3264 x 2448 before being cropped to a 5.12-megapixel size of 2235 x 2291. It’s also fishy that the photo was taken at 4.3mm f/2.4, which is decidedly more point-and-shoot-like than the 3.85mm f/2.8 lens setting of the iPhone 4.

The last bit of proof that this shot wasn’t actually taken with an iPhone 4? It’s geotagged location is none other than the first building at 1 Infinite Loop, Apple’s headquarters.

Photocopied “lost dog”" flyers taped to lampposts and stapled to telegraph poles are so 20th century. The modern day approach to a mislaid canine is GPS tracking. Specifically, the Tagg Pet Tracker.

The Tagg is a collar-mounted tag with GPS and cellular radios. Using it, you can track pooch on a map and find him, wherever he may have wandered.

As a Gadget Lab reader, its likely that you are a nerd. In which case, you may be one of the three or four people who bought a Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry Playbook, or a Galaxy Tab. Or perhaps you are unlucky enough to have asked your significant other to buy you an iPad as a gift, only to receive a fire-sale HP TouchPad instead (hint: divorce the cheapskate right now).

If so, then this post is for you. Waterfield Designs will sell you the Ultimate SleeveCase, a padded envelope-style case available in myriad sizes to fit pretty much any tablet or “slate.”

The case is made from ballistic nylon (the tough one that goes fluffy if you rub it a lot, not the thin one that tears) and has a soft, screen-cleaning Ultrasuede lining.

Many things claim to be credit-card sized, but none can be more perfectly exact than the Cardstick, a ruler that sticks onto your actual credit card, and is therefore atom-for-atom the exact same size as that card (if you ignore the fact that it adds a little depth to one end of the card).

Further, because the Cardstick is a ruler, you can measure other objects which claim to be “credit-card sized” and verify their credentials.

Nikon’s new Coolpix P7100 is an update to, you guessed it, the P7100. It’s not a big update, feature-wise, but the bits that Nikon has added are essential. If the P7000 was Nikon’s beta attempt to copy the Canon G-series cameras, the P7100 is the proper v1.0

The P7000 was known as slow and buggy. Poor response times and oddly behaving menus were the problems, and Nikon says it has fixed them. Here’s the sentence from Nikon PR “Enhanced high speed performance, quick response, a new user interface and HD movie recording.”

The other main differences are the pop-out, rotating LCD on the back (still the same 921,000-dot model as before, only you can now move it) and a new command dial on the front, which will be good news for anyone who is used to a Nikon SLR.

Budwrap isn’t an insulating collar to protect your delicate office-worker’s hands from your chilled can of watery beer, although it could presumably be used as such. No, Budwrap is a silicon bracelet around which you can securely wrap your cellphone’s earbuds.

Designed by Mark Williams, a high school teacher from Texas, the Budwrap was inspired by two things he saw students doing every day: wearing rubber bracelets and wearing earbuds.

Apple’s keen on eliminating antenna woes in its products, even ones you may not even realize had antennas in the first place.

A new patent win for the Cupertino, California, giant illustrates a method for integrating a cellular antenna into MacBook and iMac keyboards, specifically by placing antennas under some keyboard keys.

According to Patently Apple, this is Apple’s fourth cellular-based MacBook related patent over the past year and the second to deal with disguising the cellular antenna itself.

If you’re a normal human male, your mother almost certainly used to knit you embarrassingly-patterned sweaters when you were a kid. If you are particularly unlucky, she still makes you one every single Christmas. And like every other human boy, you hated them, despite the love which your poor mother wove into them.

Now, though, there is a solution to this painful yearly ritual: the R2-D2 sweater. The one you see above was put together by EricaKnit and sells on Etsy. The sweater is made from merino wool, and its natural stretch makes for a nice fitted shape (unless you have a Gamorrean guard like gut, that is).

I have never been anywhere near Stanisław Płoski’s Bonobo plywood bike, but I can feel the thing flex as clearly as if it were beneath me on a pothole-strewn road. Plywood is strong and beautiful to look at, but it isn’t exactly stiff.

Saying that, Płoski has certainly bent his sheets of veneer into a rather fetching form, something like a smoothed-off outline of a regular diamond-shaped frame. And by leaving out the seat-tube, this thing will probably ride as softly as a 1950s Cadillac.

Most calculations of market share in the portable computing arena don’t include the iPad, which they consider a tablet and not a traditional computer. But because tablets seem to be cannibalizing computer sales, it’s not a stretch to include iPads in those tabulations.

Based on the line graph above, the notebook landscape changes drastically when iPad is included.

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore calculated global notebook computer sales up until the second quarter of 2011 in a note to clients.