TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

There’s a new folding-bike company in town, and it might look similar to one of the old ones, at least in terms of the faces you might see working there. Tern Bikes is a new startup by several ex-employees of Dahon, the maker of nicely designed and lightweight (if a little large when collapsed) folding bikes.

According to founder Joshua Hon (son of the founder of Dahon), Dahon has been having trouble with quality control, so he decided to go it alone.

If you played Katamari Damacy by rolling a sticky iPad through your gadget closet (you guys have a gadget closet, right?) then you’d end up with something like the Grid-It Wrap (or GRID-IT!™ Wrap For iPad, to give its full and ridiculous title).

The heart of the GRID-IT is a neoprene sleeve to protect your tablet.

By Chris Foresman, Ars Technica

Apple only mentioned 10 of the promised 200 new features for iOS 5 during its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. The first developer preview has been released to developers, and while specifics are covered under an NDA, new details have been leaking out like oil from an ‘87 Plymouth Horizon.

We decided to round up a few of our favorite leaked features we have seen so far.

It looks like the rumors and leaks were dead on — almost. Sony’s latest mirrorless NEX camera has been made officially official, and it is indeed a smaller, lighter version of the NEX-3. Called the NEX-C3, it’s essentially a compact camera with a big sensor and interchangeable lenses.

The one thing the rumors got wrong was actually pretty big. “Leaked” photos showed the same camera we have here, only with a bulky flip-out LCD screen.

If it’s made in Switzerland, I’ll probably buy it. Delicious chocolate, super-accurate watches and of course the iconic Army knife. And now, the Parachute Hoodie, which is not just made in Switzerland but Remade in Switzerland (that’s the name of the company behind it).

The Parachute Hoodie is sewn from two different colors of “surplus Swiss military air-brake parachutes”.

There’s no possible way that I could not write about the Plug Cup. It has the winning trifecta of power-plug, coffee (or tea) making and unholy danger, all in neat, plastic package. But before I continue, take a good look at the photos of this concept design:

That’s right. Your eyes are not deceiving you. What you see is a cup of water with a power plug on the bottom. Inside is a heating element, and you are supposed to balance this cup, full of water, on top of a power-strip.

Barnes & Noble on Tuesday unveiled a simplified touchscreen e-reader: the Simple Touch Reader. Designed for a “pure and simple” reading experience without buttons, keyboards or complexity, the new compact Nook will be available around June 10th in stores or online.

It’s got a 6-inch Pearl E Ink display and weighs in at just under 7.5 ounces, 35% lighter than the original Nook. It’s selling for $140, the same price as the Kindle 3, but not as cheap at the $114 Kindle with ads.

The first-generation Nook is available for a discount price of $120 (for WiFi only) and $170 (for WiFi/3G) until supplies run out.

CEO William Lynch announced at a New York press event that the Simple Touch would be the “easiest to use, most portable e-book reader ever.” He outlined several advantages to the new Nook over its Amazon rival.

This is the world’s largest camera. You won’t be using it to take holidays snaps or to send pictures of your dinner up to Instagram, and you won’t be able to carry the resulting photograph in your wallet. In fact the massive photo — of a dull scene of a scrubby Californian land — is rather unimpressive save for its size.

When I was a kid, I used to wonder just what the drivers of toy cars might see. Just before I sent my Hot Wheels (or the 1970s UK equivalent) car plunging down its long, long ramp for a date with terminal velocity, extreme G-force and the inevitable bone-snapping impact, I considered what the experience might be like from inside the car.

If I had had the Hot Wheels Video Racers kit, I may have stopped torturing the tiny drivers immediately, because it turns out to be terrifying.

You know how the Motorola Xoom shipped with half-baked Flash support and a lack of a 4G radio (which required you to mail the tablet in to get an upgrade)? Did you also know that it went on sale — to the real, non-geek public no less — with a non-functional SD card slot? Talk about beta hardware.

If you live in Canada and are unlucky enough to own Moto’s joke tablet, then you’re in “luck”. A soon-to-be-released software update will switch that slot on at last.