Leica has a stranglehold on the the hearts and minds of photographers everywhere. Even if the professionals call it a “dentist’s camera,” as in a camera that is popular with folks with too much money and not many photography chops, there’s something about that little red dot that is as iconic as the black and white of a Speedmaster or the clean lines of a Ferrari GTO. It’s something that survived the ravages of time relatively unscathed – perhaps worn down by evolution and advancement but still, at least to the part of the brain that desires comfort in the permanence of the material, the same.

Ryan wanted to add a flash to his iPhone so he cut open a Mophie JuicePack and connected a bright white LED and tiny switch. Boom: instant flash.

My, how time flies in the tech world. It was only one month ago today that the Palm Pre launched to the public, giving users their first chance to try out WebOS first hand. Critical response to the device was generally positive, though much of this stemmed from the phone’s impressive operating system rather than the hardware itself. Still, it was exciting to see a genuinely compelling product come out of Palm for the first time in years, and many of us viewed it as one of the first worthwhile competitors to the iPhone. And then the iPhone 3GS came out, selling 1 million devices in a single weekend.

Since then, the Pre has largely fallen under Apple’s shadow. But there have been murmurs that Palm has still managed to sell far more devices than most analysts were expecting — a recent report from Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder suggests that Palm is still unable to meet demand, and that the company will ship one million phones to Sprint during the device’s first quarter in production. Today we’ve gotten a report that indicates that this may be pretty far from reality.

So it looks like this whole “iPod Touch with Camera” thing is coming to fruition. While the first case we saw was a little wonky, this makes more sense. Take a look at the back of your iPod touch – there’s a Wi-Fi antenna on the left side so the only place they could stuff a camera would be in the center, next to the antenna. I’m not sure what else is up in that spot, but the camera can’t take that much space.

UPDATE – Now there’s a freaking Nano case with a hole in it!

Before I go defile myself with burgers and beer I wanted to jailbreak my iPhone 3GS for you all. The process was amazingly simple. Using a Windows netbook – it doesn’t work under Windows 7 – I simply installed iTunes and ran purplera1n. It took a second to reboot then it rolled through recovery mode, rebooted, and an app called Freeze appeared. Freeze then installed Cydia and all was right with the world.

Waves of exultation and joy must be coming out of Saigon as the first secret G.S.M. Palm Pres begin wending their way out of the secret Pre factories in the jungles to the south. A crack team of commandoes have wrested one of these super secretive models out of the hands of an unsuspecting courier and taken video and photos of it.

Remember that the Palm Pre originally came in G.S.M. flavor back at MWC 2008 and that O2 and Movistar probably have Pre exclusivity which allows us to assume the G.S.M. model will drop sooner than later.

The Interweb is a tizzy over the 3GS unlock/jailbreak and the Dev Teams decision not to release it until there is a new firmware update immanent. Why would they do this? Well, if they release now, Apple can close the hole with the new release, something they’d be loathe to do if the unlock happened closer to launch. While this isn’t very nice, it’s amazingly practical and forward thinking.

Wee Scott Campbell of Aberdeen, Scotland is 13 years old and sent us an email last week asking if he could write for us. What he lacks in physical age he makes up for in chutzpah. And so, much to my surprise, I wake up this morning to discover young Campbell on BBC comparing an iPod to a Walkman with his mum and generally impressing the heck out of us.

The bairn writes:

My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day.

He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

When I saw it for the first time, its colour also struck me. Nowadays gadgets come in a rainbow of colours but this was only one shade – a bland grey.

So it’s not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing choice of music player. If I was browsing in a shop maybe I would have chosen something else.

From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets. It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.

First, an anecdote: when the iPhone first launched in 2007 I took it on a tour of Central Europe, namely Budapest and Warsaw. Communism had just fallen and the hopes and dreams of these benighted nations were dashed. But as I pulled the iPhone from its protective cozy, the eyes of those present were filled with hope again, hope that there was something better out there, something magical. That something was called the iPhone and it was this promise, the promise of a Jobsian escape from the gristmill of history. All of this in a cigarette-pack-sized cellphone.

Fast forward two years. With the release of the iPhone 3G S we can safely say that the bloom is off the rose. The 3G S looks exactly like the iPhone 3G in every way. There is no outward identification and, in those intervening years, Hungary, Poland, the UK, Russia – heck, everybody – got the iPhone. Pulling one of these out is like pulling out something like a tin of Altoids – a bit against the grain but common enough to discourage gawking. So we must answer a few questions in this review. They are:

* What are the major improvements?
* Who is this phone for?
* Should you buy one/should you upgrade?

And so we begin.

Dealnews has a great deal on the Ectaco Jetbook eBook Reader, an e-ink device with 5-inch display, built-in Fodor’s Travel Guide and CIA World Factbook (!!) and an SD card slot for expansion. It supports .txt, .pdf, .fb2, Mobi, PRC, EPUB, RTF files and doesn’t seem to have any built-in storage. It’s available at NewEgg for $169.99 and free shipping, down from $299.99.