This past Friday, Apple said that, in all cases, the iPhones in question were damaged by an "external force," not a faulty battery or glass screen

Ok, so Apple are denying the explosion stories, but there are quite a few of them floating around and, with several million iPhones in circulation, it would be a bit odd if some of them didn't suffer catastrophic manufacturing or component failures.

A HUNDRED years ago, summer day-trippers were lured on to London Underground’s Bakerloo line with the promise that, at a refreshing 15 degrees centigrade, its tunnels were the coolest place in the capital.

It's been a while since the underground was cool. It's fairly chic, I suppose, sometimes, but mostly it's just unpleasantly hot, humid, sweaty and crowded.

I have been waiting for Logos for Mac, the Bible research application suite, for over a year.

What? A Bible research application suite? Does anyone really need this, I wonder, except priests (who, one assumes, would already be fairly familiar with their favourite magic book) and RE teachers? And who would pay $260 for the introductory version, let alone the $1,379 for the Gold licence? Weird stuff.

Engineers say a forest of 100,000 "artificial trees" could be deployed within 10 to 20 years to help soak up the world's carbon emissions.

Fantastic idea. And I like the accompanying image, showing lines of wind turbines and 'trees' at the side of a motorway, a motorway from which lighting appears to have been removed.

Sony has launched a wireless e-reader which allows users to download electronic books on the go.

I haven't been tempted by the current crop of e-book readers; I like printed books and I don't want another electronic device to charge and carry (convergence, that's the thing I'm looking for). That said, Sony's new device does look rather neat, and they've finally implemented a touch screen rather than the rather naff mechanical buttons on earlier incarnations.

There are two remaining impediments to joining this particular technological revolution:
1) Cost. £250 buys a lot of paperbacks and the electronic books aren't much cheaper than their physical counterparts so there's little financial incentive.
2) iPhone. It isn't perfect, but I can (and do) read books on my iPhone, and I don't really want to carry another device just for reading text.

So, basically, I'm lazy and stuck in my ways, and the incentive to change (a little extra convenience) isn't great enough to overcome my objections. Yet. So what would it take? Here's my list:
1) Induction charging; I don't want to have to think about charging my 'book' - make it super-easy so that it ceases to be a problem.
2) Cost. I don't want to pay as much for ebooks as I do for paperbacks. In fact, I want to pay a lot less.
3) Weight. It needs to be forgettably light.

Would that be enough? Possibly, but probably I'll stick with my phone for the rare occasions that I want to read on the move. Also, iPhone does colour.

SiON gate technology is expected to outperform TSMC's current 40nm low-power silicon by being 50% faster or up to 50% less power consuming, and it also packs twice the circuit density.

They're right - this is geeky - but any technology that allows silicon to run 50% faster is also rather sexy, particularly if you can apply it to mobile phones and cameras. TSMC has announced Qualcomm as an early customer, so you never know what might turn up where, and with improved battery life.

At Hot Chips, AMD broke out some more details on its upcoming Magny-Cours server chip. The processor is a dual-die, single package combining two Istanbul dies under the same roof in a highly complex mesh of HT and cache links.

Actually, I'm not sure this is as interesting as I first thought. There are loads of apps, of course, that benefit from shed-loads of power, but I don't really use them. There's only so much fun to be had from watching your Excel sheets recalculate in an even smaller fraction of a second, and after that it's just about the boasting.