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Sprint’s Overdrive hub is a lot more than a cellular modem: It’s got dual 4G/3G connectivity, shared connections with up to five devices over Wi-Fi, and can serve as a sort of mini NAS, with shared microSD storage.

Early leaks of the device were mostly right, but given that the Wi-Fi range is even further than expected—150ft, Sprint and Sierra claim—actually undersold it a bit. (WiMax is fast enough, and that Wi-Fi range is long enough, that you could conceivably use one of these as your primary source of internet at home. Nuts, basically.) A 1.4-inch LCD screen lets you know who’s connected to what and how, and gives you a precise battery reading—fixing one of the dumbest problems with Verizon’s Mifi. Actually, all around this device feels like the MiFi on steroids—it’s even a bit bigger, at about 3 x 3 x .6 inches, though that’s still pretty compact for what you’re getting here.

The Overdrive goes on sale January 10th for $100.

Everyone knows that laptops can get hot. We’re talking uncomfortably, disconcertingly, something-in-there’s-gotta-be-melting hot. Belkin’s new laptop pad not only lifts your computer off of your legs but packs a USB-powered fan to keep your laptop cool. Cool!

With a sleek, curved shape, a USB-powered fan to circulate hot air away from your machine, and some patent-pending bit of design dubbed the AirFlow Wing, Belkin claims their new F5L055 cooling pad is “proven to cool better than others on the market.”

That may be true, but in a category cluttered with music-playing monsters and featured-packed lapdesks, Belkin’s simple, unobtrusive design is really what makes this cooling pad worth checking out.

The miracle of the English language is that sometimes you get to use the same old words and make a sentence never seen before. This is one of those times. And supposedly, it’s true. Koreans + Sausage + iPhone.

I don’t know how legit this is, and why the person in the video is playing a Taiko Drum game on the iPhone that isn’t available in the US. But our dear Rosa just confirmed, through first hand wiener testing, that unwrapped hot dogs work. She also says her iPhone smells like meat, which, to be fair, might have been the condition it was in before she did the test.

The president of the USB Implementers Forum discussed the arrival of USB 3.0 and gave a brief demonstration of transfer speeds on a Hewlett-Packard laptop at the Consumer Electronics Show.

In case anyone was in doubt, USB 3.0 is a lot faster than the current 2.0 version. Below is a photo of a display Asus had at CES, showing a comparison of the time it takes to drag a 2.1GB file from a laptop to an external hard disk drive using USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. And in the second video segment, Jeff Ravencraft, president of the USB Implementers Forum, provides a taste of the gaping difference in transfer speeds between USB 2.0 and 3.0.

And another certainty: USB 3.0 is now available to consumers on laptops from HP and Asus, among others.

USB is also more power efficient than 2.0. “This uses one-third of the power it would take on USB 2.0,” said Ravencraft, in an interview at CES. “And it’s backward compatible,” he said, meaning it can also handle peripherals that use older USB standards.

And speaking of peripherals, Western Digital has announced a new WD My Book based on the USB 3.0 specification with an adapter card, which will make an existing desktop PC USB 3.0-compatible.

Also, cards that go into a laptop’s ExpressCard slot are available, Ravencraft said. This allows an existing laptop to be upgraded to 3.0.

HP is now offering an Envy 15 laptop model with USB 3.0 connectors, and Acer was showing a raft of laptops on the CES show floor with the new standard, including the NX90Jq.

In the top video segment, Ravencraft discusses some of the new peripherals and what USB 3.0 means. The second segment is a brief demonstration of USB 3.0 transfer speeds versus USB 2.0. The first transfer seen in the segment is USB 2.0 sending photos that total roughly a couple of hundred megabytes. The second is the same group of photos using USB 3.0.

Updated at 10:30 p.m. PST: updating comparison of USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 transfer speeds.

The semiconductor industry is set to post a revenue drop of $29 billion for this year, according to research firm Gartner.

Worldwide revenue for 2009 totaled $226 billion, down 11.4 percent from 2008, the company said in a research report published on Thursday. It marks only the sixth time in 25 years that the semiconductor industry has posted an annual decline, and is the first time it has seen a drop for two years in a row, according to Gartner.

While revenue fell sharply at the beginning of 2009, carrying on a fall prompted by the economic recession the year before, it began to rise again in the spring, according to the report.