There’s a new BlackBerry Bold headed to market. This morning, Research in Motion uncrated the BlackBerry Bold 9700, a more refined verison of its popular enterprise device, the BlackBerry Bold 9000.
While the highlight 
of the week was undoubtedly Apple’s Rock and Roll event on Wednesday featuring Steve Jobs 2.0, that was only the anodized aluminum, candy-colored, video-shooting cherry on top of another week of tech sector reporting from All Things Digital.
Motorola has finally announced its bet-the-company Android handset. At GigaOM’s Mobilize 09 event in San Francisco this morning, Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s co-CEO and CEO of the company’s handset division, uncrated the CLIQ, a device it describes unremarkably as the “first phone with social skills.”
After nearly a year out of the public eye, Apple CEO Steve Jobs returned to it yesterday at the company’s annual music event. It was his first public appearance at an Apple gathering since Oct. 14, 2008, when he uncrated the company’s new unibody MacBooks, and it far overshadowed the new products he was about to announce. In fact, it could be argued that public confirmation of Jobs’s health since his return to the company was truly the most significant announcement of the day.
Apple has sold some 225 million iPods to date, making it one of the most popular electronic devices ever. And it’s sure to sell even more after the updates the company announced at this morning’s event in San Francisco. Among them: Larger, cheaper iPod touches and nanos with cameras and FM radios.
Apple’s iPhone continues to be AT&T’s marquee handset, though the data-guzzling “Hummer of cellphones,” as the New York Times has dubbed it, has inspired widespread customer dissatisfaction with the carrier’s network. Indeed, according to Piper Jaffray, the iPhone 3G and 3GS are AT&T’s top-selling phones.
When Steve Jobs described the iPhone at D5 as “the best iPod we’ve ever made,” he set the bar high for future iterations of the iconic device. Now, in the run-up to tomorrow’s invitation-only Apple event, the question is: Will Apple reach the bar? And with what? The answer, if the latest rumors prove true, depends on your feelings about iPods with cameras.
If you’re a student planning on taking advantage of Apple’s “Buy a Mac, get a Free iPod touch” back-to-school promotion, you might want to plan a trip to the Apple Store in the very near future. Because sources in the Apple reseller community tell Ars Technica that it looks like the company’s current iPod line is being discontinued.
The week ending Aug. 21 began Aug. 17 with another round of digital musical chairs–BoomTown reported that David Dickman, VP of West Coast sales for Yahoo, will be leaving the company at the end of the month for Warner Bros. to work in digital sales. Also, after a five-month tour of Europe and its finer Web establishments, Yahoo seems poised to name a new international head.
No wonder cellular carriers rejected Dell’s first smartphone offering for its “lack of differentiation.” Unveiled in China this morning, Dell’s “proof of concept” handset looks like the chimerical offspring of Apple’s iPhone and the Palm Pre, but lacks some of their more powerful features.
Apple on Wednesday released OS X 10.5.8, the latest point release to Mac OS X Leopard, even as Amazon takes pre-orders for its next iteration–Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). 10.5.8 is largely a maintenance update, though it does patch a number of security vulnerabilities (18 to be exact), some of them fairly old.
The next iteration of Apple’s iPod touch will boast not just a camera, but a microphone as well. That’s the latest rumor, anyway–this one from a “well-connected” Wired source who claims the device is already being manufactured with an eye toward a September launch.
According to some lines of code secreted away within webOS, Palm has at least one more handset in the pipeline–the so-called Eos (codename: Pixie). And while no one seems to know when it will arrive at market, there’s speculation today that we’ll see it by November, right in time for the winter holidays.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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