“We are no longer planning to pursue the acquisition as there has been no progress since we withdrew our offer as of Oct. 22, 2008,” the company said in a filing with the Korea Exchange. The announcement comes after the two companies inked a new seven-year NAND flash-memory license agreement, one that will see Samsung paying about half the royalty amount it paid previously.

An industry executive said to be familiar with the company’s plans tells Multichannel News that Netflix plans to extend its Watch Instantly video-streaming service to the Nintendo Wii and to the iPhone and iPod touch as well.

It’s not entirely clear how the company plans to bring Watch Instantly to the iPhone. Presumably, it will use a native iPhone app, since the device doesn’t support Silverlight, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Flash-esque also-ran.

That said, there are some hurdles to negotiate there since native video streaming on iPhone 3.0 doesn’t yet support digital rights management.

Another issue likely to prove problematic: Bandwidth. Watch Instantly streaming typically requires a fair bit of bandwidth and might prove problematic over 3G connections. AT&T (T), which hobbled SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone over bandwidth concerns, will probably see things that way. Which means Netflix’s app, if it is indeed in development, will be limited to Wi-Fi like the SlingPlayer.

Beyond that and the DRM issue, there’s not much more I can think of to prevent such an app from being brought to the iPhone. There’s not much overlapping content between Watch Instantly and Apple’s iTunes service. And even if there was, there’s no real rivalry here that might inspire Apple to block Netflix’s (NFLX) service. iTunes is run pretty much at break-even to support sales of Apple (AAPL) devices. And a Netflix app for iPhone would arguably help Apple do that as well.

“We did a long-term supply agreement with Toshiba,” Cook explained. “As a part of that, as part of the terms and conditions, we paid them $500 million as a pre-pay earlier in the quarter. You know, we view Flash as a very key component for us because as you know we use it in so much on so many of our products and also we are a reasonable percentage of the user of Flash on a worldwide basis.”

Indeed, Apple (AAPL) sells millions of NAND flash-enabled devices each year, so many that its needs often constrain supply for the entire market. In 2005, the company arranged to purchase up to 40 percent of Samsung Electronics’ holiday NAND output for use in it iPods. In July of last year Apple bought 50 million 8Gb-equivalent NAND flash chips from Samsung, forcing the company to reduce its supply to other customers.

Then, this past April, Apple ordered 100 million 8Gb–or one-gigabyte (1GB)–chips from Samsung, once again causing flash supplies to tighten. Now we have this $500 million prepayment, which, according to sources, will keep Apple in NAND for about three months.

Great news for Toshiba, which has been suffering mounting losses in the midst of tougher competition, and for the NAND market as well. As Tim Cook said yesterday, “The NAND market has now begun to stabilize and we expect it to move towards a supply/demand balance.”

In an interview with BBC News, GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs said the next decade will see such massive growth in the market that apps will rival the Web in popularity. “Apps will be as big if not bigger than the Internet,” GetJar predicted.

“They will peak at around 100,000 by the end of the year. That will be a tipping point and after that there will be a gradual fall in the rate of development. The full blossom will come in ten years and mobile apps will become as popular as Web sites are today with consumers.”

A grandiose claim, to be sure, but one that strains believability a bit less than it might, now that Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes App Store has racked up 1.5 billion downloads. That said, what, exactly, does “as big as the Internet” mean? And won’t the progression toward that metric be undermined once smart phones fully support HTML5, Flash and whatnot?

Why bother developing apps for multiple platforms–iPhone OS, webOS, Android, Symbian–when one could simply develop a single Web app that will serve all of them at once?

As Google Engineering vice president Vic Gundotra recently said, the browser is where things are headed. “What we clearly see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers,” he said. “Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning. We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

Seems Apple’s not only reshaping the music and cellphone industries, but the memory industry as well.

By all appearances, the Pre is a slick little device. But is it formidable enough to stand its ground next to Apple’s iPhone, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry and the groaning board of Android devices currently in the handset market product pipeline? Palm (PALM) certainly seems to think so. In fact, the company is so confident in the Pre that CEO Ed Colligan seems to think it won’t need a sub-$200 price point to pull share from Apple (AAPL), et al. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked ATD’s Peter Kafka earlier this afternoon.

Well, here’s one reason: To stay in business. Because despite Colligan’s claims of a “significantly better product,” Palm hasn’t raised the smartphone bar much (if at all) with the Pre. In fact, the device is as noteworthy for the features it may not include as for those it does. Absent from today’s grand unveiling was any mention of video. Also missing was a rival to Apple’s App Store and the robust developer-consumer ecosystem Apple has created around the iPhone and iPod touch. Even Google’s (GOOG) Android OS debuted with that. And the name; well, “Pre” isn’t likely to do very much for Palm’s already much diminished brand recognition.

Now, perhaps video and an app store are coming. But even if they do, will the Pre really be worth paying a premium for, as Colligan suggests? I’m not so sure–especially when the inevitable updates to the iPhone and BlackBerry remove the few advantages it does have over those devices. “Fast Web browsing” and “efficient multitasking” just aren’t big differentiators anymore.

That magnetized conductive charging platform sure is nice, though.

UPDATE: Turns out Palm is planning an App Store rival. According to the Pre press release, “The platform’s flexible environment will also allow developers to distribute their applications over-the-air via an on-device Palm application store.” And though no mention was made of video during Thursday’s Pre unveiling, the device will support it–both on the device and streaming. Said a Palm spokesperson, “The Pre has video playback, including YouTube video from the internet.”

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• Yeah. Those PC Guys Never Stood a Chance, Palm.
• Palm: Spare Change for Financial Viability?
• Alms for Palm?
• Palm New-ness: A Target Price of Zero
• Palm: Hey … Hello? Excuse Me … Over Here!

Great, another Web-connected TV platform, right? Bet stock quotes and weather reports will look amazing on that Plasma HDTV we’ve got in the living room….

A predictable and understandable response to the CE 3100 when it was first announced, but things have changed a bit since then. Working with Adobe, Intel has optimized the chip to run Flash. Which means consumers will soon be able to stream Flash video to their TVs without a separate set-top box or a PC. And once that happens, YouTube, Netflix and online TV providers like Hulu will almost certainly go mainstream.

And that means the digital living room may have finally arrived. As Forrester Research analyst Paul Jackson noted last summer: “If you look at these things what they boil down to is–is it compelling to use? Am I as a consumer going to sit on my couch with my very expensive TV and think ‘Wow, I really want to go and look at the weather.’ As we have seen, a lot of people are doing that with their laptop on their knee during the Olympics or the Superbowl, which is inconvenient and involves just one person. So getting to the stage where you can bring some of that functionality to the TV without it being disruptive to the viewing experience is what has been missing to date.”

• Enhancements to Google Maps, including support for Google Street View, plus bus schedules and walking directions
• Support for over-the-air podcast updates via the iTunes Store
• An app-scoring feature that allows users to rate applications purchased from the the App Store before deleting them
• Support for line-in audio via the iPhone’s headphone jack

Wonderful additions to the platform, all of them. Of course, there are still quite a few missing. MMS support would be nice, wouldn’t it? As would support for Flash and the ability to compose messages in landscape mode.

And what about cut-and-paste? Seriously, at this point, it’s almost like Apple (AAPL) is purposely withholding it, out of spite.

The judge disagreed. And his reasons for doing so will undoubtedly come into play in the Viacom case and others as well. “Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users,” the judge wrote. “Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the third-party software. … But Veoh does not itself actively participate or supervise the uploading of files. Nor does it preview or select the files before the upload is completed. Instead, video files are uploaded through an automated process which is initiated entirely at the volition of Veoh’s users.”

Google (GOOG) was understandably quite pleased with the ruling: “It is great to see the Court confirm that the DMCA protects services like YouTube that follow the law and respect copyrights,” Zahavah Levine, YouTube’s chief counsel,” said in a statement.

Viacom (VIA) was equally displeased, understandably. “Even if the Veoh decision were to be considered by other courts, that case does nothing to change the fact that YouTube is a business built on infringement that has failed to take reasonable measures to respect the rights of creators and content owners,” the company said in a statement. “Google and YouTube have engaged in massive copyright infringement–conduct that is not protected by any law, including the DMCA.”

Adobe (ADBE) has conceived of a way for search engines to index Flash content, even pre-existing Flash content, without the need for developer intervention. It’s made content encoded in the Flash file format (SWF), which was previously undiscoverable to search engines, discoverable–and it’s given Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) the tools necessary to discover it.

As Ryan Stewart, an Adobe evangelist, explained: “We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google, which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.”

Google will begin doing that today; Yahoo, whenever it manages. A big change for both companies, especially Google, which has long advised Webmasters concerned about their PageRank to use Flash sparingly. “In general, search engines are text based,” the company explains in its “Creating a Google-friendly site” FAQ. “This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.”

Today that changes. And now, developers can use Flash to their hearts’ content, without mucking about with workarounds to ensure the dynamic content it makes possible is properly indexed and ranked.

The device is largely as expected–an iPhonish-looking thing with both GPS and Wi-Fi, 1GB of permanent flash memory, a 2-megapixel camera, full HTML browsing, 3G support on GSM networks with HSDPA access and, of course, the BlackBerry’s one-trick killer app: instant, secure email. That’s a compelling combination for business users and casual ones not easily swayed by the iPhone’s hype juggernaut as well. Indeed, Citigroup analyst Jim Suva says it could boost RIM’s quarterly shipments by 200,000 to 400,000.

But perhaps not without a bit of struggle. The BlackBerry Bold won’t ship until as late as August, which means Apple (AAPL) could beat it to market with the enterprise-friendly 3G iPhone it’s rumored to be uncrating at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference in June. Which has got to worry RIM. After all, the first-generation iPhone had claimed a 28% market share by the fourth quarter of 2007. That’s still less than the BlackBerry, which holds about a 41% market share, but the iPhone hasn’t even been on the market a year.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s claim that Safari is responsible for 71% of mobile browser usage apparently echoed throughout Microsoft HQ like a hearty Nelson Mundt “Hah Hah!” since Microsoft (MSFT) has developed a more robust version of Internet Explorer Mobile with which to challenge it. At the CTIA conference in Las Vegas this morning, the company announced Windows Mobile 6.1 and along with it a new desktop-grade version of IE Mobile. With support for Adobe Flash and Silverlight, the browser should help Microsoft better compete with the full Web-browsing experience provided by Mobile Safari. Expect it at market in the third quarter of 2008.