Both debuted this morning, along with a Web-based storage and media-sharing service called My Phone. And while they’re certainly better than Microsoft’s offerings to date, the market seems unimpressed. Said Gartner (IT) analyst Carolina Milanesi: “There is nothing in this version that makes drastic changes that will get people to choose Windows who didn’t before.”

And, indeed, that appears to be the case. WinMo 6.5 is very clearly a stopgap on the path to 7.0, which is to be released next year. “Windows Mobile 6.5 isn’t just a letdown–it barely seems done,” Gizmodo’s John Herman complains, adding that its underpinnings reveal “an OS that hasn’t been fundamentally changed in years, and which bears a strong resemblance to Windows Mobile 6.1, and a startlingly not-weak resemblance to PocketPC.”

A startlingly not-weak resemblance to PocketPC. Not the comparison Microsoft (MSFT) was hoping for, I’m sure, especially given the OS’s decidedly flashier competition. But likely about all we could expect when even the company’s own executives are saying privately and publicly that they wish the OS was further along.

So 6.5 is really just a placeholder to keep Microsoft in the game–and just barely. As Windows Mobile Senior Product Manager Greg Sullivan told TechFlash, “It’s not the destination for us, by any stretch of the imagination, it’s a step along the way.”

Kara was half James Bond, half Indiana Jones in the cities and jungles of BoomTown this week. She jet-setted, jet-lagged and still managed to report on a genuine cougar fight.

BoomTown waved goodbye to merry old England and racked up some more frequent flier miles early in the week heading back to the techie embrace of Silicon Valley. Before her tray table was locked, though, Kara made a quick stop at music darling-of-the-moment Spotify. Daniel Ek, founder and CEO, hopes to bring its pay-per-month music service to millions of American mobile devices, to add to its hefty presence in the U.K. and Europe.

As D-Force One touched down at AllThingsD headquarters, one of the valley’s original major players shook things up with a $100 million branding move. Yahoo (YHOO), possibly now spelled Y!hoo, changed its brand in support of an overall shakeup of its services. Kara hearkened back to the D conference and wondered if rebranding the company Y!#@&$oo might have been more appropriate, considering CEO Carol Bartz’s preference for “salty” language.

And not to be left out of a worthy chuckle, BoomTown brought readers the inside scoop on the cougar that came to town. Yes, a cougar–or mountain lion, if you’re from California–was seem roaming the hills above Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus this week. The company circulated a fairly priceless memo that included tips on how to successfully fight a cougar. Any such advice against snow leopards, however, was omitted.

As Kara was jet lagging, John was running full-tilt over at Digital Daily. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission released a new proposal to institutionalize Net neutrality. The proposal would ban Internet service providers and data deliverers from prohibiting or throttling content to promote their own services. John pointed out that it wasn’t too surprising that AT&T (T)–and Republicans–weren’t too happy with the move.

While politicians exercised their series of tubes, Microsoft (MSFT) was busy shadow-tablet boxing. John filed a report about the first Microsoft device designed exclusively to compete with a product Apple (AAPL) doesn’t make. The “Courier,” as the two-page “tablet-book” is called, features some decidedly un-Apple-like interfaces, unless of course you look a little farther back to the days of the Newton.

To finish out the week, Digital Daily took the AllThingsD time machine back to 2003, when Apple was rolling out its revolutionary MMS service. Sometime Friday, iPhone users were suddenly able to share pictures with friends over the air. Unless they already use Flickr, Facebook, or about a zillion other apps that basically do the same thing.

MediaMemo explored its inner, or maybe outer, geek this week, beginning with the Gizmodo annual gallery show. The charity event featured musical Tesla coils, Star Trek props and a “Microsoft Surface”-like computer with a mud-based (not joking) user interface.

Peter continued the browsing theme, reporting that Yahoo and Google were both back in the market for acquisitions. Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt said he had his checkbook open again, now that “the worst is behind us.”

Even if Yahoo and Google are in a buying mood, one particular VC firm isn’t feeling so flush. New York’s Union Square Ventures opted out of the latest round of Twitter fund-raising. Peter hazarded a guess that the now-famous $1 billion valuation may have had something to do with it.

Across town at the Mossberg Solution, Katie gave readers a complete rundown on the Microsoft Zune HD. The iPod-hunting media player is now in its fourth generation. The player got high marks in the style and widgets categories, but still needs a solution to the confusing “points system” purchase interface. The problem with Zune isn’t the player, it seems, but the stuff Zune isn’t connected to.

It’s going to be another week of electro-awesomeness here at AllThingsD. Until then, always remember that you should never turn your back on a cougar. The safest way to escape is to buy it a pomegranate martini and squeeze out the window of the men’s bathroom.

For one thing, the Microsoft (MSFT) device is a booklet, not a tablet; in other words, it’s designed to fold. For another, it supports input via multitouch and, in an ironic nod to Apple’s Newton, stylus.

From Gizmodo, which somehow managed to uncover a bevy of information about the device:

“The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a ‘pocket’ to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft’s tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we’ve seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.”

Overall, I believe Snow Leopard will help keep the Mac an appealing choice for computer buyers, and I can recommend it to existing Mac owners seeking more speed and disk space, or wanting to more easily use Exchange. But I don’t consider Snow Leopard a must-have upgrade for average consumers. It’s more of a nice-to-have upgrade. If you’re happy with Leopard, there’s no reason to rush out and get Snow Leopard.

– Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you’re looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard’s biggest feature is that it doesn’t have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.

– Brian Lam, Gizmodo

Here’s the thing about Snow Leopard, the single inescapable fact that hung over our heads as we ran our tests and took our screenshots and made our graphs: it’s $30. $30! If you’re a Leopard user you have virtually no reason to skip over 10.6, unless you’ve somehow built a mission-critical production workflow around an InputManager hack (in which case, well, have fun with 10.5 for the rest of your life). Sure, maybe wait a few weeks for things like Growl and MenuMeters to be updated, and if your livelihood depends on QuickTime you might want to hold off, but for everyone else the sheer amount of little tweaks and added functionality in 10.6 more than justifies skipping that last round of drinks at the bar–hell, we’re guessing Exchange support alone has made the sale for a lot of people.

– Joshua Topolsky, Engadget

Snow Leopard is Apple’s lowest-priced OS update in eight years. Granted, it’s a collection of feature tweaks and upgrades, as well as under-the-hood modifications that might not pay off for users immediately. But the price of upgrading is so low that I’ve really got to recommend it for all but the most casual, low-impact Mac users. If you’ve got a 32-bit Intel Mac (that is, one powered by a Core Solo or Core Duo processor), the benefit of this upgrade will be a little less. But for most Mac users, especially the kind of person who reads a Web site devoted to the subject, the assorted benefits of Snow Leopard outweigh the price tag. I’d pay $30 just for the improved volume ejection, the ability to create services with Automator, and the improvements to the Dock and Exposé–though I admit I’d pay slightly more to not have the misguided QuickTime Player X as a part of the package. If you’re a user who connects to an Exchange server every day, upgrading to Snow Leopard really is a no-brainer. For everyone else, maybe it’s not quite a no-brainer-but it’s awfully close. Snow Leopard is a great value, and any serious Mac user should upgrade now.

– Jason Snell, Macworld

Impressive and important, it’s an update that will revitalize your existing Mac even though you’ll be stumped for a quick five-minute demo that convinces the people around you that much of anything has changed at all.

– Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun Times

In my experience, Mac OS X was already a superior operating system to Windows. With Exchange and other technologies, Snow Leopard adds bite, especially for business. But as upgrades go, this one is relatively tame.

– Ed Baig, USA Today

If you’re already running Leopard, paying the $30 for Snow Leopard is a no-brainer. You’ll feel the leap forward in speed polish, and you’ll keep experiencing those ‘oh, that’s nice’ moments for weeks to come. If you’re running something earlier, the decision isn’t as clear cut; you’ll have to pay $170 and get Snow Leopard with Apple’s creative-software suites–whether you want them or not. Either way, the big story here isn’t really Snow Leopard. It’s the radical concept of a software update that’s smaller, faster and better–instead of bigger, slower and more bloated. May the rest of the industry take the hint.

– David Pogue, New York Times

First the company gave us CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), an “artificial intelligence” tasked-array system with the personality of a 12-year-old girl and accompanied by its own homepage, YouTube channel, blog, monograph and versions of Google Earth and Google Maps. And to these, Google has added Google LOLCODE, Google Brain Search, Google Chrome with 3-D and a new Gmail auto-reply feature. The search giant also announced a new upside-down viewing option for YouTube and an automatic red-eye function for Picasa.

Overkill? Maybe, just a little. Google (GOOG), of course, wasn’t alone in pumping the Web full of pranks. Seems people with Web sites everywhere fancy themselves Don Rickles today. Hotels.com began taking reservations for rooms on the Moon. And Expedia (EXPE) began offering flights to Mars. Microsoft (MSFT) renamed its Kumo search product Omuk and unveiled Alpine Legend for Xbox 360. Some angry librarians staged a Kindle burning in a Los Angeles park. Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media appointed Gary Busey as Director of Human Resources. Torrent index The Pirate Bay partnered with the hopelessly litigious Warner Bros. The Guardian adopted an all-Twitter publishing model. Gizmodo was taken over by spam overlords. Amazon (AMZN) launched a brand new cloud-computing dirigible called Floating Amazon Cloud Environment, or FACE. Yahoo (YHOO) debuted an Ideological Search. And, finally, Qualcomm (QCOM) took convergence a bit too literally.

There are plenty of others, of course, far too many to mention here, and most of them unworthy of that mention in the first place. As Good Morning Silicon Valley aptly notes, “The sad fact is that pranks are like fireworks–once amateurs get to fiddling around with them, somebody’s going to end up lame.”

As I noted that day, the timing of the rumor seemed a bit suspicious. With little in the way of news during the holiday week, Jobs’s decision to bail on the Macworld keynote issue still fresh in our minds and his health an obvious shareholder concern, it seemed a bit like an AAPL manipulator’s perfect storm.

Apparently, there may be a bit more to that armchair theory than I thought. Over at Traderhood, writers with far more stock analysis acumen than I, suggest that Apple shares were poised for a huge breakout in price the afternoon of Dec. 30, bolstered by a general upward trend in the market and their own ascending triangle (click on chart below) when they very suspiciously had the wind knocked out of them. “Amazingly at the very point where AAPL’s spike at the tip of the ascending triangle should happen, rumor was introduced and killed the setup completely,” Traderhood blogger Conschmillo explains. “I mean you can have things to happen unexpectedly. It happens all the time, it is a stock market, but to have them placed this [precisely] when everything else is taking off, AAPL included, makes me believe, there is more than meets the eye to why AAPL price is down. If this rumor was not introduced, AAPL would be somewhere around $93.”

So, a favorable technical set-up was thwarted at the moment the odds favored the opposite happening. Coincidence?

UPDATE: Apparently, it was a coincidence. Brian Lam, Editorial Director of Gizmodo, which published the rumor, tells me the site was tipped off well before Dec. 30.

[Image credit: Tin foil hat courtesy Patrick Daley]

(Thanks Barry )

If ever Steve or the board of directors decided that he was no longer capable of doing his job as CEO of Apple, I’m sure they will let you know.”

– An Apple spokesperson

Three days of gains gone in just two minutes. That’s what happened to Apple shares today after Gizmodo published a rumor suggesting Steve Jobs’s declining health is the real reason he won’t deliver the keynote at Macworld 2009. Apple (AAPL) hasn’t yet commented on the report, nor has anyone who could reasonably verify it. And they almost certainly won’t; Apple’s longstanding company line has always been “Steve’s health is a private matter.” And those close enough to Jobs to comment on such rumors with any degree of authority surely won’t for fear that Jobs would brain them with the nearest Mac Pro.

But CNBC’s Jim Goldman–who earlier this month reported that Jobs’s decision to skip the Macworld keynote had nothing to do with his health–is calling BS on the Gizmodo report. “I spoke to Apple after these headlines crossed and the company, which officially doesn’t comment on rumors, reiterated the reasons it offered two weeks ago: Apple was pulling out of Macworld because the company didn’t see the need to continue its investment in the expo, which included Steve Jobs’s keynote. I was told this morning (Tuesday) that nothing has changed since then. The same reasons apply today that applied two weeks ago. I was told two weeks ago by sources inside Apple that the decision had nothing to do with Jobs’s health. I got the same message today. Period.”

Which makes you wonder about the motives of these “previously reliable sources.” There’s sometimes a very fine line between solid sources and stock manipulators looking to make a quick profit. With little in the way of news this week, the Macworld keynote issue still fresh in our minds and Jobs’s health an obvious shareholder concern, a rumor like this one seems a little too perfectly timed, doesn’t it?

“Someone very, very close to the 3G iPhone launch” tells Gizmodo that the device will debut as expected at Apple’s (AAPL) Worldwide Developers Conference 2008 on June 9 with immediate availability.

A plausible rumor, and one that jibes with other similar ones we’ve been hearing for some time now–specifically the one about AT&T (T) employees being asked not to schedule any vacation between June 15 and July 12 to ensure sufficient staffing for “an exciting summer promotional launch.”

Normally a consumer product announcement at WWDC would seem unlikely. That said, it would make sense for Apple to uncrate a next-gen iPhone at the event this year, given its recent software roadmap and SDK announcement. Wouldn’t it?

Actually, it does get bricked out. Sources at Apple tell Ars Technica that the activation limbo into which unlocked iPhones are sent is the company’s definition of “bricking”: “Current attempts to reactivate across the Web are failing and therefore [a hacked] iPhone cannot be used to do anything–no phone calls, no Safari, no iPod, nothing. An unlocked iPhone that runs firmware update 1.1.1 is unusable no matter what SIM is in it.”

UPDATE:The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) reports that Apple Stores around the country are restoring bricked iPhones. “We’re not sure whether they’re doing a low-level reflash or just swapping units out,” TUAW explains. “We have reports of at least four customers who walked in with iBricks and walked out with iPhones. It is unclear at this time whether these customers unlocked their iPhones or not–we’re also receiving reports of iBricks from people who never unlocked or modded their units.”