With a handful of new Android handsets arriving at market in the coming weeks, including Motorola’s much anticipated Droid, Palm’s prospects for blowout winter holiday sales are dimming. Earlier this week, analysts at Citigroup and CL King voiced their concerns about the company in the wake of another ugly quarter from carrier partner Sprint. Now, Standard & Poor’s is doing so as well.
The Pixi, Palm’s second webOS-powered smart phone, finally has a price and a U.S. street date. This morning, Sprint said the device will arrive at market Nov. 15. Price: $99.99 with a two-year contract and after $150 in rebates. Not the most aggressive of prices considering that Amazon is currently offering the Pre, Pixi’s elder sibling, for $99 with two-year contract as well.
Well, what do you know? Like Apple, Microsoft is also developing a tablet computer. It’s called “Courier” and it’s remarkably different from what Apple is imagined to be cooking up.
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.
With Palm’s shares up more than 900 percent since January, two things are clear: Palm’s Pre and webOS operating system are nothing short of a triumph and the run-up in Palm shares is most likely a wee bit overdone. In a research note issued Monday, Jesup and Lamont analyst Kevin Dede says as much, arguing that the company’s shares are overvalued, particularly in light of Pre returns.
If the netbook market is a race to the bottom, then Sony is bringing up the rear. Not a year after Sony execs disparaged netbooks as undeserving of its premium brand attention, the company announced its token entry into the market: the Vaio W.
Apple and Research in Motion may disagree on many things, but they’re of the same mind when it comes to the the netbook phenomenon: It will be short-lived. Asked about Apple’s interest in the category during a late-April earnings call, COO Tim Cook said the company has none. Turns out, Research in Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie feels pretty much the same way.
Reports that Apple is developing a new touchscreen device are picking up traction and credibility. In the past few days, claims made in a Chinese-language financial newspaper have been reinforced first by Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal and now by Reuters as well. Consensus seems to be that Apple has ordered 10-inch touchscreens from Wintek and that those screens are destined for an entirely new device. Netbook is the word most often bandied about for it. But might it be an e-book reader?
Turns out that when Apple COO Tim Cook said the company would use “whatever weapons we have at our disposal” to pursue anyone who “rips off” Apple’s iPhone intellectual property, he had a very specific weapon in mind: United States Patent #7,479,949. Awarded just days before Cook made that statement, the vast 358-page patent describes the touchscreen, graphical user interface and technologies that define the iPhone user experience, including at least one that may define an element of the Palm Pre’s as well.
Next up, the new and expected 17-inch MacBook Pro. Before introducing it, Schiller notes that the MacBook has been the No. 1 notebook computer in the states.
The new machine is largely as predicted. It boasts Apple’s new unibody chassis and a glass touch trackpad. At 6.6 pounds, it’s the world’s lightest notebook. It has a hi-res backlit display. “The best display we’ve ever shipped in a notebook,” says Schiller, with a 60 percent greater color gamut than other machines.
“We have big plans for the digital television business,” Canon CEO Fujio Mitarai said at a Canon exhibition in 2005. And with a new technology called surface-conduction electron-emitter display, and plans to use it to transform the lowly TV into a “multifunction information device,” Canon seemed well poised to execute them. At the time, anyway.
As rumored, the DVD slot has been moved to the left side. A rumor not true, however: Blu-ray. There’s no Blu-ray capability in the new Apple notebooks.
Ports on left side include a new mini-display port. The left side also features a battery indicator.
Other points : A solid-state drive option. The unit is less than 1-inch thick, .95 inches to be exact.
The media will gather tomorrow at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for an invitation-only event–presumably about updates to its MacBook and MacBook Pro lines. And, as with every Apple product launch, tomorrow’s has been preceded by feverish speculation about what form, exactly, those updates will take. Among the rumors currently making the rounds …
Founded nearly a decade ago on patents for printing active-matrix electronic display panels on thin, flexible plastic substrates, Plastic Logic spent the ensuing years developing a lightweight plastic screen that mimics the look–but not the feel–of a magazine or newspaper. And this morning, the company uncrated it.
With Apple’s much lauded iPhone having captured about 19.2% of the smart-phone market, expectations were high in advance of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s keynote at the company’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. And Jobs did not disappoint, unveiling the iPhone 3G, which will go on sale July 11 for $199.
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.
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.
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.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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