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For Palm, 2010 will be a year of channel expansion, with its new webOS handsets coming to more carriers. Top among them, Verizon, which has been rumored to be getting a device “like the Palm Pre” since Palm launched it. In a research note to investors today, Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu says a Palm smartphone from Verizon is pretty much inevitable.

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Analysts who follow Palm are already rolling their eyes over TheStreet.com’s claim that Verizon has balked at adding the company’s new Pre handset to its lineup. In a research note this morning, Deutsche Bank’s Jonathan Goldberg dismissed it as “off base.”

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Those Apple tablet rumors just never let up, do they? Not a week after the company’s latest media event and they’re already back in force. The latest, from China Economic News, claims the device is being prepped for a February debut at a price somewhere between $799 and $999.

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Looks like the semiconductor industry has finally found a bottom from which to scramble upward. In the second quarter, chip sales registered their fourth consecutive monthly increase, the Semiconductor Industry Association said today, suggesting that we may be seeing the beginning of a gradual recovery in the industry. Though worldwide chip sales fell 20 percent year-over-year in the second quarter, they rose 17 percent from the first quarter.

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Here’s the flip side of reports that Palm plans to deliberately keep supplies of the Pre artificially low to foster the perception of a shortage and spur demand: There will be a shortage, but it won’t be deliberate or artificial. Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar claims that his supply chain checks indicate that Palm has “drastically reduced its production orders” for the Pre.

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If Apple is indeed preparing to offer the iPhone 3G in China in partnership with China Unicom, its sales prospects are looking pretty damn good. Bank of America analyst Scott Craig believes the company could claim as much as a fifth of the smartphone market in China when it launches the device there–and in relatively short order.

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Ugly just isn’t going to cut it in today’s mobile device market. That’s what Dell is finding as it attempts to build a smartphone capable of holding its own against the Blackberry, iPhone and upcoming Palm Pre. According to Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu, the PC maker’s first smartphone prototypes have been rejected by wireless network operators, which found them dull compared with current and upcoming devices.

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The slow gutting of the U.S. economy hasn’t had as much of an impact on global semiconductor sales; they rose 5.5 percent in August from a year ago bolstered by strong demand for personal computers and handsets. Odd, since you’d assume that slowdown in the U.S. economy would reduce demand for electronics goods and, by extension, the chips on which they run.

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