Palm, then, is clearly a shortimer on shaky ground as Apple has managed to several up their opponents at every turn, and I’m having doubts that they will show up to this party with 80′s grade wine coolers. The iPhone is, after all, Apple’s flagship product already in its short life, besting even the powerful and battle-ready iPod (yeah, the iPod Touch is an iPhone without the phone, so you do the math). This new iPhone is just in time to sate the upgrade needs of the original iPhone owners whose precious non-3G gizmos 2 year contracts are coming up.

Interestingly enough, it appears that Palm is struggling right out of the gate by releasing webOS 1.0.2 today! Reports on PreThinking.com are already saying that the update makes the phone faster and adds a clock widget. Wow. I’m not surprised, since its a very Palm-like thing to do, but its not the kind of message that Palm should want to put out there. Regardless, there has been a great deal of buzz about the Pre and people appear to be loving it, with thousands of tweets hitting the nano-blogging nano-sphere as people pick up their new handsets at a local Sprint store.

The excitement is clear and many of the reports being posted about new Pres is very positive, which is a good sign. The other question is, “Who will win, Apple or Palm?” Fortunately, I’ll break out the old saw and say that neither, its the consumer who wins. Apple set out to completely revamp the mobile market and it did so in less than a year with the first iPhone. It has taken less than three years now for the competition to start catching up, and (this is my opinion) the Palm Pre and the new webOS is the first to offer a valid challenge to Apple. Apple wins, Palm wins, and we all win.

We get a pair of kick ass pocket computers for cheap! Nice work, fighters!

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Now, as to the podcast, I’m running that Chupacabra down ASAP, likely tomorrow. To tide you over, Arlen Specter, Mr. Centrist Republican himself, has ditched the extreme Right to adopt lodgings with the Communist, Stalin-loving Democrats. BTW, I’m a dem.

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The reason this is cool is because it allows you to use Google’s most used features without being online, but what it affords Google is far more comprehensive. Gears technology allows Google to pre-define and work out the kinks on keeping its mess of services synched up correctly with local applications. Sure, for now that’s web browsers and web pages, but there’s no limitation anywhere which states that the sync target isn’t an application instead of a browser. This suggests that its the synching which is more important to Google than the offline usage aspect, though that’s a feature which should not be discounted. It will be some time before everyone is always online, so offline access is critical to Google’s success.

Google’s also got another trick up its sleeve which it hasn’t seen fit to shine a spotlight on. You thought that the Google Phone, T-Mobile’s G1 Android phone, was cool. Wait until you see Grand Central. Grand Central is an access provider which Google bought last year and has not yet publicized significantly. In fact, its still in private beta and there are no signs that it will be coming out of the closet any time soon. What does Grand Central do? Its a single point of contact system which focuses around a phone number. The service gives you a number and you can add any number of phones to that service. Once added, you can control when and how people reach you and when and how the phones connected react. 

Its not clear what Google plans for Grand Central and how it might fit into the grand scheme of things, but it is a compelling additional notch in Google’s already battle-tested belt. Grand Central could very well be a component of an everything or nothing play which leaves all other contenders on the field. Take Picasa, Google Gears, a desktop application compatible with Mac and Windows, Google Sync, and Grand Central and you have an all-in-one data powerhouse which can handle your internet access, search, email, contacts, agenda, images, feeds, voice mail, phone calls, and back it all up while offering you ubiquitous access. Its not hard, then, to imagine a cheap netbook with 3G network access or tethered to a Google/Android phone (more are coming, I assure you) and a Google-specific Linux distro designed to take advantage of all of these features. 

If prices of netbooks aren’t compelling now, wait until you get a deal which includes unlimited wireless internet. My guess is that the sweet spot will be US$99-250 for MIDs to 10-11″ netbooks. Does this mean that Google’s taking over the world as we know it? Yes and no, depending on who you talk to. If you ask the nuts, sure. Google’s been trying to wrest freedom from our already tenuous grasp since day one. If you ask me (and you are reading this), then the answer is no… with concessions. Google is very clever. It will pretty much own the internet in 10 years, but not alone. It will be owned by a largely loosely compiled group of open source advocates who have been eyeing this prize since Steve Ballmer started gloating about Microsoft’s position years ago. 

More specifically, with the way that Google has positioned how it uses and leverages technology, there will be a number of sources for Google’s almost assured dominance, and this is clever because it almost completely bypasses Anti-Trust. Android is Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) so, technically, Google doesn’t own it. Email is ubiquitous, and Google makes no claims that its Gmail or nothing. In fact, Google has been opening Gmail up further and further since it started, making it pretty damned compelling. Docs: There’s no real competition, but Google’s not exactly vying to stop it, either. The same goes for Calendar, Sync, and Picasa. When you buy a WinMo phone, it won’t work with anything but Outlook on Windows. Hmm. Everything from Google works everywhere. If you were Anti-Trust, who’d you look at first?

So, as Sherlock Holmes used to say (despite the fact that he is a fictional character), “The game is afoot.” Google isn’t playing, either. They’re in this to win. They’re already one of the world’s largest companies in what is most assuredly a record breaking time. I can assure you with every fiber of my being that there’s no way in hell (or Los Angeles, if you like) that Google’s going to willingly give up that growth and power position, recession be damned. Mark my words, though. In the next year or so we’ll start hearing about desktop applications, and then you’ll know that I saw the future as clear as day… or at least that I guessed well

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Now, some would argue that I rail against such an act in order to protect my right to be a pervert and take up-skirt images on trains and buses. This is the content of arguements for such laws as it is with anti-virus software makers whose marketing policy is to engender fear in order to sell. (I may be a hardcore Machead, but I do use Windows, and when I do, I don’t use A/V software, but I also don’t use Microsoft software or do things I shouldn’t. Because of that, I’ve not been infected in 10+ years.) The real argument, and the one Republicans and the Religious Right don’t want you to make, is that its about freedom of speech. Yes, taking pictures is a right we have because its a form of personal expression.

What I’m more concerned about is Republicans fighting as hard as they are to not support our President, Barack Obama. We are in a serious recession, we have a dangerously high jebless rate, we have a large, National population of homeless people, we have banks and other financial institutions ripping us off, the credit market is in shambles, and money fund managers are giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses with TARP funds. We’re in trouble. Deep trouble, and Republicans are up to their same, tired, ridiculous old games claiming that Democrats are all about spending and spending and spending. Its shameful.

Think about it, kids (and I’m no mathematician). If you spend X number of Billions of dollars on a bridge refitting project, where does that money go? Republicans would have you believe that simply making the money available is waste and will produce nothing. Democrats, on the other hand (and who never seem to say anything about this), know that what will really happen is the money will go to planning which will create staff positions for design and implementation which will pay architectural firms to design the refits which will guide the project leaders to determining a contractor who will need to hire people to actually perform the work. I don’t know how many bridges there are in the US, but I know there’s a lot so I imagine that’s several hundreds of thousands of jobs right there.

I have a feeling that some of you will ask yourselves what you can do about it. Don’t. Know that you can call, write, fax, or email your representatives in Congress and tell them what you want them to work on. Tell them that pushing a bill (HR414, in case you were curious) to make mobile phone cameras click by law is less important than reinvigorating our economy. Let them know that you’re not happy about this. I’m certainly going to tell my reps what they should be working on.

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I have to say that I’m very disappointed to hear of this. Apparently, a PR rep at Belkin (not mine, fortunately) has been named as the individual blatantly offering $0.65 per fake review of Belkin products on social product review sites. That’s not all, however, as the fake reviewer was also required to find reviews to competing products and mark the reviews as negative in hopes that it would “delegitamize” them. This kind of baldfaced, scandalous, anti-competitive marketing is about as bad as it can get for people like me.

I’m a blogger. I started PDA Handyman in January of 2001, which means I’ve been doing this for 8 years now. I’ve had large and small readerships (I currently draw around 130,000 readers a month) and I created the site and maintain it because I wanted to carry my love of neat little gadgets to anyone interested in my opinion. With that in mind, I determined early on that I would be careful about how I would review products.

My first rule is simple. If I don’t think a product is of any value to me, I don’t request it from the vendor for review. This is why you don’t see reviews of (much less stories promoting) stupid ass products like USB hand warmers or Hello Kitty mobile phones. Sure, I’ll run up the flag on something stupid to ridicule it, but certainly never to give it any time in the limelight. I request quality products which I think will carry a value over to my readers.

To see, then, that this unscrupulous PR person at Belkin, a company whom I’ve had lots of dealing in the past with, was paying for reviews disgusts me. Later in the piece you will learn that Belkin would also prepare special ROMs for certain devices which would mask any of the known issues those devices were having to skew the results for the reviewer. Since I haven’t reviewed any Belkin products since the Great Mobodojo Revivial of 2008 or during PDA Handyman’s Halcyon Days, there are no Belkin products reviews on the site now.

In case you don’t know, and you likely don’t, PR people who ship out products for review will often open the product, charge it up, and insert a personal note or reviewers guide. It does now raise questions in my mind about who could have done what to anything I have reviewed, though from my experience I’d have to say that the chances of that happening are slim to none. As you know if you’re a regular reader, I very rarely give out 100% glowing reviews. In some cases, like Sony’s nearly unusable Mylo 2 internet tablet, I give very, very poor reviews.

My PR person looked at it and responded thusly:

“That’s a pretty rough review, but thanks for sending along the link. As for the P Series, I will add you to our list, but we have a bunch of requests, so it’s going to be a wait before we can get you a unit. I will be in touch, though, and will let you know as soon as we have one available. It’s a great product and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”

As you can clearly see, I didn’t receive a note informing me that due to my unpleasant review of the Mylo 2 I would no longer be allowed to review Sony products. This is because there is an awareness between PR people and journalists which says that you win some and you lose some. PR people are paid to promote a product or a company, not to force a prescribed view on anyone. PR people are also pragmatic in understanding that not everything a company makes will the consumers like. The PR firm just won’t use any of my review in their PR pieces. I do know, however, that someone will come along and smartly decide not to buy something because of what I wrote.

For that, I’m glad. I want my readers to walk away from Mobodojo feeling like they got some value out of their time on the site. The last thing I’d ever want, as I imagine any legitimate blogger would, is to be considered a mouthpiece or a shill for a vendor or vendors. Belkin may need some time to restructure so they can save some face in this disgraceful debacle. I truly hope that they do. They make some good stuff.

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Apple has reached a point where they are now the defacto name of cool in the technical space. Apple has a cachet which Microsoft never had and it looks like Apple is now trying to capitalize on that. The simple truth is that cool doesn’t carry, and Apple will have to fundamentally modify its strategy to continue to grow. Its become clear that Steve may have figured out that no matter how many moves of the chess pieces he orchestrates, there is no longer anything new Apple can do that will have the Zing Factor of the iPhone.

They’ve captured the laptop market, the mobile media player market, the music market, the mobile phone market, and enough of the desktop market to make them very happy, and they’re watching that marketshare grow consistently. Anything they do now will be a derivation of something they’ve already done and people will necessarily be disappointed. This, I believe, is why Apple has been migrating away from the event-driven announcements over the past few years. Apple also had to have noticed that shares of Apple stock drop after every keynote.

I’m pretty sure that Steve knows that Apple rises and falls on his perceived failings and fortunes, and that’s not good to the ongoing fortunes of a huge multinational. Apple needs to become a brand again and right now its Apple is Steve Jobs. Mr. Jobs own mortality had to play a role in his views on how Apple should appear to the world. Apple is now distancing itself from its fanbase and will, in the next year or so, become something akin to Microsoft.

This will actually help Apple to grow as the lifestyle brand it has been forging itself into, something Microsoft has never been able to get a handle on. The people who purchase Apple goods now don’t do so out of brand loyalty or because they are phanboiz. They buy because it is popular and it works. This was the image Steve Jobs has been crafting over the last decade. He started with the iMac then the new PowerBooks then Mac OS X then the iPod and so on.

If Apple is going to move forward, gain more marketshare, and be a powerhouse from this point on it needs to behave differently. Will this piss off the phanboiz? Sure. Will it upset the loyalists? Some. Will it cement Apple’s role in the future of lifestyle computing? Without a single doubt. Apple has created a brand image for itself which works on all levels of a persons needs from the technological standpoint. They have made themselves as necessary as shoes, and unlike Microsoft’s lumpy pennyloafers these shoes are nice and comfortable.

That brand image doesn’t have a picture of Steve Jobs in it. Think back and try to find any piece of advertising material aimed at the general consumer in the last decade which has included Steve Jobs in it. My bet is you won’t find any. I’m also going to bet that Apple will return to MacWorld soon, maybe even next year, but they won’t do the keynote.

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Before Psion gave up the ghost on PDAs, though, they produced the consumer-oriented Revo and the enterprise-oriented Netbook/Netbook Pro products. The Netbook, and the Series 7 device before it, were powered by the EPOC operating system while the Netbook Pro was powered by Microsoft’s Windows CE 5.0 OS. Psion cancelled the consumer lines, however, and only continued the Netbook Pro with WinCE installed for their corporate customers, a product they would cancel a few years later.

Psion, however, seems to be kinda pist about everyone’s usage of the term Netbook as if it were some generic designation akin to the way people talk about Q-tips or Vaseline, both trademarked product names. As far as I know, however, there are no other products which are using the Netbook name and the term is only being used to as a descriptive. Its a mystery, then, why Psion’s legal department is sending news and blogger sites Cease & Desist letters. Its not like they can sue the sites for use of the term. If any judge allowed such a case to be won, no news site could ever specifically refer to a product again without getting sued.

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• Palm will introduce a Linux-based touchscreen device at CES. Sure, that’s mostly already known, but my prediction is that it will actually be freaking cool. I’m also going to guess that it won’t be able to run anything which wasn’t compiled for Palm OS 5.x, or at least not well.
• RIM will continue to lose marketshare to the iPhone and won’t see significant growth for the Storm until they release a version of the OS which is specifically designed for touch applications.
• Apple will update the Mac Mini. They might even incorporate AppleTV into it and kill the discreet AppleTV product. The other option is to turn AppleTV into a real DVR.
• Apple will release a 64GB iTouch model and move the entire product line up, keeping prices the same. They may also release a 128GB model, but I don’t think we’re quite there yet.
• GM will sell Saab back to Sweden and Scania will be returned to the product line badge, right alongside Saab honor and the death of the hideous Saab-badged, GM-made SUV. By 2011, real Saabs will be sold again, and I will buy a new one which will have been made in Sweden.
• Chrysler will die a long, overdue death.
• IBM will buy back the ThinkPad line from Lenovo and start making good ThinkPads again.
• Dell will trim most of its line in a successful effort to become a powerhouse again.
• Microsoft will offer a public beta release of Windows 7 and generally stop marketing Vista after failing to get savvy people to purchase it for 2+ years.
• Microsoft will announce official partnerships with various laptop fabbers to build Windows 7 Approved touchscreen lappies. The plan will generally fail, just like the UMPC, Tablet PCs, and clamshell Windows CE devices before it. (Say hello to Bob, touchscreen Win7 lappy!)
• Nintendo will release a US$99 add-on dongle which will allow the Wii to output up to 1080p video via an HDMI connection, something they had planned on doing all along. If not HDTV, it will be a VGA or DVI or both, which looks really sharp on sets which support that type of input. Think along the lines of Sega’s VGA box for the DreamCast.
• Nokia will finally make the Internet Tablet line an actual phone. At the very least, it will be a data-only arrangement like Amazon’s Kindle or the Peek.
• Google will make all of its applications support Google Gears and offer an update to Chrome which will make it work like a desktop.
• Sony will come to its senses and release a value-priced, non-mobile Playstation Core which will play PSP and PSP2 games at up to 720p and wireless controllers to compete with Nintendo’s Wii. **
• Sega will come to its senses and produce the DreamCast 2 to compete with Nintendo’s Wii. **

And now here are some “doi’s” which you would likely easily guess on your own:

• We will see netbooks from just about every name brand on the planet, including BMW and Sears.
• Apple will continue to take over marketshare in the mobile, desktop, laptop, and PMP spaces.
• Microsoft will continue to lose marketshare to Apple and Firefox.
• Dell will remain the largest single retailer of computers.
• HP will continue to be second in line, but will keep making stupid touchscreen TVs.
• All studios will sign up for Blu-Ray.
• Fox will relent and allow Watchmen to be released, but for 5% of the global profits.
• Toyota will release its Prius plug-in hybrid early to better compete with Ford’s Fusion hybrid.
• Hydrogen powerplants will not make a major splash in any market.

That’s it for 2009, kids! We’ll see how good I am at predicticating. In the past I’ve not been so good.

** Lacking quality skills at prognosticating, these could happen in 2010-11. Not sure. Just a feeling.

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Its not hard, however, to figure out how to make it more complicated. Convergence takes care of that, and what used to be one of the most beloved mobile messaging devices and an indispensable tool for the Federal government, the RIM Blackberry, has lost its way in a fight to remain relevant in a writhing sea of multi-functional nano devices which can play music, watch TV, fetch email from several accounts, browse the web, pick your teeth after a fine meal, and, if you’re lucky, make a call or two. They have cute, cloying names like Bold, Storm, Chocolate, Shine, and Behold, and they all (at least according to the manufacturers) do everything better than the Apple iPhone.

Until now. I introduce to you the one and only Peek. Its not an iPhone. It doesn’t play music. It doesn’t organize your life. Its not designed to make phone calls. Its more like 2G then 3G or 4G. It doesn’t sport a touchscreen, have any number of GBs of storage space, can’t find out where you are because it doesn’t do GPS, and doesn’t even take pictures. What it does do, and quite well, is email. If you can recall back to the mid-90′s when RIM’s Blackberry devices was just becoming hot with its two-way pager service on its neato 850/950 models then you might also recall that they weren’t phones back then. Not until 2001 did RIM add phone support.

The Peek brings back the concept of the old Blackberry and reboots it with a fresh, thin, clean, easy to use new device. For US$79.99 and US$20 a month you get unlimited wireless service which gives you access to up to three email accounts, unlimited SMS, and they’re adding features all the time. In the most recent update they added the SMS feature and the ability to view images attached to emails. My hope is that they add additional file types in the near future. Feature-wise, the interface is very clean. In fact, if you’re familiar with how the Blackberry works, you’ll be instantly at home on the Peek.

Setup of email accounts is very, very easy. The device itself has a number of configurations built into it, such as Gmail, AOL, NetZero, and many others. Just enter in the details and, if it recognizes the email address, it takes care of the rest. If you have your own mail server, just call up the service folk and they’ll set up the account for you. Word from their PR people is that they are working on adding Exchange access, as well. This should make some Crackberry addicts rather happy. I didn’t think to ask if they were also working on Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise account access, though.

The hardware itself is very well made. The device is nicely this and light. The screen is 320×240 and has excellent backlighting and color. There are some things which could be slightly improved. The thumbwheel could be a moved from the traditional side of the unit to the front middle, which would make it easier to use for lefties like me. The battery cover, which is nice and solid, would benefit from having a strengthened locking mechanism. One odd choice was the placement of the extended characters which are located above the numbers across the top of the keyboard. All of the keys are backlit, but the aforementioned characters are not, so you can see what they are in the dark.

There are also some things which the Peek developers could do to improve the interface. First, there are only three built-in color themes, none of which are particularly attractive, to choose from. There’s also not font control, which I’m assured by my PR contacts they are working on now. One thing which they could fix, however, is the status bar at the top of the screen. Its quite a bit taller than it needs to be. If they could trim it down and modernize the icons and status elements there would be more room on the display for email. It would also be nice if there was user control over the colors.

The Peek is one of the nicest, simplest, cleanest devices to come out in a long time. It fills a hole which used to be filled quite nicely but has become ridiculously overwrought. It also fills the gap which the costly iPhone has created. Some people just want a simple phone to make calls a a nice way to access their email on the go. The Peek has no contracts and it comes in a few colors. The Peek is a very elegantly simple solution to a problem which doesn’t need complex solutions, and I’m happy to have one. It very quickly became one of my most used devices and I don’t foresee a time when I stop using it.

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