Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

A fast week already yet, June 9 can’t seem to come fast enough.  Lucky for us it just not Apple speculation feeding the pipes this week, oh no!  A quick look at the industry shows us just who is on the edge and just who is out there, really out there.  Let’s begin, shall we?

For the second game in a row, Microsoft starts us off.  Microsoft has the stones to drop an actual press release saying how they are “supporting” the UMPC/eee pc clones with XP.  Really?  By agreeing to keep the OS around you support them?  Good grief man, reinvent yourself for at least the 90s: slap a new color splash screen and call it “Windows PieCrumbs”, optimize it for the small things these small machines do without some bloat…but don’t expect us to offer the pat on the back for “supporting” a fast growing niche market with a product you were about to send to the shredder.  Microsoft cornering the market on crack.

Palm.  Palm posts some impressive smartphone numbers thanks to El Centro (not the sweltering hot city in Southern Cali).  Fantastic, way to go.  Unfortunately for Palm my four words equate to profit they are making on these puppies.  This is the phone that should have been built after the initial success of the original Treos…not a last gasp effort to get hip and down vernacular-ly with the young folk.  Can you parlay it into something that brings home some bacon?  Investors don’t seem to think so.

Blackberry (making my list for the second straight time).  I know times are tough and you have do something but a flip phone?  Are you going to come up with a CarBlackberry as well?  My dad had one of those back in the 80s.  Come on, really?  A frickin flip phone?  Say it isn’t so?  Between these three, it’s amazing there is any crack left over for the others on this list.

Bloggers.  Oh yeah, point that finger right over here.  Some of get excited, really excited thinking about the possibilities that could happen within the framework Apple has set up.  How about a nude $99 iPhone with no programs.  Ok, maybe just phone and contacts.  Want to add email?  GPS? Internet? Yada, yada yada?  Sure you do!  Step right this way to the “Ye Olde App Store” and have a go.  Buy what you like, avoid what you don’t.  The choice is yours.  Pimp your phone for real.  I think a different form factor for the Nude iPhone would be hot but that’s just me and my differentiation value proposition.  Others disagree and it doesn’t matter ‘cause we are all on crack.

And that’s just the iPhone.  Forget about my (and by that I mean our) insight that sees Apple getting into the UMPC/EEpc game with a 6"x5” iTablet aimed at students (isn’t this why iTunes U exists), book readers (adios Kindle), Eee PC early adapters and last but certainly not least: gamers.  Bigger screen, touch keypad, accelerometers up the ying yang.  Woo Hoo!!!  Mountains of crack here.

What wrongs did you see this week?