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It’s the latest Hollywood cliffhanger: how will you spend your economic stimulus check?

If the New York Times, NPD Group and other leading-indicator-watchers are to be believed, you’ll head right down to Best Buy, Game Stop or Costco and use that money to buy a shiny piece of consumer electronic hardware.

Two Times stories in the last three days have mentioned how sales of HDTV’s, video game consoles and software, DVD players and other home entertainment devices have been rising during the economic downturn. It seems that when hard times hit, most people will be content to cocoon in front of their 42-inch LCD’s, watching high-def newscasts full of talking heads holding court on the cost of gasoline and food.

Hollywood uberblogger Nikki Finke says Hollywood is paying attention to this mashup of commerce and technology because “Iron Man” is about to launch in multiplexes nationwide - waving the green flag for the summer movie season - and the videogame “Grand Theft Auto IV” just came out and it’s getting the kind of reviews you usually see for a Coen Brothers film. Sure, you spend $60 bucks for the game, but how many hours of 1080p gameplay (plus cinema-worthy storytelling) does that buy you vs. the 126 minutes it will take to watch Robert Downey Jr. blow stuff up? Do we even need to mention related spending/downtime like parking, pre/post-movie dining, babysitters, etc?

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Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. have announced plans to team up with Digital Cinema Implementation Partners to revolutionize what goes on behind the scenes at movie theaters.  Instead of delivering actual film to the theaters, they have announced that they will soon stream the movies over satellite and broadband connections.

This new technology would allow theaters to play movies on more screens so you don’t go home crying next time a premier is sold out.  They have yet to express the reason for the new method of delivery, but I’m thinking they’ve started to realize that delivering a hard copy to theaters around the world is a huge waste of money.  That or the MPAA has another “brilliant” idea to get people to stop pirating films.

Read [AP] Via [Gizmodo]

There have been rumors of an antenna-less Palm Treo for some time now...some call it the Treo Hollywood.  Alleged spy shots of the new device have been leaked to our friends over at SlashGear.  The device looks exactly the same size as the current model Treos (700p, 700w), but have no antenna.  To be honest, I would prefer they spend their time on making it thinner so it has a chance at competing with the Motorola Q’s form-factor.  The antenna is annoying, but they’ve got to do something about its size next.  Click on to SlashGear for the rest of the pics.

Read [SlashGear]

Here are some supposed leaked shots of the next generation of Palm Treo’s. Currently codenamed Lennon and Nitro, the main difference we see here are Treo’s with their antennas cut off to deliver a sleeker form factor. My guess is that these next generation versions add built-in WiFi, a higher megapixel camera (or an option of no camera), have a faster processor, and a few other goodies that probably very few people will use. Previously a image of this new model was taken and dubbed Hollywood, which can be found here. Finally, we expect all future models to be released in both Palm OS and Windows Mobile versions in addition to the possibility of a Linux version too.

Update: We became aware of the following leaked image of a Cingular roadmap showing the Nitro and Lennon for October.

The Treo Lennon is listed as having UMTS and Class 10 EDGE, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, WiFi (built-in, one can only hope), and sports Windows Mobile 5.0 with MSFP. Not quite as many details about the Treo Nitro, but it is listed as having a 1.3 megapixel digital camera and appears to be running the Palm OS.

Read [Treo Central]
Via [Engadget Mobile]