Well, if you haven’t heard by now, it looks as if Palm, makers of the incredible Palm Pre (which in my honest opinion had the nicest UI after the iPhone) is dying.

According to Bloomberg (hat tip: Engadget), Palm has already seeking out buyers which range from Dell (who declined), RIM (aka Blackberry), Nokia (who seems apathetic towards the deal), HTC (who also might make a great partner) and Lenovo (from China).

While there are pluses and minuses for buying Palm on the cheap, I think HP would benefit the most because:

• Mobile street cred: Can you remember the last time HP was in the mobile arena? If you said the iPAQ without Googling, then you get a golden star.
• A better tablet: If you didn’t know, HP is releasing a tablet computer to compete against the iPad (which I’m saving up for). While it’s great that its running Windows 7, it’s battery life isn’t (translation: you need an OS that won’t kill the hardware). webOS could give them that.
• Energize on contact: Palm’s touchstone technology is awesome. Buying the company for that alone would be worth it.
• HTC: If HP doesn’t pick up Palm, then HTC will as a defensive move against Apple’s lawsuit. Which means HP missed the boat AGAIN!!!

Well, hopefully someone in HP is thinking about a Palm acquisition.

After all, HP does make some decent hardware, and combined with an awesome OS they might be able to take on the mighty Apple and settle for second place (sorry, I’m a fan of all mobile Mac products. I would be a fan of their notebooks if they were slightly cheaper. Hint, hint!).

Update (4/28): It looks like HP just bought out Palm for a little over a billion dollars!

(Mobile Crunch) Breaking news, fresh off of the wire: HP just finalized agreements to buy Palm for $1.2 billion dollars. [...]

And for all you webOS fans out there: Don’t worry — it doesn’t look like the platform is going anywhere just yet. It appears that the companies plan to continue the development of webOS, leveraging HP to “rapidly accelerate the growth” of the platform.

HP has seemingly been lightening their efforts in the pocketable mobile space lately — but with the iPAQ line and countless Pocket PC handsets behind them, they’re by no means strangers to it.

This is good news indeed as it means that my Palm loving friends can now sleep safe knowing that there is a future for the 2nd greatest mobile device to hit the market! (sorry, the iPhone is 1st!)

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When the iPad was first revealed to the world I was very disappointed.

The lack of camera, flash and multitasking made the device less appealing in my eyes, making to look elsewhere (with the HP TouchSmart and WePad being top contenders–and no, I would never by a Joo Joo after they screwed over Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, but that is another story).

Fortunately, wiser geeks than I have remedied these issues, making the iPad gloriously awesome again.

No Camera for me? Think again.

Forget Apple’s camera connection kit. I would never buy something like that, mainly because its for taking pictures or video on a digital camera, which I’ve (unfortunately) come to loathe due to Apple’s iPhone.

Instead, I can simply upload images to either Flickr or Picasa, and download them to the iPad.

Video is a little bit trickier, but I’m hoping the KnockingLive will be able to remedy that for me in a few weeks. (hint, hint!)

Sudden Flash Backs

The only reason I was upset about the lack of Flash for the iPad was the fact that services like Hulu would not work for me (since their ads are in flash and no flash equals no cash).

Thanks to the boys and girls at Google (hat tip: TechCrunch) this may no longer be an issue as they converted a flash game of Quake into an HTML5 compatible game.

More sites are jumping on board the HTML5 iPad train, so this means that Hulu may soon be available plus Facebook videos may finally play in my iPhone! (and everyone shouts hurray)

Lack of Multitasking?

Truth be told the only reason I would want multitasking for the iPad is so that I can play Pandora in the background.

I could care less about instant messaging (as I hardly use it any more thanks to Twitter and Facebook) and those silly GPS apps that broadcast your where abouts globally in order to make it easier to get robbed.

But for the love of geek I would pay extra money or even suffer through a Twilight flick in order to play Pandora in the background (and no I’m not joking–well, at least when it comes to Twilight, as I haven’t seen it yet).

Fortunately hackers may make that possible via a jailbreak. The only trade off is that Skype may no longer work.

Other reasons?

• $30/month for unlimited internet contract free (everywhere else is between $40-$60/month with a 2 year contract–ugggghhh!)
• $30 total for iWork productivity apps verses $400 for Microsoft Office. And if I like neither, I can still use Documents to Go or Quickoffice apps
• The touch screen is second to none. Don’t believe me? Compare the iPhone (which the iPad is based upon) to its rivals to see what I mean.
• Between iBooks and Stanza, I’ll have access to over 500,000 books! It will probably be a million by years end! I can carry a library without having to carry a library! Plus it will work great for text books (for college)
• Netflix and ABC on the iPad! Farewell cable!

So yeah, I’m finally going to get an iPad 3G. Not when it comes out (as I want to avoid the iCrowds!) but I’ll visit my local Apple Store or order it online in late May.

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Geeks: 1, Norms: 0.

First it was getting a smart phone. I couldn’t convince her to forsake Verizon for the iPhone, although she did pick up a Blackberry Storm (which she later ditched for a Droid Eris).

Now she has started her very own blog at Everyday With NA.

I probably need to help her track down a new template (or help her customize a free one online).

Either way, welcome to the blogosphere NA (her real name is _____, but since death, destruction and mayhem would follow, I’ll keep her identity anonymous–for now).

Note: I wonder if I can finally convince her to sign up for Facebook?

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Yeah, so the Apple event was over and I was following the noise via Twitter on #AppleLive.

Before I lay the case for my underwhelming mood, here is what I liked about the iPad.

Books

The fact I could have a dedicated device for book reading is awesome.

No offense, but I was not impressed with the Kindle, mainly because I would need extra lighting to read a book on an electronic device (which is “fail” in my book–pun intended).

Plus the fact it’s in color is a plus.

Images

Seeing supersized images is just plain awesome. Need I say more?

Internet (Wifi/3G)

I know people gripe about AT&T, but as for me they’re 3G signal is decent (note: after I whined about the poor signal on Twitter, although they did fix the issue).

The plan for unlimited Internet is reasonable ($30/month) plus the nationwide free wifi, which means I can chill at Barnes & Nobel and enjoy the latest novel.

What I hate (deal breakers)

Only 64GB?!!

The fact that you get an iPod Touch with 64GB underscores my point here.

Apple should have at least have made it with 128GB.

No Multitasking: Fail

If this feature was included, I would consider ordering this via Visa.

The fact that I have to jailbreak it for that (thus voiding the warrenty), makes it not worth my time.

No Camera?!!

If Apple can place a camera upon an iPhone & iPod Nano, they could certainly place one upon the iPad.

My theory is that they didn’t want to do this in order to avoid cannablizing their iPhone sales. Either way I’m underwhelmed.

Conclusion

While I’m glad Apple released this (as they’re a catalyst when it comes to all things geek), I think I may hold out buying one until model 2.0 comes along (or Mashable gives me one for free).

But on the brightside, perhaps this will convince HP to lower the price of their TouchSmart? Hmmmm….

– Posted from my iPhone

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So basically I had a strange dream that my cousin bought me a Motorola droid which looked like the Motorola shadow (aka the mythical Google Nexus Two) for $5 (the deal of the century I know).

Anyways in order for me to activate it, I had to sign up with Verizon because of some weird contract rules and pay $50.

I turned the phone on and hooked it up to Wifi and began exploring the app store in search of Twitter and WordPress apps.

To my horro I discovered that all the apps sucked (I couldn’t find wpTogo for the life of me), and despite the superior Droid phone (as I had my iPhone 3GS in the dream) I couldn’t switch because the third party apps were lame.

Then I heard a weird sound and realized my iPhone alarm (the scifi ring) went off, at which point I realized I was dreaming and woke up.

Moral of the story: I need to stop reading geek news right before I go to bed.

– Posted from my iPhone

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I just heard the news regarding MyBlogLog, and as you know it doesn’t instill confidence within me for the big Y!

(ReadWriteWeb) Five years to the month after it was founded, cross-blog social networking widget MyBlogLog will be closed down by Yahoo! in January, we’re hearing from sources close to the project. MyBlogLog is a service that shows blog writers and readers the faces and profile information of other MyBlogLog users that visit their sites.

I was never a fan of the service, but with them shutting down anything that isn’t generating serious cash (i.e. their Shopping API, giving up search to Bing!, etc.) I’m no longer going to upload images to Flickr and will probably stick with Facebook or Picasa Albums instead.

Yahoo! has some great products under its belt, some which were kicking Google’s wazoo before the purple Y! acquired them.

But if Yahoo! continues this trend of passionless retreat, then I probably need to find someone else to host my goods upon. Sad times indeed!

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