Now, ailing company Palm is finally finding itself a savior from extinction. HP is looking at buying Palm, and they are shelling out $1.2 billion dollars to make the purchase. From the official press release:

HP and Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase Palm, a provider of smartphones powered by the Palm webOS mobile operating system, at a price of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $1.2 billion. The transaction has been approved by the HP and Palm boards of directors.

The combination of HP’s global scale and financial strength with Palm’s unparalleled webOS platform will enhance HP’s ability to participate more aggressively in the fast-growing, highly profitable smartphone and connected mobile device markets. Palm’s unique webOS will allow HP to take advantage of features such as true multitasking and always up-to-date information sharing across applications.

And if this doesn’t make things exciting enough, HP may actually put off its plans to release the upcoming Slate tablet computer in favor of a tablet computer running Palm’s WebOS. I’ve been watching WebOS since the Pre came out, and I must say that I’ve been disappointed at the WebOS phones’ floundering performance. It’s almost as good as Android, if you ask me. Now I believe that HP is trying to do an Apple and create computers and smartphones with their own OS running on it, instead of depending on Microsoft to release an update.

Would this work fantastically for HP or would it spell their downfall? I’d like to hear your opinions in the comments.

Finally, NVIDIA will unify its driver releases for laptops and desktop computers. This move, expected to be rolled out gradually over the next few weeks and months, will simplify the process of updating your graphics drivers. Instead of waiting for a driver from your computer’s manufacturer, all you need to do is to go to NVIDIA’s website and grab the latest drivers from there. One driver release for all computers, manufacturer-independent. Read more…

It’s been a while since we’ve seen new Intel Atom processors hitting the market, and now we have the new Intel Atom N450 and the Atom N470 processors. How do these new Atom chips match up to each other? Read more…

The lucky writers at Gizmodo were able to get their hands on five new netbooks powered by Intel’s Pine Trail (Atom N450) processor. The netbooks are:

- Sony Vaio W
- Toshiba NB 305
- HP Mini 210 HD
- Acer Aspire One 532h
- Dell Mini 10 HD

Of these 5 netbooks, the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 came off as the best of the Pine Trail netbooks with HD. Read more…

As much as I love lugging around a laptop everywhere so I can log on the net and work in the nearest coffee shop or anywhere else with wifi or 3G coverage. But there’s really one thing about laptops I don’t care for: the trackpad. I seriously don’t understand how trackpads can still suck at this point, when touchscreens, especially on the iPhone and iPad are really amazing.

Devin of CrunchGear has an interesting editorial on this issue:

It seems obvious. The trackpad is, after the keyboard, the object you interact with the most on any laptop. Wouldn’t laptop makers want this object to be largest, most responsive, most versatile thing they can make it? Yet on every PC laptop I review or test out, the trackpad is small, poorly placed, unresponsive, or all three. And the buttons, which should easy and satisfying to click, are often stubborn, squishy, or small. What the hell are they thinking?

Sure, with a little netbook you can’t expect it. But the question is not a netbook question (though to be fair, the reviews linked above are in the low-mid range). This is on otherwise-excellent laptops costing $1000-$2000 that we are finding tiny, low-quality trackpads. There are exceptions here and there, but a huge majority of the laptops out there are, in my opinion, shorting the buyer. When someone is buying a laptop that they are going to use as a primary computer, the savvy laptop-maker would do well to assure the consumer that the laptop is of the highest quality, and not cobbled together from whatever parts fit the bill. The trackpad is the first thing that most consumers will touch, and if they fall in love with one, their budget suddenly expands to allow that love to be requited.

So I’ve been using a little program called Scrybe that actually gives you a bit of two- and three-finger gestures for your trackpad. It gives me a bit of what it feels like to be on a Macbook thanks to the gestures, but the actual trackpad experience still is sucky. Yep, laptop manufacturers, please, think of the trackpads.