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.

From Hothardware:

NVIDIA’s Verde GPU drivers, as they are called, will bring the company’s mobile GPU drivers up to feature parity with desktop GeForce drivers. This is particularly important as of late, because the GPU is being used for more than just gaming. Owners of notebooks with discrete NVIDIA GPUs that wanted to take advantage of the increasing number of CUDA-enabled applications, for example, can’t do so if their notebook drivers didn’t enable CUDA.

The Verde drivers aren’t only about CUDA-support, however. With recent driver releases, NVIDIA has also implemented features like ambient occlusion and included compatibility updates and SLI profiles for many new games, in addition to 3D Vision support (with a compatible notebook). NVIDIA will also be releasing a feature called 3D TV Play, which will allow notebook users to connect their systems to 3D TVs, to exploit the benefits of 3D Vision and 3D multimedia content using the glasses included with the TV. And let’s not forget about performance. NVIDIA’s 197 series drivers also offer significantly increased performance in a number of games and applications, over the old 17x / 18x series drivers. And those performance increases can sometimes make a game that was previously unplayable on the mobile GPU, playable.

I can’t stress enough that I’m all for this. Anything that will make computer maintenance less complicated than it really is, is welcome.

So, here we are, excited as we can be for the much-anticipated USB 3.0. I mean, who wouldn’t be? USB 2.0 has been around for a few years already and even if it hasn’t overstayed its welcome (yet), we’re dealing with increasingly-larger files to transfer and bigger transfer speeds would actually be great. But despite our anticipation of USB 3.0, it looks like it’s not going to stay as long as its predecessor had.

You guys can blame Light Peak.

What is Light Peak anyway? It is Intel’s code-name for a new high-speed optical cable technology designed to connect electronic devices to each other in a peripheral bus. It has the capability to deliver high bandwidth, starting at 10 Gbps, with the potential ability to scale to 100 Gbps. It is intended as a single universal replacement for current buses such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, and HDMI. In comparison to these buses, Light Peak is much faster, longer ranged, smaller, and more flexible in terms of protocol support.

Let me repeat: 10 Gbps. Minimum. It can reach up to 100 Gbps. And the best part? It’s compatible with USB devices.

From Electronista:

Intel’s upcoming Light Peak standard could take over from USB 3.0, company senior fellow Kevin Kahn said today at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing. The 10Gbps peripheral standard was technically built to link up other standards but was seen by Kahn as possibly replacing 5Gbps USB 3.0 altogether in the next few years. He went so far as to treat Light Peak as a finality that may replace any other standard in the future.

“We view this as a logical future successor to USB 3.0,” Kahn told those gathered at the event. “In some sense[s] we’d… like to build the last cable you’ll ever need.”

The Intel fellow also made clear the release plans and noted that Light Peak would only become available to component makers in late 2010. Actual shipping PCs should be ready earlier in 2011.

What do you think?

PadGadget was able to get a sneak peak on the games you might be playing on the iPad once it comes out on April 3. They were able to do some digging in the iTunes web interface, and lo and behold, they saw that Apple accidentally leaked the iPad titles along with the regular iPod touch and iPhone games.

From PadGadget:

We did a quick scan and were able to find several titles clearly marked as “HD”, a common label developers are now using to indicate an iPad specific version of their app. HD is not a universal title for iPad apps, some developers are instead choosing “XL” to denote their iPad version or simply creating a universal build so that both the iPhone and iPad versions are contained in a single app. There are probably many more titles in the database that have been approved by Apple for the iPad that we haven’t yet stumbled upon. Some of the tiles we found are:

- Ammoin HD
- Azkend HD
- Flight Control HD
- Grind HD
- HD Recovery
- Labyrinth 2 HD
- NBA Hotshot HD
- Numba HD
- Plants vs. Zombie HD
- Sparkle HD
- Worms HD

Although the new HD titles appear on the iTunes web site, if you click on any of the links you simply get an error stating “the item you’ve requested is not currently available in the US store.”

I think it might be time to say goodbye to the Eee Keyboard.

Okay, the Eee Keyboard hasn’t even been launched yet, but we all know that it’s already woefully outdated by netbook/nettop standards. Heck, Asus’s own nettops beat the Eee Keyboard by sheer computing power a long time ago. Strangely, even though the all-in-one keyboard PC has been outdated since, I don’t know, the 80’s, but we’re enamored by the prospect of this form factor. I don’t understand why either.

When we talk about keyboard PCs, there’s only one brand that should come up in discussion: the Commodore. You know, the old computers that are compact and economical. Its been past their glory days, but the Commodore brand might make a comeback. Check out what Engadget has to say:

But all that could change if Barry Altman has his way. As President and CEO of the newly minted Commodore USA, he’s spent the better part of a year crawling through the arcane red tape necessary to get the rights to the Commodore name. And now? With any luck, later this year the company’s monumental advertising campaign will have had its effect (“something like you’ve never seen in your life,” as Altman described it to us on the phone this afternoon) and you’ll be able to have your very own keyboard computer with the Commodore logo slapped on for good measure.

There obviously aren’t any specs out yet, but it’s rumored that the new Commodore might be based off the Cybernet ZPC-GX31, which will give it a Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad chips, GMA X3100 graphics chipset, up to 4GB of RAM, a slimline optical drive, and Mini PCI and PCI-e slot.

What do you think?

Engadget has a great review of HP’S 13-inch Envy laptop out, and I’m here to digest the review and present the most important parts for you guys. It’s been called a Macbook Pro clone, and from the looks alone, it really does deserve the title. It has an aluminum body, chiclet keys, even a buttonless trackpad. But how does it stack up to Apple’s premiere notebook?

Hardware-wise, it’s already supposed to be an ok notebook. Just look at the specs: Intel Core™ 2 Duo processor, ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4330, and a 13-inch screen with a 1600 x 900 resolution. The “Beats”-branded speakers actually sound slightly better than in other netbooks as well. However, there is a bit of a drawback: the buttonless trackpad, obviously patterned after the Macbook’s trackpad, is a little, well, clunky. And of course what kind computer manufacturer would not install any crap and bloatware on a Windows 7 install, rendering the usually-snappy OS to slow down? HP does just that, true to form.

Here’s what Engaget says about the HP Envy:

Overall we’re very conflicted about the Envy 13. Hardware wise it’s one of our favorite laptops ever, but the trackpad almost destroys all of that good will built up by the other elements — no matter how great a laptop is, if it’s painful to interact with on the go (without an external mouse), what’s the point? We also have to say that Windows 7 doesn’t make this laptop crazy delicious in any particular manner. It’s certainly a better OS than Vista, but it’s not so much better to make it a huge selling point in our book or a lure for folks who don’t normally walk the Windows path, since many of the traditional pitfalls are still present. All we can say in summary is that we hope HP manages to update the trackpad drivers very, very soon, and that other PC manufacturers steal a bit from HP’s and / or Apple’s in other respects, since it seems to be working.

What do you think? Is the HP Envy worth it, or do you think you’re better off going for a cheaper netbook?

However Google seems to be on a collision course with Apple. After the search engine giant’s Google Voice app was pulled from the iTunes App Store, they responded by releasing the Google Nexus One. They’re also moving in the operating system business by way of the Google Chrome OS (I’ve been pretty unimpressed with it, by the way), and they’re poised to go for laptops/netbooks as well with the as-of-yet mythical Google netbook.

But it looks like they’re also going for the tablet market as well, because we’re seeing a Google Chrome OS tablet in the future. We’ve heard rants about the iPad a million times already and it’s not even out yet, so the Google Chrome Tablet is looking pretty attractive to those not yet fully convinced that the iPad is the future.

So the guys at Chromium just posted some picture mockups and a video simulation of the Google Chrome Tablet in action. Guess what? It can run more than one application!

Check out the video below:

Although I know that we’ll be seeing more touchscreen internet appliances in the future, I still don’t know if touchscreen devices are actually a good deal now or if we have to wait a couple of years more. And I still am iffy with the prospect of an all-cloud operating system, even though it makes more sense with a tablet PC over a netbook.

What do you guys think?

[via]

According to the same blog post, Dell’s move can be seen as a realization that in the netbook market the 10 inch display is where the money is.

Dell is selling the Mini 9 for $299 while the Mini 12 is sold at the Dell factory outlets for about $569.

The lithium-ion batteries that are contained in certain notebook computers were the subject of two reports that were submitted to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission as well as Health Canada. The said reports were said to contain examples of minor property damage.

The batteries affected by the recall were those manufactured between August 2007 and March 2008. Among the computer models that likely contain the faulty batteries are:

HP Pavilion
dv2000
dv2500
dv2700
dv6000
dv6500
dv9000
dv9500
dv9700
dv6700

Compaq Presario

A900
C700
F700
V3000
V3500
V3700
V6000
V6500
V6700

HP Compaq

6720s

The recalled batteries will also have the following barcode levels. Please note that the ^ denotes any letter or number in the code:

62940^^AXV^^^^
65033^^B7U^^^^
65033^^B7V^^^^
65033^^BGU^^^^
65035^^B7U^^^^
65035^^B7V^^^^
65035^^BGU^^^^
65035^^BGV^^^^
67059^^V8U^^^^
67059^^V8V^^^^

It is interesting to note that the last time a battery recall happened, which was in 2006, it began a series of recall announcements from a number of companies. This means that this could be the beginning of a massive recall move from other companies as well.

ASUS unveiled its two EEE PC tablets at the show recently. The T91 and the T101H are 8.9 – and 10 – inch screens that posses the Atom processor, a direct spec link the the EEE netbooks that are probably the most popular laptops in the market today. The great innovation for this line is the tablet functionality allowing a user to swivel the screen flush and fold it flush to the keyboard.

I am quite excited about the T101H not only because of the size but also because of the good looking chiclet keyboard. No price has been given yet for these new EEE stars but I’ll definitely be getting this when it gets released.