Hugh Molotsi

With all the excitement about the iPhone and BlackBerry , smartphone pioneer Palm has almost been forgotten. Their latest phone may just change all of that. The new Palm Treo Pro has an impressive list of features: A high resolution (320x320) screen, 3G, Wi - Fi , GPS, 2 Megapixel camera with video capture and Windows Mobile 6.1 (although I'm not sure that's a good thing). Unfortunately for Palm, none of the US carriers is subsidizing this phone so you have to pay a pricey $549 to pick this up. Meanwhile, Citigroup reviewed the BlackBerry Bold and described it as a big improvement but not a game changer. Apparently the Bold is plagued by the same 3G connection issues that have been reported with the new iPhone. That's the downside of being an early adopter! We're still waiting to hear when AT&T will release the Bold...

Like many of you, I was affected by Gmail's outage on Monday . The previous week, our family blog molotsi.com was affected by the Sitemeter bug which prevented IE7 users from viewing thousands of web sites included the infamous PerezHilton.com. There's been a fast movement towards " cloud computing " (even my company Intuit is getting into the picture with our Small Business Connected Strategy ) but the Gmail and Sitemeter incidents have exposed how your business can become vulnerable to operational breakdowns in cloud providers. Is this an example of more problems to come or over time are we unlikely to see breakdowns of this scale?

Apple's release of the iPhone completely shook up the mobile market by becoming an instant hit that lived up to Apple's high standards for design. Count my wife among the millions of iPhone owners. The real game changer is Apple's App Store which Steve Jobs reported sold a staggering 2 million programs per day (Apple gets 30% of the revenue from each program sold). All this has me eagerly anticipating the release of RIM's BlackBerry Bold which should become available later this month. Despite all the noise about the iPhone, RIM has been quietly gaining market share and extending their enterprise dominance into the consumer space. RIM makes great handsets which may not be as sexy as the iPhone but are much easier for developers with its solid JDK. It's going to interesting watching this battle of the titans...