Palm Pre Due March 16

“Beware the ides of March.” – Soothsayer in Julius Cesar

You heard it here first. No official confirmation, but message boards are all aflutter with rumors that Sprint is going to take delivery of the Palm Pre beginning on March 16.

Yes, technically the ides of march would be the fifteenth.

The Palm Pre promises plentiful punditry placating perturbed phonecallers.

Sorry, that kind of got away from me at the end there.

New Googlephone En Route

The Reg is reporting that HTC’s new Android handset will debut in the UK through the Vodafone wireless carrier.

If you can’t wait you can have an imported, unlocked handset for around $500. No word yet on what US carrier will get the device in the US. Perhaps this will be Verizon’s big foray into the GSM market? Maybe if they can squeeze a CDMA radio in there?

We doubt it.

Sir, did you know you’ve been drinking Vista?

Remember those commercials where there’s a guy drinking coffee and someone comes up to him and tells him it’s decaf?

On the heels of the – dare we say “cataclysmic” – failure of Vista, Microsoft’s most recent incarnation of its ubiquitous Windows Operating System, Redmond is getting ready to skip over that fiasco and move on to an even newer generation of the OS, titled Windows 7.

Or so we’re led to believe.

It turns out that Windows 7 is simply a re-skinned, exhaustively optimized version of Vista. The product has shed its birth name in favor of one that is not associated with the mediocre performance and extensive, totalitarian security warnings.

And I have to hand it to Microsoft and their marketing team. They really did take a lemon and make lemonade. Windows 7 is meeting with reactions that can only be described at 180 degrees from the chilly reception that Windows Vista received.

Rise of the Smartphones

The makeup of the world’s cellphone population is rapidly shifting towards mobile handsets that can do much more than make and receive phone calls.

The usage of data-centric devices will continue to increase over the next five years. Smartphones currently constitute 1 in 10 handsets. That share of the market is set to more than double by 2014.

For those of you out there who are waiting to see if the mobile web trend will really catch on, this might be the signal you’ve been waiting for.

Get used to paying for your data plan.