Hasta La Gadget!

Oh dear. Palm investor Roger McNamee appears to have had a little too much Red Bull before his interview in San Francisco yesterday. McNamee is a co-founder of Elevation Partners, which put an extra $100 million into Palm last December.

 

You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.

Them’s fightin’ words, and they remind us of some similar bravado from Palm CEO Ed Colligan back in 2006, before the iPhone wiped the floor with every single competitor: Colligan, on rumors of an iPhone:

 

We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.

Oh, Ed! What did you say? We’re not sure why people insist on doing this — they’re just setting themselves up for even more ridicule in the future. And lest you say I’m just poking fun, here are a few things that McNamee has failed to consider, at least in this interview.

First, Apple has a cachet that Palm does not. Many, many companies have made MP3 players with more and sometimes better features than the iPod. None of them succeeded. Not even Microsoft with its deep pockets and the rather good Zune.

Second, June/July is indeed the second anniversary of the original iPhone. It is also the first anniversary of the iPhone 3G. And you can bet that it will also be the birthday of a third iPhone. Don’t get us wrong — we love the Pre and really want to see it give Apple some trouble, but if McNamee is boasting that his phone will beat out a two year old phone from Apple, he ought to be worried.

McNamee couldn’t stop:

 

Think about it — If you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market. Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy.

Roger, please. These customers will have a battered, two year old iPhone, but it’s still an iPhone. Even if Apple doesn’t bust out a new model this summer, customers can upgrade to a slimmer, faster iPhone 3G.

But the most obvious thing that McNamee has forgotten is the App Store aka the first mobile application store used by normal people. The iPhone user has a hand held computer stuffed full with useful applications, none of which will run on any other platform. If they take another iPhone, they can keep them all, for nothing.

The App Store is indeed the genius behind the iPhone, itself no slouch when it comes to redefining a market. And what does the Pre have to offer? A slide out keyboard, and Bono. Good luck, Palm.

Pre to Win IPhone Users After Contracts, McNamee Says [Bloomberg via ★]

Photo: Jon Snyder

See Also:

• Sprint Could Become Palm Pre’s Achilles Heel
• Up Close and Personal With the Palm Pre
• Palm Unveils Its Long-Awaited Smartphone, the Pre
• 6 Reasons Why the Palm Pre Is Special

When I tell you that Leica is killing its manual focus R-Series camera line, many of you will say "Leica still makes a manual focus SLR?" Your surprise is justified. When I read the press release today I thought the exact same thing — and I should know better.

Despite proudly showing the R-Series on its stand at the PMA show in Las Vegas, Leica will no longer be making either bodies or lenses. All of its efforts will instead go into the S2, the 35mm DSLR sized body with a huge  53.15mm sensor (that’s the diagonal length, measured like a TV screen, and our new metric here at Gadget Lab for combatting the weasely obfuscation of sensor sizes by camera makers).

We’re neither surprised nor disappointed by the move. After all, what was the point of a Leica SLR? For the price, you’d get almost nothing. Compare the R9 to Nikon’s last film SLR, the F5, for instance, and you’ll see that the Nikon gives a lot more gizmos for the money, and at SLR sizes, the Leica lenses just aren’t that much better. Curiously, the cameras remain on Leica’s site.

Leica ceases R-series production [DP Review]

Who said anything about a troubled economy? Austrian jeweler Peter Aloisson has crafted the “Kings Button,” a diamond-encrusted iPhone whose name refers to the 6.6-carat diamond planted on top of the handset’s Home button, MSNBC reports.

The jeweler also remade the case out of solid 18-carat yellow, white, and rose gold. Meanwhile, 138 cut diamonds (all of which are color “F,” whatever that means) form a swirling pattern as they encircle the case and the Home button diamond.

This gaudy beauty makes a great present at a cool $2.5 million, and is the perfect upgrade for owners of the I Am Rich app in Apple’s App Store. I have nothing else to say about this.

Maybe Percival Lowell was on to something after all: A new analysis of canal-like features on Mars offers more evidence of flowing water on the planet’s surface, possibly as late as several hundred thousand years ago, according to Scientific American.

Images snapped by a camera on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a gully that’s about one kilometer across, with a delta-like fan at the bottom. Researchers discovered an array of craters on the delta’s western portion, and suspect that a large meteorite impact scattered rocks to create what’s called secondary craters, according to the article.

Tracing backwards, the pattern of pockmarks led to a large impact crater about 100 kilometers to the southwest. The crater’s presence helps geologists date the gully, which researchers believe indicates water activity, possibly due to melting snow from an older Martian ice age.

“We had hoped to find the source of these secondary craters, and voilà, we found a link to this big crater,” said lead study author Samuel Schon, a graduate student at Brown University’s Planetary Geosciences Group, in the article.

How do you shift music on old-fashioned CDs in a world where everybody and their grandmother (literally*) downloads music over the evil BitTorrent? Why, you make the physical CD worth more than the cost of the music it carries.

This CD, a compilation called "Woman: Sweet 10 Diamonds", is packed in a platinum, erm, jewel case with, you guessed it, ten diamonds mounted in it, each of two carats. It is of course a publicity stunt, designed to shift the regular, plastic-encased version of the disk. Nevertheless, the CD can be bought for a staggering ¥10m, or over $100,000.

The perpetrator of this taste-crime is Universal Music, which is apparently trying to get this monstrosity into the Guinness Book of Records, under the category "World’s Most Tasteless Obselete Technology" (joke, although the record part is true).

CD 1000’s diamond decorations thanks to my wife? [MSN Japan via Dannychoo]
* RIAA Sues Deceased Grandmother [Betanews]