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Steve Ballmer is back, baby. The Microsoft chief received a 5.8 percent raise for 2010, bringing his salary up to $1.34 million. That’s up from $1.26 in 2009. It puts him roughly around the level that he was making in 2008.

According to The Seattle Times, “[Ballmer] received 100 percent of his targeted incentive pay. The board could have awarded up to 200 percent.”

Ballmer also received a good share less than many of his peers at other companies–and even some of his co-workers. Take, for example, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, who nearly doubled his 2009 earnings in 2010, pulling in an impressive $10.4 million, according to Microsoft’s filings with the Securities and Exchange commission.

The Microsoft board–Ballmer’s bosses, more or less–praised the chief for the “strong financial year” and the “successful product launches” of Windows 7, Office 2010, and more, but docked him for the swift failure of the Microsoft Kin and the company’s overall lackluster performance in the mobile space.

Great, that’s all we need–more reasons for the guy to scream.

It’s been over nine months since Steve Ballmer whipped out the HP Slate at CES and divulged that there’d be Windows 7 “Slate PCs” hitting the market. It sure was a memorable keynote, but since that fateful day all we’ve got to show for actual Win 7 tablets are a slew of leaked videos of HP’s elusive device, information / trade show sightings of lots of similar products, and the less than stellar Archos 9. Until now that is. A small company, interestingly and rather ironically called Netbook Navigator, has managed to get its act together slightly ahead of the rest with its Nav 9 Slate PC. Starting at $599, the 8.9-inch resistive-touch Windows 7 Home Premium tablet is powered by an Intel Atom N280 processor and can be configured with up to 2GB of RAM and 32GB of flash storage. Yep, it sounds a heck of a lot like your first generation netbook with its keyboard cut off… and, well, that turns out to be just one of the Nav 9’s major problems. You’ll want to see what we mean in our full review after the break.

Continue reading Netbook Navigator Nav 9 Slate PC review

Netbook Navigator Nav 9 Slate PC review originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How to pull all of those high-profile sex scandals behind you? Simple. Hire a CEO that no one’s ever really heard of. Hire Léo Apotheker. That’s precisely what HP just did. Apotheker does have some prior CEOing experience. He was briefly in charge of SAP AG, a German software company, from April 2008 to February of this year.

Apotheker had been with that company for some time, however, having first joined its ranks in 1988.

His own history seems the polar opposite of the manner of scandal that defined his predecessor, Mark Hurd and Hurd’s own predecessor at Oracle, Charles Phillips. Hurd, of course, was pushed out of the company after the discovery of accounting irregularities–a discovery that arrived suspiciously close to the surfacing of a sexual harassment suit filed by Body of Influence 2 actress, Jodie Fisher.

Phillips’s face, meanwhile, had been plastered on billboards along with his alleged ex-mistress, YaVaughnie Wilkins.

Apotheker’s story, meanwhile, is that of a man who worked his way up the ranks of a major organization to become the one of the first Jewish child of holocaust survivors to run a major German company. In 2007, Apotheker was awarded a medal by the French Légion d’honneur. He was recognized for his contributions to the French economy.

HP’s stock dropped four percent on the news of Apotheker’s hire. It seems not everyone is excited by the prospect of HP’s new chief. Fortune reached out to members of the investment and tech communities who dropped such definitive one-word reactions as “Idiotic” and “astonishing.”

You see, Légion d’honneur awards aside, not everyone thinks that Apotheker did a bang up job running SAP AG. He did leave after seven months, after all. Why? He left involuntarily, according to Fortune, after SAP “had its clock cleaned” by Oracle and IBM.

We’re not sure exactly what Kevin Ashton is looking to find inside the back of the Belkin Conserve Gateway he’s holding. As General Manager for the division that produced it, he should know quite well what it is: a sort of wireless gateway that connects your smart meter and smart appliances to your network, letting you capture your whole-home energy usage in real-time. Earlier entries in the Belkin Conserve line allowed you to track and manage individual devices, but this new gateway uses ZigBee to talk to your meter and compatible devices, then turns around and pumps that information to a “cloud-based device management system.” Belkin hasn’t shown us any interface shots yet, so we don’t know exactly how that information will be presented, but we’re assured it will be easy to understand — even for corporate executives who confuse Ethernet ports with kaleidoscopes.

Continue reading Belkin Conserve Gateway will track your whole home energy usage, confuse this guy

Belkin Conserve Gateway will track your whole home energy usage, confuse this guy originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Oct 2010 09:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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