Hasta La Gadget!

A new video from Engadget briefly shows off the first prototype Windows Phone 7 Series device from LG. The device is a QWERTY slider with Windows-Phone-7-Series-dictated Back, Windows, and Search buttons below its touch screen.

No firm specs were gleaned from model, but it did have a 5-megapixel camera and dedicated buttons for camera, volume, and power on the sides. Windows Phone 7 Series is slated for “holiday season 2010,” but we’re sure to see plenty more Windows Phone prototypes and models before that time.

Palm CEO John Rubenstein sent out a note to his staff yesterday,
following the release of the company’s disappointing earnings report. The note,
while maintaining the obligatory positive outlook, acknowledged that “the news is
difficult to swallow.”

According to Rubenstein’s letter, the company recently met
with Verizon Wireless in an attempt to “accelerate sales.” One possibility is
the recently launched Project JumpStart, which is employing Palm “Brand
Ambassadors” and Palm employees to train Verizon sales reps on Palm products. The
move has reportedly helped to increase sales of Palm products on the network.
Palm has also increased billboard, bus, and subway ads.

“Our goals are taking longer than expected to achieve,”
wrote Rubenstein, “but I am still confident that our talented team has what it
takes to get the job done.”

Good news: if you thought the current CompactFlash 4.0 storage limit of 137 Gbytes was too restrictive, the new CF 5.0 standard should shatter that barrier for a good long time.

The CompactFlash 5.0 standard creates an upper boundary of 144 petabytes, an almost unfathomably high capacity of storage: almost 147,500 terabytes. One and two-terabyte hard drives are common, but 147,000? On a flash card? That will only be achieved in the far, far future.

The CompactFlash Association competes with the Secure Digital (SD) card, which has announced its own SDXC standard, taking capacity points up to 2 terabytes. Panasonic announced its first SDXC cards in January.

Google’s Android was a major topic at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and one of the companies taking advantage of the OS is Myriad. The Zurich-based mobile technology firm has released the Dalvik Turbo virtual machine, which can boost application execution speed by up to three times, according to exes.

Dalvik is the virtual machine that powers the Java platform on Android-based phones. Myriad’s Dalvik Turbo basically replaces the existing Dalvik engine with a more powerful version, which speeds up apps, preserves battery life, and allows for more powerful apps – like games.

I stopped by Myriad’s booth at MWC, where Gael Rosset, vice president of product management at Myriad, showed off a demo of the technology.

Rosset launched a spinning, 3D cube animation on two identical, Android-based HTC phones – one running Dalvik Turbo and the other the standard Dalvik engine. The cube on the Dalvik Turbo was spinning much faster than the cube on the other phone, as demonstrated on the video above.