HPalm is Official

HP’s bid to acquire Palm is now a done deal. It still isn’t willing to talk about the fate of its Windows 7 slate, though. Stay tuned…

T-Mobile Discontinues Sidekick, Ponders Options

Yesterday it was the Microsoft Kin that got the axe. Today, its a much more popular phone that is riding off into the sunset. T-Mobile said Thursday that all sales of its popular Sidekick QWERTY device would be halted after the close of business Friday. The move would end a six-year relationship with Danger, who is now owned by Microsoft.

It’s not clear whether or not this move has anything to do with the Kin announcement. The Sidekick and Microsoft’s social phone are somewhat related: the Kin was developed with the help of the folks from Danger, although it was based on Microsoft’s code and not the Danger OS.

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InstaLoad: No-Wrong-Way Batteries From…Microsoft?

Here’s evidence of just how diversified an outfit Microsoft is: Today, it announced InstaLoad, a technology that allows devices to be built that can accept batteries in either orientation, so you don’t need to worry about whether you’ve stuck a battery into the compartment with the positive end touching the positive contact. The basic idea looks both clever and pretty simple: It’s a contact unit that incorporates both a positive contact and a negative one.

Microsoft has signed up a bunch of third parties to endorse the technology, and intends to license it for use by other manufacturers. (It’ll license it for free for use in products for disabled people who might have particular difficulty with standard battery compartments.) Oddly enough, it’s not making any announcements regarding using InstaLoad in its own products which could benefit from it, such as mice and keyboards.

Notes on the iPhone 4′s “Retina Display”

[A NOTE FROM HARRY: Here's a guest post by my friend Dr. Ray Soneira, founder of DisplayMate Technologies, whose display-testing products are widely used by manufacturers and tech publications.]

The article by PJ Jacobowitz “Is the iPhone 4′s LCD the Best?” on PCMag.com with lab measurements comparing four high-end smartphone displays is especially interesting because it has the first published lab results for the iPhone 4 Retina display. Below are my own comments for some of the PCMag article results.

The iPhone 4 is 25 percent brighter than the iPhone 3GS, which was the previous record holder, so the iPhone 4 is now the brightness king for smartphones.

Steve Jobs promised a Retina display Contrast Ratio of 800 and PCMag measured 1097, 37 percent more than the Apple advertised spec. That’s very impressive because you seldom ever see manufacturers conservatively understate their specs to that degree – but then see my widely reported (and often misquoted) comments on the iPhone 4 Retina Display, where it falls short on that spec. The iPhone 4 is a tremendous improvement over the iPhone 3GS, which only had a measured Contrast Ratio of 138. But note that the Motorola Droid remains the Contrast Ratio king of mobile LCDs with 1436, which I measured in our own DisplayMate Lab tests.

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The Big Kindle Gets Better and Cheaper

A little over a year ago, Amazon.com released the Kindle DX–an e-reader with a big 9.7″ display and a big $489 pricetag. The DX hasn’t changed since then, but the world around it sure has. For one thing, the price premium over the smaller Kindle keeps growing–it started out costing $130 more, but last month’s Kindle price cut left the DX costing $300 more than the little guy. Oh, and the DX cost only $10 less than the cheapest version of the similarly-sized, far more colorful and versatile iPad.

Now the Kindle DX is evolving to reflect the e-book landscape as of mid-2010. Amazon plans to start shipping a new version on July 7th with a graphite-colored-case and an improved E-Ink screen with 50 percent better contrast. I’ve always had issues with the E-Ink displays on Kindles and other devices: For all their power-efficient, non-reflective virtues, they’ve always looked like dark gray ink on light gray paper…sort of like a poorly-printed paperback on cheapo newsprint. So I’m curious to see how much better the new DX screen is at doing the thing that Amazon has always claimed Kindle displays do: read like real paper.

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Hulu Plus: The Good and the Bad

Engadget’s Ben Drawbaugh reviews the private preview of Hulu Plus, the service’s for-pay, extra-content, available-on-many-devices version. Sounds like it’s neat in some respects but could still stand some polishing up.

Broadband Becomes a Legal Right in Finland

Finland put into effect on Thursday a new law that mandates telecommunications companies make available Internet access of 1 MBps or higher available to all permanent residences and businesses. The move is the first step in making 100 MBps or faster access available to every Finn by 2015, the government said.

The “universal service obligation” would be handled by about 26 different nationwide providers who would offer service around the country. It should not be too difficult: Finland is one of the world’s most wired countries, but only about 26 percent have a broadband connection–about the same as the United States.