Lotsa news tidbits this Wednesday:

Windows 7 users: happy campers.

More BlackBerry Storm 2 rumors.

Nintendo DS: pocket video player.

Apple sued over touch screens.

200 million people use Facebook.

Almost all e-mail is spam.

More and more Twitterers.

Acer unleashes tons of notebooks.

Better broadband? FCC’s getting going.

Word’s father returns to earth.

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What do you do after everybody in the country has already signed up for a two-year contract to get a cheap cell phone? Looks like AT&T thinks that signing them up for a two-year contract to get a cheap netbook might be the next step. The company has announced that it’s experimenting in company-owned stores in Atlanta and Philadelphia with various package deals for mobile broadband and DSL service, some of which involve subsidized netbooks (or “mini laptops” in AT&Tspeak). Sign up for both mobile broadband and DSL for two years, and the cheapest of AT&T’s netbooks goes for $49.99.

The deal reduces the cost of the computer to half of what RadioShack charges for its discounted netbook. Of course, since AT&T’s offer requires both mobile and home data plans, the monthly cost is a lot higher.

The most interesting thing about AT&T’s test–other than the prospect of buying a computer for less than the price of a high-end steak–is that it’s not limited to one model from one company: It’s selling an Acer Aspire, two Dell Minis, and the LG Xenia, as well as Lenovo’s ThinkPad X200 (a full-sized ultraportable laptop). If it likes what it learns in Atlanta and Philly and rolls the offers out nationwide, your local AT&T store could end up devoting a meaningful amount of its floor space to computers. I’m still wary about committing to contracts to get cheap hardware–especially cheap hardware in categories that are evolving as rapidly as netbooks are–but I’ll be interested to see if these offers make sense to enough consumers to make them worth AT&T’s while.

Phones. More phones. Phones that look a lot like iPhones, except for the ones that don’t. Phones that may never show up in the good old US of A. Phones that are full of style, and ones that seem to be devoid of discernible personality. That, in short, was my Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where I spent the entire day bopping from press conference to press conference, learning about new handsets from most of the major manufacturers (as well as laptop titan Acer, which announced today that it’s getting into the phone biz).

I wrote about some of the day’s debutantes as I encountered them, but missed others. And while the show is teeming with journalists who are cranking out a surging sea of stories on all the announcements, I’m not sure if anyone’s trying to put as much as possible in one place.

So here’s a stab at a convenient, concise guide to nearly every new phone I encountered as of Monday evening (I left off a couple of far-off models which Acer mentioned only fleetingly and cryptically). Most of these phones have been announced only in GSM models, except for the two HTCs. Nobody revealed anything about American carriers today, although in some cases you might be able to make educated guesses.

The fact that a spec isn’t mentioned doesn’t indicate a phone doesn’t have it–in some cases, the manufacturers provided something less than full information, and I’m not trying to provide all the ones they did mention (all these phones have basic stuff like Bluetooth, and I stopped short of listing info like their dimensions and the media formats they support). If you know more about any of these models than I do, please speak up.

And one last note: Yes, I know that it’s increasingly tough to judge phones by their hardware specs. In the post-iPhone era, it’s the software that gives a handset much of its functionality and character. I didn’t get to touch most of these phones at all today, and certainly didn’t spend enough time with any of them to come to conclusions about the quality of their interfaces. But even today, specs and other basic facts mean something–and after the jump, I’ll give you plenty of ‘em to chew on…

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Forty-eight hours after the news broke, it’s still kind of stunning. One day, the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld Expo is arguably the most famous ritual in all of technology. The next day, it’s gone–apparently just because Apple was ready to move on. For a number of reasons, I wish it wasn’t ending. But as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber notes, it’s hard not to stand in awe of Apple’s general willingness to break cleanly with the past rather than just keep doing things because it’s always done them that way.

Apple’s move has left me in the mood to question everything about the reality I thought I knew. So why don’t we reassess a bunch of other long-standing traditions in the world of tech–Apple and otherwise–whose expiration dates may have come and gone? Sixteen nominations after the jump; your contributions are welcome.

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There’s something (mildly) magical about the idea of a computer that sells for $100. It captured the imagination back in 1982, when Timex introduced this one. People still call the OLPC XO a “$100 laptop” (plug: we’re giving one away) even though OLPC hasn’t yet ground the price down to $100. And now RadioShack–who some of us former still TRS-80 groupies think of as “The Biggest Name in Little Computers”–is selling Acer’s Aspire One netbook for $99.99.

Yes, there’s a catch. It’s the same one that every cell phone carrier uses to drive down the alleged price of most of their phones:  The ‘Shack is offering the Aspire at $99.99 only if you sign up for a two-year contract for AT&T 3G wireless service at a minimum of $60 a month. (The netbook has 3G capability built in.) In other words, you’re commiting to a total expenditure of $1539.99 (before taxes) over two years to get a computer for a penny under a hundred bucks.

Just how much do you save on the Aspire by signing that two year contract? RadioShack is selling the netbook at an unsubsidized price of $499.99. That seems a tad pricey given that a similarly-equipped Aspire (except without 3G) goes for $380 elsewhere.

My instinctive reaction to the ‘Shack’s deal is the same one I have to almost all ones that involve subsidizing an immediate purchase with a long-term contractual obligation to pay a fixed monthly service price: Don’t do it. The price of 3G service will likely fall, and relationships with wireless carriers tend to be better when you can cheerfully call them up and tell them you’re planning to dump them immediately for a competitor. (In addition, AT&T 3G coverage remains spotty–going online with the Aspire won’t be much fun at all if you happen to be in a neighborhood where you can only connect at EDGE speed.)

Of course, the utter universality of two-year contract pricing in the phone world proves without a doubt that the average American is willing to do the deal, rightly or wrongly. So I think it’s possible that these Aspires will fly off of RadioShack’s shelves. And I’m curious to see if other electronics merchants will roll out their own “$100 netbook” offers.

Would you take the bait?

(Image of TRS-80 Model 100 from OldComputers.net)

This is kinda sad: On Friday, Taiwanese PC giant Acer announced that its Gateway subsidiary will stop selling PCs direct to buyers over the Web and will focus on indirect sales–that is, through retailers such as Best Buy, Circuit City, and Costco. Along with Dell, Gateway created the direct-sales PC market starting in the mid-1980s; for a long time, it was the only way to buy a Gateway, and the company’s whole reason for being centered around the idea that the best way to buy PCs was directly from the manufacturer.

There was a time when it looked like most PCs might end up being sold direct. And at its best, it was and is a wonderful way to buy a computer. Now only Dell remains as a major manufacturer focused on the direct market, and it’s dabbling in retail itself and generally no longer a shining example of the virtues of buying direct.

Today’s news is no shocker, since Acer not only doesn’t sell direct but has thrived in recent years by actively spurning direct sales in order not to compete with the retail outfits that sell its PCs. Only a really schizophrenic company could have done business both the new Acer way and the old Gateway way.

A lot of us whose memories of PCs go back to the 1980s probably retain some residiual fondness for Gateway–the plucky, quirky upstart founded as Gateway 2000 by Ted Waitt in in Sioux City, Iowa in 1985, with the wacky, cow-centric marketing. That company disappeared a long time before Acer bought it–it was certainly gone by the time it launched an ill-fated attempt to reinvent itself as a consumer-elecronics company and then ended up acquiring eMachines, and eMachines’ business strategy. in 2004. But the warm fuzzies for the Gateway name have helped sustain it, even though the company in its current form has almost nothing in common with its original incarnation except the word “Gateway” in its name.

Okay, the cow spots remain, too…