This weekend, I entered my sixth month of Palm Pre ownership. Back in June, both James and I purchased a Pre and walked away with good impressions. It’s been a solid and fun ride so far, but I’m regretfully putting my Palm Pre on notice. I’m going to give the webOS platform another few months to mature. If it doesn’t happen, I suspect I’ll either eat the early termination fee or I’ll add a different phone entirely to my Sprint account. I like the device very much, but I’m routinely carrying two phones because the platform isn’t where it needs to be for me. Many Pre owners are thrilled with their Pre and I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t be. I’m looking specifically at my needs — and they’re not yet met with the Pre. Why is that?

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It’s time to let off a little steam about something I keep seeing over and over on the Interwebs. The growth of the subsidized netbook segment regularly has someone chime in that the “$300 netbook” is really a “$2,000 netbook” due to the cost of the data plan over two years. I understand the logic, but I’m going to call it for what it is — fuzzy math.

The fact of the matter is that the data plan is a separate item from the netbook, no matter the subsidy. Sure the carrier will knock off a few hundred dollars so you’ll buy the netbook, but the real product they are selling is the data plan. Subsidy or no, netbook or notebook, if you don’t need a two-year data plan then don’t buy it. If the data plan is important to your work or other need, then get it and view the netbook as a throw-in on that deal.

What most fuzzy mathematicians fail to note is that carriers will let you move the data plan to any other device, even if you bought a netbook from them. You can move the plan to a “full” notebook down the road if you decide the netbook is too restrictive. You can move the plan to one of those fancy MiFi devices, or even a USB modem. It’s your data plan for two years and you can do what you want with it (except cancel it without penalty).

So don’t buy a data plan to get a cheap subsidized netbook — they are all cheap already. Buy a data plan because that’s what you need, and if you get the cheap netbook so be it. It’s still a cheap netbook — not a four figure netbook no matter what anyone says.

The timing of news from Cupertino is eerie. They’re shouting from the rooftops that over two billion apps have been downloaded to the over 50 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices sold. Obviously, when we recorded our latest podcast a few days ago, we had no idea that Apple would hit these numbers today. But we focused our entire show on Windows Mobile — what was once a leader in the smartphone space. And I have to wonder: why isn’t Microsoft sharing the numbers of available applications for its platform?

See, that’s one of the common responses I get when I talk about Microsoft becoming a potential “also-ran” to Apple, Google and Research in Motion. Folks defend the platform passionately with quotes like “I can install any third party app on my Windows Mobile device and there are tens of thousands of them out there.” Or “Windows Mobile currently has every single other platform beat hands-down in terms of app library due to its long history.” Good points. Apple says there are now 85,000 applications in their store, but I really have no idea how that compares to the Windows Mobile space. Nor do any other consumers.

I know that I’ve used a fair share of third-party applications during my WinMo days. Some of them were outstanding and I’d load ‘em up on every WinMo handset I had. And I suspect that many of you have felt the same joy about certain programs in the past. So why then, isn’t Microsoft defending Windows Mobile in this regard? I’m sure it’s difficult to determine the exact number of applications available for Windows Mobile since there isn’t yet a centralized place to find them, but even an estimate would be handy, no?

Sorry for the mini-rant here, but I still don’t get the appeal of femtocells. These are the “mini cell tower” devices offered by carriers in order to provide good signal coverage at home for your cellular phone. Today, AT&T became the last of the big four U.S. carriers to offer such a device (at least in a limited trial) and Engadget Mobile says customers will pay $19.95 a month for unlimited calling through the femtocell. Sounds great, right? Let’s dig a little deeper into what a femtocell actually does before you sign up for a monthly commitment.

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This morning I read a Forbes article entitled “Intel’s Not-So-Mighty Atom” and I walked away scratching my head in confusion. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not so sure that I’m the one that’s confused. Lee Gomes takes the approach of identifying how the Atom processor “isn’t up to the demands placed on it by a full-fledged Windows Vista computer doing business in today’s Web world.” I agree with Lee on that point, but it’s like making the point that a sports car isn’t up to being as fuel efficient as a hybrid vehicle. A sports car isn’t meant to save gas, it’s meant to go fast and be fun to drive. Likewise, the Atom isn’t meant to power a desktop replacement notebook.

Lee mentions that the “typical Windows Vista netbook runs from $300 to $500.” That’s an accurate statement, but I’d argue its relevance. Why? Go out and look at netbooks for sale in a retail store or online. Now out of the lot of them, how many run Windows Vista as opposed to those that run Windows XP? I’ve been watching this market since it became a market and I’d say netbooks with XP outnumber those with Vista by at least 8 to 1. So why utilize Windows Vista to draw sweeping generalizations about the Intel Atom and netbooks as a whole? It simply doesn’t make sense.

The culprit, Lee says, is bad marketing research. People want lightweight portable computers with long battery life, so that’s why netbooks are made and sold. My question to Lee would be: if that’s what people want and computer makers are willing to build them, what’s the issue? Actually, is there an issue at all? Last I checked, netbook sales were up and growing in a what’s otherwise a down market for PC makers. Surely, there are a few happy customers in the tens of millions buying netbooks, no?

I understand that Lee is pointing out how limiting an Intel Atom netbook can be when compared to full-featured desktops. That’s not in dispute. But the fact is — proven by those big sales numbers for a market that’s not yet two years old – there’s a place for low-powered computing devices in the world. No, they may not handle Windows Vista well, although they’re pretty capable with Windows 7. And Lee’s right that “games like Flight Simulator are a joke,” but the fact that he even installed such a game on a netbook tells me that his expectations of the device were flawed from the start. It’s simple once you understand what both the Atom and netbooks are for: basic computing for several hours in various locations. Once you have that expectation in mind, I think you’ll find that both the chip and the device are well suited to the task. If instead, you need heavy duty multitasking, high-definition video and 3-D gaming, you’ll have to step up to a more expensive and power hungry chip in a what’s likely a larger device.

How about it, netbook owners? Netbooks and the Intel Atom certainly don’t do everything well, but are they doing enough of what you need on the go?

The Lenovo announcement of two ThinkPads to come available with multitouch capability lends credence to the impression that multitouch is the wave of the future. Microsoft has integrated multitouch features right into Windows 7, so is betting on the value added by them. I’ve been wondering if multitouch really adds much value to notebooks for a good while, but until they started actually appearing all I could do was wonder. The folks at Lenovo sent me one of the new ThinkPad T400s notebooks with the multitouch features, so at last I can see if my skepticism was well-founded. I’ve only been playing with the multitouch notebook for a few days, and I have to admit my skepticism has not budged.

Lenovo has done a masterful job with the multitouch on the T400s. It is light touch, as good as that on any smartphone, and can sense up to four points simultaneously. It can detect two-handed operations; even two people can manipulate things on-screen at once with accuracy. The multitouch feature is implemented as well as it can be. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change my opinion that the feature adds little of value to notebook usage.

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This week Gmail went down and you would have thought the world stopped. The reaction all over the web was overwhelming, and Twitter became nearly useless if you wanted to hear about anything else. I mean, come on, it’s only email, not the end of the world. Now, hear me out before you start railing against what I’m saying.

My email is pure Gmail, so the outage affected me like all the other Gmail users. My email went down, stayed down for a while, and then came back up just like yours. Did I panic? No, I knew it would come back, and pretty soon at that. Did the lack of email kill off my productivity? Nope. I just worked on other things.

Let’s face it, email is hosted on servers, whether Google’s or someone else’s. And servers go down from time to time. It’s a fact of life — nothing runs forever. Sure we can jump up and down and scream at Google, but why? I knew Gmail would come back and sure enough it did.

I heard all kinds of complaints when Gmail went down. People saying that email service X would never go down like that. Or others saying that Google OWED us to keep Gmail up and running. Give me a break, stuff happens. When I was in the corporate world it was oh, so common to hear employees at some large company or another wandering down the halls claiming that “email is down again.” And this the fancy corporate Exchange Server that only has to keep their own employees working. Stuff happens.

I had my own hosted Exchange Server for a long time and while it rarely went down, sometimes it did. The fact is that email servers are on the web and sometimes access to the server (or the web) is cut off. Stuff happens and we just have to get over it.

After much anticipation and waiting, Windows phones get a grand introduction on October 6th. These are the handsets that will feature Windows Mobile 6.5, which was officially introduced back in February. Yes, they’ll run WinMo 6.5, but Microsoft says that “most people who carry a Windows phone don’t realize it’s running Windows Mobile,” hence the new Windows Phone branding. The new devices will arrive on various carriers worldwide:

• In North America: Mobile operators AT&T, Bell Mobility, Sprint, TELUS and Verizon Wireless, and phone manufacturers HP, HTC Corp., LG Electronics, Samsung and Toshiba Corp.
• In Europe: Mobile operators Orange, Deutsche Telekom AG and Vodafone Group Plc, and phone manufacturers Acer, HTC, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba
• In Latin America: Mobile operator TIM Brazil, and phone manufacturers HTC, LG Electronics and Samsung
• In Asia Pacific: Mobile operators NTT DOCOMO Inc., SOFTBANK Mobile Corp., SK Telecom, Telstra and WILLCOM Inc., and phone manufacturers Acer Inc., HTC, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba

Aside from the new Windows Marketplace, which launches the same day, this effort looks more like a re-branding and less of a platform evolution to me. That’s not to say that Windows Mobile isn’t evolving or it has no place in today’s mobile world, because it is and it does. But based on relative market share and more modern platforms, it seems to have less of a place than ever before.

Microsoft Exchange support, always rock-solid with ActiveSync, was the biggest advantage Windows Mobile for me over other handsets. But now most of the major platforms license that technology or offer it through third-party solutions, so that advantage is lost. There are definitely other features that Windows Mobile provides that might be better, but I’m not sold that they’re key features that most people want or use on a daily basis. These days, it’s all about apps and the web.

While Windows Mobile offers a huge array of great applications, it’s lacking natively in the web. Yes, consumers can add a highly capable version of Opera or some other browser, but if they’re new to smartphones, they won’t likely know to do that. And if they already own a smartphone with a capable WebKit browser, do you think they’re going to move to Windows Mobile for a third-party browser? I suspect most of them won’t — regardless if the phone is called a Windows Mobile phone or just a Windows phone. It’s a shame that Microsoft let Research in Motion beat them to the punch by purchasing Torch Mobile and their WebKit browser technology for Windows Mobile. I’d probably feel differently about Windows Mobile 6.5 if that happened sooner and the new mobile OS used WebKit for Internet Explorer.

Yes, I’m now ducking from the onslaught of commentary from the WinMo faithful.

Is it just me or is anyone else starting to get tired of all of these different mobile application stores popping up? I get that different platforms might need different stores, but one per phone platform is enough for me. After LG’s, the latest entry is Samsung’s, which Engadget says will launch on September 14th — but only for two specific Samsung handsets in the UK, France and Italy to start. The two handsets are both Windows Mobile devices and in fairness to Samsung, Microsoft hasn’t outed its Windows Mobile software storefront just yet. But what happens when they do? Why the redundancy and fragmentation? All of these mobile marketplaces are bound to confuse the consumer in the long run.

Aside from the operating system and handset makers getting in on the app store action, the carriers are doing it too. They’ve actually done this for a long time, but some — like Verizon Wireless — are renewing their efforts, based on what I read in Colin Gibbs’s 33-page GigaOm PRO briefing (subscription required) this week. In Colin’s survey of the mobile app landscape, the market looks more diluted than I originally realized. Colin offers a detailed overview of the competitive advantages and disadvantages each player faces, along with the challenges each individual app store is up against for consumer and brand awareness. I still say one platform should equal one app store tops, but then again, I like a neat and tidy space.

Some relationships just aren’t meant to be. Take AT&T and Android, for example. Since the Apple iPhone is a cash cow for the carrier, I’m thinking that there isn’t much chance for AT&T customers to experience Google Android devices in the near future. Scott Moritz at The Street sheds a little light on my thought, reporting that, “AT&T canceled plans to carry Google Android-powered phones later this year.” This news hits just as Motorola enters the Android market at our upcoming Mobilize 09 conference, where they’ll announce at least one device running Google’s operating system.

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