Palm, somehow finally managing to glean that the creepy , confusing , weirdly not-relaxing spots they’d been rolling out for the Pre weren’t having the kind of impact they probably had hoped for, appears to have turned over a new leaf. Witness the jubilant, effective new holiday campaign for the Pixi

Product: Windows 7
Manufacturer: Microsoft
Wired Rating: 8

Microsoft’s loyal customers are finally getting the operating system they deserve with Windows 7, and it was well worth the wait.
First, to provide full disclosure (as critics have requested in our previous Windows 7 write-ups) yes, I am indeed a Mac user. But until heading to college, I grew up [...]

Back in November of last year, the location-based social event service Hot Potato launched at our Realtime CrunchUp. Today, they’ve taken what was a solid service , and made it a lot better with a number of upgrades. First and foremost, there is a new iPhone application that just went live in the App Store.

It’s getting tough to keep up with all of the location-related developments leading up to this year’s SXSW, and they just keep coming. Tonight, on the eve of the event, Plancast has just had its iPhone application approved. The service, which we’ve previously described as a ‘Foursquare for the future’, allows you to tell your friends where you’re planning to be as opposed to where you currently are (in other words, it lets you and your friends plan ahead).

This morning Google announced a new Blue Dot feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search that shows whether a product is in-stock at nearby stores. This seems to pose a threat to startup Milo , which highlights local inventory in product search results both on the web and mobile devices.

Most people in the world hear Hewlett-Packard and think “printers.” And who can blame them? Since the relatively recent emphasis on the “HP” instead of “Hewlett-Packard,” and the general consumer move away from printers, HP hasn’t really done anything noteworthy — well, other than thrive despite the decline of the business in which they made their fortune. It’s like the old joke about the bricklayer and the sheep — but instead of drowning their sorrows in gin, HP is drowning them in money in an effort to rebrand the company.