As rumors swirl around the latest chapter in Palm Inc.'s checkered journey from mobile darling to also-ran, I'll resist the urge to place bets on which company or companies will be making an acquisition play. It almost doesn't matter who buys Palm at this point. What matters is what that buyer does with Palm afterward, and how any acquisition would affect that company's existing mobile strategy.

For quite some time, it's been obvious to everyone but Palm that it would eventually need a white knight. Palm seems to have finally clued in, as Bloomberg is now reporting that the mobile device vendor has engaged Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer.

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Today's KIN phone launch should not be compared to iPhone. Anyone doing so should be whacked aside the head. Microsoft isn't trying to directly compete with Apple's smartphone but cater to a specific customer segment -- Millennials and younger Gen Ys who use technology to socialize with friends or follow celebrities. Microsoft describes KIN as "an experience for the social generation."

KIN "knits together a tight community of kindred spirits...who broadcast their lives all the time," said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division. Bach introduced KIN during an event early afternoon East Coast time. So there would be no confusion, he made the distinction of Windows Phone 7 being "everything on the phone." It's more multipurpose. By comparison, KIN is customized for social media consumers and pulls data from cloud services. "We're going to crank social up to 11," Bach said.

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Microsoft today debuted a whole new Windows Phone experience developed in conjunction with Sharp called KIN.

Billed not as a smartphone, but as a "social phone," KIN is like the Sidekick/hiptop concept updated to fit a lifestyle based around constant social media use, which is made up of four components:

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An amendment to the terms of Apple's iPhone OS Developers' Agreement, called Section 3.3.1, uncovered last week, would expressly prohibit developers from building apps for iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad that were not created exclusively for that platform, using Apple's tools, and linking to no other APIs except Apple's. That "clarification" threatens the existence of cross-platform support for the iPhone platform, not only from Adobe Flash (whose apps can be devised to run on iPhone), and Oracle Java (same story), but also from development tools whose apps don't have to be jerry-rigged to run on iPhone.

Those include Unity3D, the 3D gaming platform originally for Mac OS that dropped Java in 2008 for Novell's Mono; and MonoTouch, Novell's extension of its .NET Framework-compatible platform for iPhone OS. In a notice on MonoTouch's home page, the development team expressed optimism that Apple would find MonoTouch to be in compliance with the company's new terms.

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Adobe today celebrated the global launch of Creative Suite 5 (CS5), the first new version of the company's suite of digital art, design, and development tools in nearly two years.

Creative Suite 5 includes 15 of Adobe's products: Photoshop CS5, Illustrator CS5, InDesign CS5, Acrobat 9 Pro, Flash Catalyst CS5, Flash Professional CS5, Flash Builder 4, Dreamweaver CS5, Fireworks CS5, Contribute CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, After Effects CS5, Soundbooth CS5, Adobe OnLocation CS5, Adobe Bridge CS5, Adobe Device Central CS5, and Adobe Dynamic Link.

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It should come as no surprise to anyone that Apple is not a cross-platform tools company, nor a supporter of cross-platform technologies that would threaten to nullify Apple's baked-in advantages -- only during the years Steve Jobs was not in charge had the company even considered opening up its platforms. So the strategy behind the company's reinforcement of its iPhone OS 4.0 licensing terms, first discovered by Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber last Thursday, is both obvious and unchanged: to direct the course of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad development traffic directly, exclusively, and entirely through Apple's channel.

States the newly added paragraph: "3.3.1 -- Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)."

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Apple has been challenging Google on many fronts this week -- first with its mobile platform, then with its advertising platform. Earlier today, its developers launched the first volley in the battle's third front, releasing the first public code for the next WebKit rendering and processing kernel that will likely drive the Safari 5 browser.

With Google Chrome using a reworked form of WebKit, the Apple team did something that perhaps any other free and open source developer would be publicly stoned for doing, but which Apple might just have the savvy to get away with: It openly one-upped another developer's open contribution.

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Download gedit text editor for Linux from Fileforum now.

Text editors are becoming more essential in today's Web-based computing world. Gone are the days when users need hard-copy versions of their documents. Also gone are the days when documents need to be gussied up with fancy fonts and fanciful page formatting.

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Microsoft has made the right decision to temporarily turn off Hotmail's vacation (e.g., out-of-office) reply feature. Flip the switch off permanently, I say.

"In our fight against spam, we sometimes have to make hard choices, and we had to make one this week. We discovered that spammers were using Hotmail's automatic vacation reply feature to send spam from their Hotmail accounts," Krish Vitaldevara, Windows Live Hotmail lead program manager, blogged late yesterday. I missed the post because of Apple's iPhone OS 4 launch (I blogged "Apple shows developers the money" and "Clash of the titans: Apple, Google battle for the mobile Web"). I spotted the announcement first at LiveSide about an hour ago.

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Despite all the buzz this week that the upcoming major update to the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad operating system was all about multitasking and APIs, the real story was iAd. Although multitasking-deprived Apple fans haven't been holding their breath for almost three years waiting for an advertising framework, the new mobile ad network is infinitely more significant to the future of the platform than the ability to run more than one app at a time.

In many respects, iAd is nothing short of a full frontal assault on Google. While Google's model for generating ad revenue from activity-linked behaviors has rewritten the rules of advertising over much of the past decade, the path for the mobile market has not been as linear. Desktops and laptops have more than enough bandwidth and screen real estate to easily accommodate subtle text-based ads (or not-so-subtle dancing-cow banners) without significantly disrupting the end user experience. Indeed, many users can become so engaged in a given service -- search, mail, productivity, mapping, whatever -- that they virtually ignore the presence of ad-containing boxes toward the edge of the screen. Even if they're aware of them, the delivery paradigm on a traditional desktop, evolved in recent years to a ruthless level of efficiency, is largely responsible for Google's meteoric corporate rise.

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In a ceremonial flexing this morning of a muscle the Court said the FCC shouldn't have, Commission Chief of Staff Edward Lazarus posted a blog entry taking Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg to task for comments he made last Tuesday in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. In recent months, the FCC has suggested the presence of a looming spectrum crisis, citing recent comments from attorneys and executives of Verizon's rival AT&T, warning of an apocalyptic event some call the exaflood. In that terrible time, demand for bandwidth would become so huge that the Internet would literally run out of spectrum like a desert lake runs out of water.

The Commission had been leveraging those warnings to make its case for potentially reclaiming bandwidth from US broadcasters and repurposing it for wireless Internet communications. For their part, broadcasters argue they may still make use of unused spectrum allocated to them, perhaps for becoming Internet service providers themselves.

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Earlier today, Apple unveiled its iAd advertising platform as part of iPhone OS 4. Over the next couple of days pundits will rail about Apple competing with Google in advertising. As I explain in the previous post, "Clash of the titans: Apple, Google battle for the open Web," there is a more fundamental, worldview war underway. Apple isn't trying to compete with Google so much as make its mobile platform more appealing. The right approach is simple: Make lots of people rich.

Apple is building out a mobile platform around iPhone OS and extended services. There are right ways to make a platform more appealing, and Apple did just that with today's announcement. Successful platforms share five common traits:

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Today marks the beginning of the great Apple-Google war. Contrary to what some other people will write, it's not advertising competition but something more fundamental. This clash of the titans is about competing worldviews -- whether the future mobile Web will be about the browser or applications.

There have been skirmishes over these opposing worldviews, but Apple's iAd platform is finally a declaration of war -- not because it could compete with Google's search-based advertising platform but because it provides a better way for mobile applications to make money. Somebody has to pay for all those free mobile apps. Apple will offer developers the advertising platform and give them a 60-percent cut.

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On Thursday, Apple unveiled a major update to the iPhone OS which is expected to reach iPhone 3G/3G S and second- and third-generation iPod users sometime this summer, and iPad users in the fall. While the banner feature of this release is its multitasking capability, the announcement that Apple will open a Web-based gaming network akin to Xbox Live and PlayStation Network has potential to be the biggest coup.

Game Center lets users invite friends to play games, start multiplayer games through matchmaking, track achievements, and compare their high scores on a Web-based game network. This is a huge addition to the iPhone ecosystem which puts it on par with the two major home consoles, and actually catapults it past both Nintendo's Wii and its DS.

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"Subject matter jurisdiction"

Back in 2005, the FCC was defending its right to enforce rules regarding the use of the broadcast flag -- the little signal attached to a digital broadcast that would disable anyone from recording the broadcast. After a challenge from the American Library Association, the DC Circuit made perhaps the first-ever ruling establishing, word for word, just what the FCC's "ancillary authority" meant: "The Commission...may exercise ancillary jurisdiction only when two conditions are satisfied: (1) the Commission's general jurisdictional grant under Title I [of the Communications Act] covers the regulated subject and (2) the regulations are reasonably ancillary to the Commission's effective performance of its statutorily mandated responsibilities."

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