It is probably the story of this year's CES: A team that's down by several points, with time ticking away, coming back to within striking distance of winning the whole ball game.

That's Palm's circumstances this year at CES, as its Pre smartphone has clearly stolen the buzz in every topic of conversation. It's an important score, especially since Apple was perceived as not having a strong follow-up at Macworld this week, and since the other smartphone-related news from this year's show has not been major.

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As expected, Verizon Wireless on Friday announced the completion of its purchase of Alltel, pushing it past AT&T as the largest wireless carrier in the United States. Rebranding of Alltel will begin in Q2 and last through Q3 of 2009.

Verizon paid about $5.9 billion for Alltel, which holds about $22.2 billion in debt. With Alltel's 12.9 million subscribers, Verizon will now serve 83.7 million total users, although 2.1 million will be lost when Verizon leaves certain markets as part of its agreement with the DOJ and FCC to gain approval for the merger.

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If you're the sort of person who likes to save lots of digital photos, video, and similar content to a hard disk drive, and would like to show it on a television rather than a computer monitor, here's the product for you.

The Seagate FreeAgent Theater HD media player, which works with a remote, is intended to work with the Seagate FreeAgent Go portable hard drive. The media player gets plugged into the TV once, and thereafter users can plug their FreeAgent Go drives into the media player without having to fumble with cables each time. It also includes a USB port for linking other non-Seagate FreeAgent Go devices.

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XStreamHD, which offered a promising solution for satellite on-demand high definition video since last year was prepped to make a big announcement today, but something got in the way.

Betanews looked at XStreamHD at last year's CES, showing off its 1080p video and 7.1-channel lossless audio "transport network" for content providers. The main appeal of the service is that it can bring high-quality content to a user on demand without using the internet.

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Intel has given its low-cost Classmate PC laptop a makeover at CES 2009, adding a touch screen and making the 8.9-inch display swivel 180 degrees and morph into a tablet PC.

Designed for students (sorry, Netbook fans), the Classmate PC is reportedly doing much better than OLPC's $100 laptop for developing markets, largely because Intel is farming out the manufacturing process to local OEMs. Intel scored its largest contract in Portugal thanks to the government's Magellan initiative, which aims to provide the laptops to all students in the country. Venezuela is working with Portugal to implement a similar program.

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Dell gathered together a modest audience this morning to make three announcements and then give a tantalizing look at the hotly-rumored Adamo luxury laptop line.

View images of the Dell Adamo up close

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It's not necessarily the PC processor company any more, as Intel's Atom processor for netbooks, and its media processors for CE media equipment, take more of a starring role at CES.

1:58pm PT: Two singers -- Adam Levine and the lead singer of Counting Crows -- both come to the stage, endorsing Intel's new program. Barrett encourages audience members to visit the new site and help fund technology programs for emerging nations.

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You know those dolls with the crocheted skirt your grandmother had on the back of the toilet, combining home decor with hiding the spare roll? Now D-Link hides a network router inside a digital picture frame.

The D-Link Xtreme N DIR-685 includes an 802.11n Wi-Fi router, an FTP server, network attached storage (how much, D-Link doesn't say), SharePort technology for sharing USB printers and scanners -- and a 3.2-inch LCD monitor that displays pictures, live streaming video and other Internet content, the weather, and network performance statistics and gauges.

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USA Today -- which veteran journalist Linda Ellerbee once described as the newspaper for people who find the evening news too complex -- is now available on Amazon's Kindle electronic reading device.

The paper is said to be the top-selling newspaper in the U.S., with a total average daily circulation of 2.3 million and a daily readership of 5.4 million.

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Showing the expansion of the use of flash memory into enterprise hardware, Toshiba said it was developing a solid-state drive using a SCSI (SAS) interface, making it suitable for high-performance enterprise storage.

Flash memory is solid state, is faster than traditional memory, uses less power, and produces less heat. But although it's earned a bad reputation lately among foundries for being cheap, compared to DRAM, it typically has been more expensive -- at least by the gigabyte -- and thus far it's been used primarily in laptops. On the other hand, servers that take less power and produce less heat could save data centers a lot of money.

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If you know the basics of Java programming, you can use Bug Labs' lengthening list of pre-built components -- which now includes audio and four types of wireless, for instance -- to build devices that do exactly what you want.

At CES this week, Bug Labs is announcing the addition of five more component modules to its earlier five.

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If your YouTube video makes a statement, and it gets onto somebody's HDTV some day, is YouTube obligated to make time available for opposing viewpoints? Certainly not...or so you might think.

Since 1949, a law has existed on the US federal books mandating that broadcasters who grant time for certain viewpoints or opinions grant "equal time" to opposing viewpoints. This is the infamous Fairness Doctrine, which is still the law of the land -- according to a Supreme Court ruling -- although the federal mandate for the FCC to enforce that law was officially repealed in 1985.

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Those of us who like to gesture at the television while watching news and sporting events are going to have to watch it, thanks to Hitachi.

This week at CES 2009, Hitachi is demonstrating a prototype television that is controlled by hand gestures instead of a remote.

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Two major CE retailers released news about how they're coping with the economic downtown, with Best Buy doing considerably better than Circuit City -- which might cease to exist before the month is out.

Best Buy released its sales figures for the 2008 holiday season, and there was good news and bad news. According to the Financial Times, though December sales dropped 6.8% in U.S. stores, the retailer's overall business actually went up 4%. The company also said in its statement that its Web sales had grown 34% in the month of December. The segment which did the best was home office -- which actually went up year over year by 6.5% -- and the segment which did worst was appliances, which went down 24.5%.

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Download Windows 7 Beta from Fileforum now (or at least try).

Huge public turnout online for a beta package that flirts with the 3 GB mark, forced Microsoft Friday afternoon to suspend distribution of its Windows 7 beta.

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