With perhaps the entire company on the line, Palm has one more shot at glory with the likely introduction of an entirely new smartphone line.

12:14pm PT: AG: Cynic one, converted. Hot damn.

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Known for its crystal-sharp displays, ViewSonic will enter (or re-enter) the PC business with its Atom-based LinkPC.

New netbooks are struggling to find the right price point, and the sluggish economy may not be helping much. So $400 is going to be a gamble for ViewSonic, a company not known to current buyers as having ever made a PC.

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At CES, Opera is launching a new edition of its toolkit for building browsers that run on gaming machines, set-top boxes, and other places beyond garden variety PC and cell phone environments.

The "Devices" toolkit -- already used for Nintendo's Wii -- now allows for development of mini-browsers with complete Internet capabilities.

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There's so much going on with Sony this year that yesterday's massive press conference couldn't hold it all. This morning, CEO Sir Howard Stringer is scheduled to take Sony's rebound strategy one step further.

10:43am PT: Stringer concludes with a sad story re kids losing their sense of wonder and adventure as they get older.

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Steve Ballmer didn't mention Microsoft Tags in his keynote yesterday. But the new phone tool -- designed for Windows Mobile as well as Android and other environments -- is slated for announcement at CES today.

Microsoft will enter beta on Wednesday with Tags, a new phone tool developed internally by Microsoft's research division and then adopted by Microsoft's incubation arm.

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"Coming soon," read a mysterious sign in the portable PC section of Sony's CES booth last night. Sony showed 3-D technology to journalists, too, but that "wasn't an announcement" either? Is there more to come from Sir Howard?

In demos and displays for journalists last night, Sony officials gave stronger hints about what CEO Sir Howard Stringer might say about his company's portable PC, OLED TV, and 3-D activities in a CES keynote later today.

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There is, or there was as of Wednesday night, a CES sign in the Las Vegas Convention Center that seems to sum up the current state of the technology marketplace. For everyone's sake, let's hope it's only a sign, not a Sign.

The small-s sign listed seminars slated for the rest of the week in LVCC North. Usual stuff, with SuperSessions and "thought leaders" and all, but there was one disturbing last-minute addition -- a big CANCELED sticker over the presentation on "International Success Stories from the Retail World."

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There are a dozen products on iRiver's CES announcement list -- devices for networking, devices for getting around town and enjoying one's music, including two that are pretty Mickey Mouse.

The world's most famous rodent graces two solid-state MP3 players, the Mplayer Eyes and the Mplayer Season II. The Eyes model is a 2 GB player, available in pink or blue, with white LED eyes that speak to you of...well, MP3s. The 1 GB Season II model comes in 10 colors and, like its sibling, connects via the USB port.

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Researchers at Microsoft have developed software that purports to do what many thousands of starving artists work at daily: write music. But Songsmith, according to its keepers, is all in good fun.

The program, announced Thursday at CES, generates musical accompaniment to a song sung into the computer microphone. Songsmith knows about several dozen musical styles, and adjusts its output accordingly -- selecting a reggae accompaniment will get you something different from the R&B results, for instance. The tempo can be tweaked to be peppier or slower, various instruments can be added or subtracted, and more knowledgeable users can make further adjustments.

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It's only the first set of Sony announcements, but the product assortment at Sony's booth preview Wednesday was enough to cap the evening with something approaching nerd-vana, if you like your gadgets colorful and slightly off-kilter.

After a day of mega-announcements that quickly became paint-by-numbers exercises (environmental awareness? check! tiny netbook-looking object? check? response to Flip videocam? check!) Sony was both right on target and curiously off-kilter. Some press folk groused about having to haul out of the Venetian's meeting rooms and over to the actual show floor, but it worked for Sony -- emphasizing that all the podium talk in Vegas isn't one-tenth as interesting as getting your hands on the gear.

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Betting everything on bettering the bottom line

Compared to AMD's Agena design for last year's Phenom, the Phenom II set will enable more instructions processed per clock cycle, will finally ramp speed up to 3.0 GHz for the Black Edition, raises the total on-chip cache from 4 MB to 8 MB, and finally makes the move AMD said not long ago was premature for Intel: support for DDR3 memory. Phenom II X4 can be dropped, however, onto processors that use DDR2, so it's still a candidate for an upgrade from Spider.

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Its enterprise brands have all been succeeding quite nicely -- Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Office, SharePoint. But in the consumers' mind, Microsoft took a beating last year. How will Ballmer recover?

7:50pm PT: They have moved over to a surface controller that will integrate with the tablet as well as a smartphone. They're showing off an e-ink style mockup as well, this is followed by typical Ballmer comment about how excited he is about everything. Gary Shapiro: "Bill left you a big sweater to fill, Steve, but I think you've pulled it off!" And with that, Tripod comes back on, to play out the quickly vaporizing crowd.

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This afternoon, the One Laptop per Child project announced cutbacks that CEO Nicholas Negroponte called "unavoidable."

The nonprofit project that envisioned the $100 laptop that could be used in even the most remote settings has changed its vision to the $0 laptop, and as such has to eliminate roughly half of its workforce.

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It's Sony's answer to the netbook: its latest very slim P-series Vaio. But even that is taking a backseat to none other than Jeopardy!, another Sony property, complete with Alex Trebek live and in person.

Jacqueline Emigh, 4:39 pm PST: The show begins with Sony Senior Vice President for Communications Rick Clancy speaking, after having been introduced by none other than Alex Trebek. They're filming Jeopardy! at the booth next door.

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The question in advance of Sony's first press conference at CES (there will be more than one) is whether it would choose to talk about its financial condition first. The answer is apparently "no," as it premiered its secret Vaio PC.

But in typical Sony fashion, its late afternoon press conference got off the ground about a half-hour late, amid a sea of reporters. Many of them had been given advance word of the Vaio P series, which Sony is describing as "a new line of high-performance, ultra-portable notebooks that fuses Sony's eye-catching design and mobility."

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