With new device releases and firmware upgrades, Palm is clearly paying much less attention recently to its older Treo platform than to its newer and cheaper Centro, perhaps in an effort to maintain its own existence.

Palm Inc. seems to be carving out a lower-end niche for itself in the smartphone market. Statistics from industry analyst firms have strongly suggested that Palm needs to do something about revamping its platform in order to regain market share, particularly in light of competition from Apple's iPhone.

After making its world debut in New York City last week, Digital Downtown -- a consumer show co-sponsored by the producers of the Las Vegas-based CES trade show -- looks like a slam-dunk to make an encore in Manhattan next year.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Gazing around the indoor exhibit hall in Manhattan's venerable, marble-floored World Financial Center -- and the festive outdoor tents set up by Best Buy and Pioneer in the harbor-facing "Winter Garden" outside -- it was kind of hard to tell that you were in New York at all -- as opposed to Vegas, or maybe even Los Angeles or an exotic spot somewhere along the Riviera.

In an extremely familiar-looking gathering of legislators, performers, and radio broadcasters last Wednesday, Congress once again debated how musicians and performing artists could be compensated by radio without breaking the industry.

Very few rounds of House subcommittee hearings are ever so entertaining that members actually consider the notion -- some not so much in jest at all -- of making it an annual event. Last year, the Subcommittee on the Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property took up a "debate" on the subject of whether the exemption on performers' royalties for terrestrial radio should be lifted, featuring a bench full of proponents of the lift, four more proponents on the panel, and one lone opponent left to represent the radio industry.

With fewer customers nowadays needing or wanting to replace their landline phone, either because they don't need a new one or don't really want the old one anymore, Verizon is preparing to offer a "double play" in place of its "triple play."

Customers of Verizon Wireless will be eligible to add either FiOS TV and/or DSL and FiOS Internet to their plans in order to receive a discount on services. It will mark the first time the company offers a bundle that does not also require a landline telephone plan.

Washington DC-based software company Mesa Dynamics has launched Amnesty Hypercube in beta, an application designed to create an iTunes-like market around Web services and widgets.

Bearing more than a passing resemblance to iTunes, Amnesty Hypercube allows users to assemble a "playlist" of Web-based widgets and allows them to be opened from the desktop, embedded in the dashboard with the traditional widgets, or placed in social networking sites.

Depending on the plan selected, Deutsche Telekom customers will be able to purchase an iPhone at a deep discount, the company said on Monday.

Apple's new subsidized pricing scheme has resulted in its carriers offering the 3G iPhones at substantial discounts in certain cases. O2 already announced last week that it will give the 3G iPhone away for free to those who sign up for its higher-priced plans.

Pulling another big surprise, Microsoft has signed on as a sponsor of OpenLogic's Open Source Census, giving it more access than most to the survey's findings about open source software downloads by enterprise developers.

First unveiled in December, the Census represents an attempt by tools vendor OpenLogic and its partners to pinpoint which open source packages are being used in various kinds of enterprise settings, and to share that information among developers, their employers, and software vendors.

Last week's well-publicized Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices from the Associated Press to social news site The Drudge Retort caused an uproar. Now the AP is calling its own actions "heavy handed."

Associated Press licensee The New York Times reported that Jim Kennedy, Vice President and strategy director of the AP, emerged from a Saturday meeting of its executives with a decidedly more placatory tone.

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn says the deal between search companies Yahoo! and Google "might have some merit," but he is continuing to study it.

In a surprise statement -- part of an interview with Reuters whose full transcript has yet to be released -- not only did Carl Icahn actually hold out hope for supporting last Thursday's AdSense deal between Yahoo and Google, but actually declined comment as to whether he would press on with his bid to upset Yahoo's board of directors.

Though not yet officially announced, reports have surfaced that FCC Chairman Martin supports the merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio companies, and will recommend that the Commission vote to push the transaction through.

The willingness of XM and Sirius to comply with demands set forth for their merger appears to be working. FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said on Sunday that he will support the combination of the two satellite radio providers given their adherence to certain stipulations.

With its new "Party, Black Edition" portable speaker system, Parrot joined a pack of other vendors last week in previewing upcoming Bluetooth products slated to be sold to consumers during the 2008 December holiday season.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - At New York City's Tavern on the Green, the indoor-and-outdoor setting for the Bluetooth SIG's annual pre-holiday event, it was hard to believe that the cold and possibly snowy days of December are only six months away now.

New software for Vista-using UMPC owners could make their portables into something more like what they expected to begin with. However, there may be some hardware out there that won't be so welcoming.

For reasons that may have less to do with Windows than with the limitations of the hardware, the first incarnation of the Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) specification went down with a "thud heard 'round the world." In a serious attempt to revive interest in a computing niche that still begs to be interesting, and so far just isn't, Microsoft is steadily reassembling its software portfolio for UMPC, with a new campaign that this time answers more questions, rather than asking, "What is it?" and leaving the answer hanging over a cliff.

A spokesperson for AT&T says the company is mulling an additional charge atop the standard monthly rate for those who use a large amount of bandwidth.

About five percent of AT&T's DSL user base consumes about half of the total bandwidth, and the top one percent of high-consumers use essentially a fifth of total bandwidth, according to AT&T spokesperson Michael Coe. It is this small segment of the market that AT&T is considering slapping with an additional fee.

After Google and Facebook could not come to terms over Google's Friend Connect service, the Mountain View-based search company has further snubbed Facebook, publicly noting Friend Connect users' incapability to access it.

Users noticed the snub when they logged into the service for all Google Friend Connect sites and noticed at the top was the Facebook logo with a "Disabled by Facebook" text where the log in link would normally be.

Yesterday, competing services Flixwagon and Qik both announced that they will be offering their live streaming phone-cam services for Apple's iPhone.

While neither is ready to open their developments to the public at present, both companies expect alpha versions to be released before the end of July.