The announcement accompanied a particularly bloody quarterly report, which is perhaps why Palm felt it necessary in the first place—when you're hemorrhaging money, it's best to assure investors and analysts that you're not putting all your eggs in one Pre-shaped basket. This was, however, pretty obvious all along. Palm is a handset maker first and foremost, so they were never expected to adopt a one-OS, one-handset strategy like Apple.

More importantly, when Palm says they plan to expand WebOS "well beyond our [Pre] base," it conjures images of a better time, that golden Treo heyday when a rich line of great handsets were united by a fantastic OS, and the name "Treo" had serious cachet. So 2010 is the new 2003, or something. [CNET]

Kevin also said that Apple has restricted background-running applications because they don't want competition to iChat from third-party applications made using the SDK. The fact is that, if they wanted to ban any direct competition to their own applications, they will simply not approve them for publication and get done with it, without affecting any other developer.

The truth, however, is much simpler than that: Apple hasn't hidden the fact that they are setting this limit to guarantee a flawless user experience, so the core functions of the iPhone are never affected by applications stealing CPU cycles in the background. And that's the whole story, really. Installer.app applications will still be able to run in the background, like many do right now (like Apollo.)

But regarding the video conference, yes, he's probably right. It's logical to expect this from Apple. In fact, most probably the 3G iPhone will have videoconferencing with any other 3G-based video-conferencing cellphone out there, because they use the same h.264 encoding that iChat uses.

In other news, completely drunk sources report that Drew Curtis was heard saying that the next iPhone will be "really shiny." [Diggnation]

"We are making the XO available to U.S. and Canadian consumers as a financing scheme for the developing world, to trigger global demand and government closure," Negroponte told LAPTOP Magazine. He added, "I have, to some degree, underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written."