Today at CES, Palm released their long-awaited iPhone killer. But though the device seemed promising, it definitely looks like they’ll be fighting an uphill battle:

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm (PALM) would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked, then walked away.

Right, good luck with that.

That’s the trouble when your competitor has beat you to the market by almost two years: there’s little room for you to recoup your R&D investment by gouging early adopters.

Steve Jobs fires off some barbs at Blackberry manufacturer, RIM:

Why aren’t CIOs really worried about security? Every email message sent to or from a RIM device, goes through a NOC up in Canada. Now, that provides a single point of failure, but it also provides a very interesting security situation. Where someone working up at that NOC could potentially be having a look at your email. Nobody seems to be focused on that. We certainly are.

That’s meant to be a talking point for any IT professional trying to sell their boss on adopting iPhones in the enterprise. Nice work.

Engadget has some photos of Google’s new Android user interface for mobile phones. Yes, it’s too early to judge it. Yes, the whole thing is Open Source, and therefore infinitely customizable by the unwashed masses. Yes, the thing has potential. And yes, I’m interested in seeing where this will all go.

But in the meantime, it looks to me like Apple can let out a small sigh of relief. Unless they seriously screw up the release of their own programming API, they don’t have that much to worry about: they’re light-years ahead in UI design, which is in the end the most important feature of a gadget.

Engadget has the goods.

Those of you without iPhones may not know this, but iPhones, like computers, get software updates which add features. So far, Apple has released one major and two minor updates to the firmware of the device. The previous one, version 1.1.1 caused a massive furor because people who were modding their devices to work on different carriers got locked out.¹ All the noise about how unfairly Apple was behaving tended to obscure the fact that the update also added features like the iTunes Wi-Fi music store and the ability to double-click the button at the bottom of the screen to bring up shortcut menus.²

All in all, the iPhone is a glorious device that just doesn’t seem to get old. And whenever I start to take it for granted, Apple seeds some new features that get my nerd heart a-pumping again. I can’t encourage my friends enough to buy one at the earliest opportunity. I’ve never had a phone that’s been as useful as this.

Google enters the mobile phone arena. Via John Gruber:

Did Apple announce iPhone third-party apps as an aside in their “Hot News” column (instead of on Steve Jobs’s home court, a conference keynote) in order to get the news out fast — before Google?

I’d bet my iPhone! Competition is grand.