If you have any interest in smart phones, especially Palm-based ones, then you need to read this incredibly thoughtful post from engadget. It was posted way back on August 21st, and a lot of you who actually keep up with your RSS feeds have already read or at least heard about this post, but it is incredible.

Peter Rojas, Ryan Block, and Joshua Topolsky have done an exceedingly good job at calling Palm to the mat on their lack of innovation, and ridiculous grip on past successes.

I have a lot of friends who have Treos, and all of them have MAJOR complaints about their phone, and the scary thing is Palm doesn’t seem to know that they are quickly becoming irrelevant.

I remember 4 years ago when Treos were all the rage. They were an exceptional answer to the lack of choice in the email phone market. Blackberries were great if all you did was email. I knew a number of people who carried Blackberries and a separate phone. Treo answered that problem. The issue is Palm hasn’t done very much since then, and all their competitors have.

There are a ton of sexy, thin smartphones out there, and people would have to be stupid to invest in a Treo now. Palm has to do something, and Engadget is calling them on it, and I applaud them.

Sorry this post is so late compared to the original article. I have been incredibly busy…too busy to blog.

Now that I have all the 3G goodness, I am going to use it with my lappy (laptop computer). I figured out how to do it and I blogged about it in a previous post.

Now that AT&T rolled out 3G in Northwest Arkansas, I tried to link up with those instructions and was unable to get it to work. I just did some investigation on the AT&T site and found these instructions.

I don’t have my USB cable here at the house so I can’t give it a try, but rest assured that in the coming days I will blog about my experience. It will be awesome to spread this high speed bandwidth goodness wherever I go with my aging HP lappy.

This is a comment that I tried to leave at fastcompany.com, but couldn’t because I am not allowed to post comments. It would have been a comment below a blog entry about how Corel has started a new service called Virtual Garage. It is an endeavor to give voice to those who have a good idea for Corel, but with no place to share it, and no one who will listen.

So, I thought I would post it to my blog.

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Here is some user-experience for fastcompany.com. Please, please remove that exceedingly annoying pop-up that asks me to fill out a survey. I was trying to watch the slideshow about Wal-Mart and their new sustainability initiatives, and I had to kill that window at least 4 or 5 times. How many times do I have to say no. No means no.

Great site though. It seems to be very forward looking and in-touch with tomorrows leaders. You really seem to have a moistened finger extended in search of wind direction… Why then are you using porn site tactics?

Keep up the good work, but keep your content in the one window I opened on purpose!

If you have been monitoring my link stream, you will have no doubt seen a link to a story that Sony has once again put a root-kit on one of its products.

If you remember a couple of years ago, Sony started putting root-kit tecnology on a number of its CDs as a way to inflict DRM on its customers. If you want to learn more about Sony and root-kits, do a search on root-kits in the search window right here on the site.

After people realized what Sony was doing, there was a huge uproar in the tech community including some trips to court and some indemnification of users who had their computers damaged by Sony’s root-kit technology.

One would think that Sony would have learned its lesson, but apparently not because it has recently come out that Sony has started releasing games with root-kits! Are you kidding me?

This just further illustrates that Sony could be in the beginnings of corporate death throes. Sony has always been an innovator in the electronics industry. An innovator comes up with creative ideas to address problems in the marketplace. They come up with new products that reinvent the space.

A time comes however when a company becomes more interested in protecting its bottom line rather than investing in new innovative products. This is the beginning of the end.

Don’t get me wrong, Sony will still be around for a long time, but they will continue to become more and more irrelevant.

The artists and dreamers have left Sony. Those with vision have given way to those who are only interested in bottom-line antics that give an illusion of protecting profits.

There is an irony here. Moves meant to protect the bottom-line that are anti-customer will slowly bleed away profits until a company either radically changes or simply fades away.

Sony, change your ways, because right now, you are a nigtmare of a company!