Strange New World: Tech Picks of the Week

May 15, 2008 — -- This week's picks are devoted to giant corporations striking back at the competition. Maybe next week we'll give the little guys a chance, but right now let's talk billionaires.

RIM's new BlackBerry is going right after Apple's iPhone. If Apple is going to take the iPhone to work, it makes sense for RIM to send the BlackBerry home. Electronic Arts sees all the money that Nintendo is getting with casual games and wants a piece, and finally Yahoo is no longer No. 1.

This week Google replaced Yahoo as the most visited U.S.-based Web site. Google landed 141.1 million unique U.S. visitors last month, up 18 percent. Yahoo only managed 140.6 million, up 7 percent, but not enough to keep the title. Microsoft actually came in third with about 121 million unique visitors. No word on how many of those visitors were logging on to complain about Vista.

We figure we can just add this to stack of good reasons why Yahoo isn't selling out to Microsoft. When things are going this well, why stop?

This week, Research in Motion unveiled the latest addition to its BlackBerry line of smartphones.

The new 3G phone will be called the BlackBerry Bold 9000 and will run on the new 3G network that all the major carriers have been rolling out, including T-Mobile, which recently joined the party.

The Bold will have more processing power under the hood (624 Mhz processor), so it will be able to run more applications than previous BlackBerries. And although the company would never say it, it has designed this thing to go head to head with the iPhone.

Recently, Apple has been trying to make the iPhone easier for businesses to use within their enterprise networks, and with the release of the slick new Bold, RIM is giving Apple a warning to "stay in their own yard."

The business-friendly BlackBerry is getting more personal. Everybody knows that e-mail is the main reason people buy BlackBerries, and you don't need a 3G phone for that, but you do need 3G for quicker downloads and better Internet functionality -- stuff that RIM never really concerned itself with until now.