Late last week, analyst Ilya Grozovsky at Morgan Joseph downgraded Palm from “hold” to “sell” because he now estimates that Palm has shipped 50,000 fewer units than he had previously estimated they should have. His note was followed by a similar one from Ashok Kumar at Collins Stewart, who alleges that Palm has cut production of Pres because of weakening demand, and who is also bearish on the smartphone maker. Palm’s stock dipped a bit on the earlier report’s release, but the rest of the market saw the dip as a buying opportunity and rushed back in, driving the stock even higher. Clearly, this was vote of “no confidence”—not in Palm, but in Grozovsky and Kumar.

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Snow Leopard may be arriving far sooner than most of us expected, and Microsoft is dropping Entourage in order to replace it with a version of Outlook for the Mac. If that’s not exciting enough for this week, other top Apple news involved antiglare screens coming back to the MacBook Pro, more rumors about the Apple tablet, and possible Blu-ray support coming to iTunes. Read on for the roundup:

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A week ago, Samsung’s Ion-based N510 netbook (Ion is the name for NVIDIA’s chipset and integrated GPU for the Intel Atom processor) became available for preorder in France, and some fancy math suggested it would cost $560 in the USA. The real situation is worse, as a USA MSRP has just emerged, pricing the N510 at $599 stateside beginning in September. This news should invite some serious conversation about the price premium Ion carries, especially since new information indicates the N510 will carry the gimped Ion LE chipset, raising the possibility that the full-blown Ion chipset could be even more expensive.

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A week ago, Samsung’s Ion-based N510 netbook (Ion is the name for NVIDIA’s chipset and integrated GPU for the Intel Atom processor) became available for preorder in France, and some fancy math suggested it would cost $560 in the USA. The real situation is worse, as a USA MSRP has just emerged, pricing the N510 at $599 stateside beginning in September. This news should invite some serious conversation about the price premium Ion carries, especially since new information indicates the N510 will carry the gimped Ion LE chipset, raising the possibility that the full-blown Ion chipset could be even more expensive.

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Laptops are hard to test. Any review is inherently a review of a complete system, because it’s impossible to control for one component, as is routine in reviews of desktop components. So, comparing desktop processors necessitates having one laptop for each processor, and direct comparisons aren’t possible unless the hardware is otherwise identical. In this context, it should come as no surprise that a simple question like power consumption should wait years to be properly addressed.

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Mobile streaming video company Qik has, after more than a year of waiting, finally gotten an iPhone version of its eponymous app approved for distribution via the App Store. It comes with a number of compromises, however, that depart from the promise of mobile live video streaming directly from the iPhone.

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A video preview on TweakTown shows off a new piece of hardware from PhotoFast, whose DIY SSDs have been a barren source of amusement since their launch and ensuing obscurity last year. The new drive sports a new card format, increased performance, and additional features like RAID and a fancy new controller.

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How much are the aesthetics of a controller worth to you? Today Sony sent us a Satin Silver Dual Shock 3 to check out, and after taking the peripheral in question out of its packaging and using it for an hour or two—which gave me a wonderful excuse to play games on the clock—I have to say… it’s a Dual Shock 3, but silver.

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More and more rumors continue to spill out concerning a long-rumored tablet-like device from Apple. Today seems brimming with new bits and pieces coming from a variety of sources.

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Microsoft has finally posted the technical specifications of the Zune HD on the Microsoft Store. The device’s dimensions are 52.7 mm x 102.1 mm x 8.9 mm (w x h x d), with a weight of 2.6 ounces (74 grams). The Zune HD will ship with the following accessories: headphones, Zune Sync Cable, and three pairs of foam earpiece covers. Battery life is cited as up to 24 hours (wireless off) for music and up to four hours for video, but this seemed a little toward the low-end. We e-mailed Microsoft and got back much better numbers: up to 33 hours (wireless off) for music and up to 8.5 hours for video (charge time is three hours when connected to a PC and two hours with A/C adapter), with the following footnote:

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