A couple of weeks ago Palm's founder Jeff Hawkins showed off his latest creation - the Foleo. It's being pushed a "Mobile Companion" that you're meant to carry around instead of a laptop for dealing with email, web browsing and some document editing while you're on the go. It runs Linux and has instant on, Bluetooth, WiFi and a 10" screen. The problem is, it's not innovative and it looks like a solution in search of a problem. HP made a device just like this a few years ago called the Jornada 820.

The good news is that the creative juices might just start to flow again at Palm - after all, their last hot product was the Treo and while it has evolved over the last three years in particular, the revolution hasn't come along.

Last week, Palm did a deal where they managed to get two very important things to come together. Firstly, financial arrangement by which they'll get $325M in cash from private-equity firm Elevation Partners in exchange for 25% of the company. They're then RACKING UP another $400M of debt. Now, as we all know, there are some things you just can't get with cash alone. One of those things is creativity.

Secondly, enter Jon Rubinstein, Apple's former senior vice president of hardware engineering and head of the iPod division. He'll be taking the reins as Executive Chairman of the board. Palm President Ed Colligan says "Jon Rubinstein is one of the top engineering executives in Silicon Valley, and he will lead our product-development efforts".

For the last couple of years there's been a bunch of speculation that Apple would buy Palm. Instead, it seems that Palm's bought a little piece of Apple.

Here's hoping that Rubinstein and his new team can deliver some great new products.

PS: If you want to keep up with all the stuff I reckon's interesting in tech and more, hop over to my new blog Pocket Mojo. I've consolidated my previous blogs to this one site and added some more stuff.

Most major technological shifts happen as a result of something new coming along and disrupting the status quo. In the '70s it was the arrival of the PC. In the '80s and '90s it was the development of the graphical user interface. This year, I suspect we'll see a significant dispruption in the mobile phone/smartphone/PDA space with the iPhone.

Apple and AT&T have released three new ads (you can see them here) that really demonstrate what a difference the iPhone is going to make. Now, I'm not suggesting we all fly to the USA to get one on 29 June 2007 when it's released. However, if the usability demonstrated in January at the Moscone Center during Macworld and these ads are even close to the truth then a paradigm shift in what we expect from our mobile devices is coming.

I'm pretty fortunate that i get to play with lots of funky new devices. At the moment, I'd say that the Nokia E65 and N95 are my top picks for smartphones. However, they're not that different to the devices I could get three years ago. They are much better but that's been a process of refinement and improvement rather than a quantum leap in functionality. The iPhone, on the gripping hand, is able to connect us to our data and our world in a way that that, thus far, we've not experienced on a mobile device. It's not that the iPhone does anything that's never been done before. What it does do is those things far better than have been done before.

I'm not going to recite the ads and Steve Jobs' keynote from January. Plenty of pixels and ink have been spent doing that. However, I will say this - the integration between Google Maps, directory services and the brilliant user interface are going to change user expectations in a big way.

There's an interesting story in today's news about the roll-out of a city-wide WiFi network in Philadelphia that'll provide access to low income earners for less that $10USD per month. Access in public places will be free.

Now, this begs the question - why can't Australian cities have the same thing? The short answer is that they can but lack vision. You see, there's plenty of WiFi access in Australia's main cities. Simply walk into a McDonalds eating place (sorry, I can't call it a restaurant) and you'll find a hotspot. However, you'll have to pay for access as it's run by Telstra.

Many hotel lobbies have access but not many of these are free. In fact finding hotspots is easy - getting free access is a joke. What this means is that it makes Australia less attractive for business travellers and has an affect on small business operators. Put simply, I'd much rather sit in a speciality coffee house for a heart-starter rather than visiting the Golden Arches.

One of the problems with the state of communications in Australia is that we've become so accustomed to high prices, slow performance and traffic capping that we not only expect it but now accept it. This means that consumers expect WiFi to be the same. This probably explains the growing market for Mobile Internet access.

What needs to happen? City councils need to take the plunge and build free WiFi networks. There's no need to blanket the entire city intially. Start with open public areas such as parks and plazas. In Melbourne, it could be the old City Square site. Sydney could start with Martin Place. The net result will be that Telstra, Optus and other providers will either drop their prices in places like McDonalds or offer a substantially faster service.

My typical travel pack consists of a bunch of devices - laptop, two mobiles, iPod and PDA for starters. All of these need to be charged and all use different chargers. The net result is that the amount of space I need to set aside for chargers exceeds what I need for the devices. It's time for some standards to come to the fore to make life easier for users.

It strikes me that all devices should be chargeable over USB and that miniUSB become the standard port for all data and charging connections. For example, what's a PDA doing over its proprietary port that can't be done over a standard USB cable? I'll tell you what - nothing. And I know this because a number of high-end devices such as O2's Atom use a regular USB cable.

With the iPod, the dock port might allow for lots of third party peripherals but why can't Apple include a dock-to-USB adapter. At least that'd support charging and making a data connection for syncing. Same goes for Palm wth its special connection socket.

Last week I gave Motorola a blast over the sync software they bundle with their phones. This week, they get a smattering of applause. Most of their phones can charge over USB and even their Bluetooth headsets use a microUSB port and ship with a small adaptor so that you can use one of their phone chargers.

So, my wish is for every maker of portable devices to either provide a USB adapter for their proprietary charge connector or simply use a regular, vanilla USB cable for data connections and charging.

I get to test out and review a lot of mobile phones over the course of a year. I have a standard set of tests I do such as connectivity testing, pushing the battery life and a series of subjective tests such as usability. One of the things I always look at is the software that ships with many of the medium to high end units. Many mobiles now ship with software that allows you to sync your desktop calendar and address book to the phone.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been playing with the software provided by Nokia and Motorola and had two very different experiences. Nokia's PC Suite installed easily and I was able to use the same software, without much stuffing about, with two different phones. Connectivity to Lotus Notes (the PIM software used in my office) was dead easy. Synchronisation over either Bluetooth or USB was quick and painless.

On the other hand, Motorola licenses an application called Phone Tools from BVRP - a well-known developer that creates apps for mobile devices. Like many modern applications it checks for updates on start up and found one. However, for some reason it couldn't find the update it says I need and there doesn't seem to be any other way to download it. I suspect that the problem is that I'm behind a proxy server but there doesn't seem to be anyway to deal with that.

Connecting to my mobile phone is slow and I've not yet managed a successful sync. Apparently, I don't have enough free space to sync two weeks of calendar entries even though my phone's memory is almost empty. I suspect the problem is that the software is checking to see if my entire diary can fit on the phone even though I've specified that I only want a couple of weeks with me.

The burgeoning popularity of the Apple platform adds a new dimension to syncing. Although OS X comes with iSync, an application for syncing mobile devices, it only works on a finite range of devices. Nokia is on the ball and provides free iSync plug-ins for many of its latest models. Other phone makers should take a leaf from their book.

So, given that mobile phones are now used as portable diaries as well as communications devices, phone makers need to pull their fingers out and get their desktop software sorted out. It needs to be reliable, designed to operate in corporate environments and be multi-platform. Nokia, so far, gets a thumbs up from me. Hopefully others will take heed and follow their lead.