5 Best Cell Phones Sure to be Collectible Items

By Scott Moritz, TheStreet

There are lots of twists and turns in thesmartphone market. Occasionally, some really good phones just fall through the cracks. Let's call these The Collectibles -- a handful of phones, years in development, that arrive or are set to launch, but instead they get cut down at their prime or doomed before they reach their full potential.

In most of these cases, it's a sweeping change at the company that effectively orphans the handsets.

For Nokia and Research In Motion, blame a full-scale shift to a new operating system. At Palm, it was the HP takeover.

And, sometimes, it's failure's fault, like in the case of Garmin's exit from the market.

Yes, you may have seen the 13 ugliest phones, but these are much different. Here are five "keepers" that could have been big contenders.

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#5 : Garminfone

The awesomeness of this device isn't the fact that it was a GPS phone made by navigation ace Garmin, or the fact that it was powered by Google's Android. No, the best thing about this phone is that it was the first Asus phone in the U.S.

Asus is a rising star in mobile computing. The 21-year-old Taiwanese tech shop is best known for its motherboards and netbooks, but it has recently turned its attention to tablets and phones. Asus was one of the first developers of a Microsoft Windows Phone 7, but that device never materialized.

Unfortunately, Garmin pulled the plug on the joint venture with Asus after it became clear that smartphones were just a little too far outside the GPS specialists' competency. With Garmin and T-Mobile as partners, Asus may not have had the best supporting cast for its debut.

The Garminfone was discontinued last month.

#4 : Sony Ericsson Xperia Play

The "PlayStation Phone" finally arrived, despite some difficult odds.

For one, Sony Ericsson doesn't do much business in the U.S. Even worse, after the company killed its CDMA phone development in 2003, it had almost no ties to Verizon.

And third, novelty phones are a dicey business.

But after a few years of speculation, the Xperia Play arrived in May.

With its slide-out PlayStation game controls, the Xperia Play lives up to its gamer name. But it is also a touch-screen device powered by Android.

The game/phone hybrid is certainly a niche, and some users are happy to have both on one device. "I get my two interests meshed into one," said one Xperia Play user on gdgt, the technology Q&A and review site.

The Play hasn't gotten much backing in the form of marketing and advertising. Perhaps one sign that this phone may not last long at Verizon is the fact that just a month after it debuted at $200 with a two-year contract, it is now being sold on Amazon.com for $50.

#3 : Palm Pre

Back before the smartphone market was narrowed down to two choices -- Apple or Android -- there was a phone company that sold a very compelling device beloved by professionals and consumers alike.

The Palm Pre matched Apple and Android in touchscreen prowess and also included a slide-out keyboard.

Sadly, Palm didn't have the financial firepower to promote the phone heavily and stoke the fires of application development like its more resource-rich rivals. Palm also didn't keep the Pre fresh. And when telcos like Verizon started cutting back on orders in favor of Droids, the Palm Pre faded from view.

Eventually, HP acquired Palm, but the integration took a long time, leaving the Pre suspended from the market.

The Palm Pre is listed as out of stock on HP's Web site, but Verizon still offers it for $100 with a two-year contract -- your last chance to start your own Palm Pre collectors' club.

#2 : RIM BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900

BlackBerry fans proved to be a far more loyal group than one would have expected. While other phones got touchscreens and smarter application processors, Research In Motion kept cranking out aging Bolds andCurves.

The addictive BlackBerry e-mail and messenger service helped keep people interested and bought RIM some time as it put together a new generation of phones built around the QNX operating system.

But between the maturing BlackBerry 6 operating system of yesterday and QNX of next year is an awkward spot that RIM hopes to fill with the touchscreen Bold.

The Bold 9900 is a beautiful BlackBerry with a full-powered 1-gigahertz processor, a familiar keypad and a gesture reading touchscreen. The problem: Even though it won't arrive until later this summer, it's already been eclipsed by the promise of fully-functioning QNX devices next year.

The Bold 9900: destined to be a lovely end-of-the-line.

#1 : Nokia N9

Soon after Nokia picked the MeeGo operating system as its next direction, MeeGo became a no go.

Well, almost.

When Nokia jumped from its burning platform to start developing phones usingMicrosoft's Windows 7 software, it didn't completely abandon the MeeGo effort. Some of Nokia's brightest minds kept working to deliver a new generation of MeeGo-powered phones to compete with Apple and Android.

Recently, Nokia introduced the N9 MeeGo phone, a finely-sculpted touchscreen device that could have kept the Finnish phone titan on top of the phone market had it arrived a couple years ago.

But as it stands, the N9 sales launch will be overshadowed by the Sea Ray and other Windows Phone 7 devices coming from Nokia later this year and next.

Collectors will probably call the N9 the best pure Nokia phone of all time. Too bad Nokia investors can't take that to the bank. 

Microsoft revenues hit a record as Xbox sales inch upwards

The US technology giant Microsoft said its annual revenues hit a record of $70b.

Sales of the company's Xbox 360 video-game console and its Office software helped fuel the growth.

Net income at the world's biggest software maker jumped 23% to 23.15b for the year.

The figures, which beat earnings estimates, also showed final quarter revenues reached a record high of $1.37b, leading to profits of $5.87b.

Sales rose 8% to $17.37 billion, a boosted chiefly by sales of Office, Xbox and server software behind Microsoft's push into cloud computing.

Microsoft's business division, which sells the Office suite of programs, including Outlook, SharePoint and Excel, was the company's biggest seller in the quarter, increasing sales by 7% to $5.8b.

The company's online services unit, which runs the Bing search engine and MSN internet portal, increased sales by 16.5% to $662m, but saw losses increase to $728m as it struggles to fight competitor Google.

One weaker spot was sales of its widely-used Windows product, which are slowing as tablet PC sales eat into demand for traditional PCs.

Earlier this week, chipmaker Intel warned that PC sales would not be as strong as it had expected this year.

Microsoft is itself expected to enter the tablet market next year with the launch of its next operating system, code-named Windows 8, which will be compatible with the low-power chips commonly used by tablet and mobile phone makers.

Microsoft is the latest technology company to exceed profit expectations.

Google, Apple and IBM all reported strong earnings recently.

Source: Silicon Valley Technology News

Are You a Position or Pivotal Player?

NETSHARE CEO Katherine E. Simmons 

It’s baseball season, and for the record, I am not crazy about sports analogies, but I was struck by the wisdom of this recent blog post from Auren Huffman, CEO of Rapleaf, about Position Players Versus All-Around Athletes.

As Huffman writes:

“Hiring managers face a dilemma similar to coaches: Should you hire someone who's really good at one particular thing - or someone who is more of an all-around player?”

Conventional wisdom from our career coaches indicates that you need to address a prospective employer’s immediate point of pain. Their point is that to get the right attention from the hiring manager, you either have to be able to save the company money, make the company money, or address some other immediate need. That would make you a position player in Huffman’s view.

But what about the company that has multiple points of pain and has limited hiring capacity. Should you try to sell yourself on your greatest strengths, or show that you have multiple talents that can be of value as the company grows?

Huffman, who among other things is an angel investor, notes that whether you are looking to hire a position player or an all-around athlete depends on where you are in the evolution of your team. If you are in “scaling mode” and have a three-year plan, then you know where the holes are in your lineup and looking for top performers with the specific expertise you need makes sense. He uses the example of an ad agency looking for a solid player in Web marketing. Like recruiting a catcher or a place kicker, it’s a highly specialized role and an expert won’t come cheap, but it will help with the firm’s growth strategy.

However, what if your company is a startup or in transition? Then you are in “change mode” which means you need pivotal players who can roll with the changes. If you are a tech startup, for example, you may find yourself targeting different markets. What starts out as an ideal software application for financial services may find a strong role in pharmaceuticals, so hiring a sales executive with a financial services Rolodex may not help your business grow when you need to. This is when hiring all-around athletes makes more sense. As Huffman puts it:

“While hiring position players will significantly increase the chance of success for your current model, it gives you little room to pivot. Any significant change in your business model might force you to swap out your team.”

So what does this mean for you as an executive job seeker? It means you have more homework to do. You need to assess where your target company is in their own development. Are they a more mature company with a game plan that requires your specialized expertise? Or are they in transition, which means you can bring multiple skills to the table to help the company grow?

The other question you need to ask yourself is do you work better as a position player or a pivotal player? 

Can you command the job and salary you want with niche expertise that really hits the sweet spot of a company with a well-thought-out growth strategy? Or do you prefer the challenge of being more of a generalist, and adapting your skills to meet the changing needs of the company? Either way, you need to make sure that your personal brand and your executive marketing documents highlight your expertise, and you approach the right kind of company that is either building their squad from scratch or looking for the expertise to extend their long game.

Katherine E. Simmons is President and CEO of NETSHARE, Inc.

Rupert Murdoch: From Bad to Worse?

MPC Paul Stephenson (L) & AC John Yates resigned over the scandal

By Frederick E. Allen - Forbes 

Here is how British journalists watching Rupert Murdoch's testimony before Parliament are reacting today. Granted, they work for competitors that might be happy to see News Corp and its newspapers suffer, but they know the story of the ever-widening News Corp scandals better than anyone.
Dan Sabbagh, at The Guardian:

The great old man of newspapers looked hopelessly out of touch in the early stages of the father-and-son grilling in front of MPs today. There were the marathon pauses; the one-word answers; the look, again and again of mystification. He tried, several times, to defer to [his son] James, who clearly had plenty of answers at his fingertips. His hand beat the desk several times to emphasise the occasional long answer. But above all, Rupert Murdoch knew nothing about phone hacking – and he didn't look like he was acting either.

  Tony Harnden, of The Telegraph:

He gives the impression of knowing nothing and having decided to just wing it – repeatedly saying he has never heard of key characters and issues involved in the phone hacking scandal. . . . One minute monosyllabic, the next minute sarcastic and dismissive, banging the table and cantankerous throughout – it’s hard to imagine an approach that could elicit less sympathy. . . .

It’s extremely difficult to takeRupert Murdoch’sappearance at face value. The man whois legendarily hands on and runs a global empire that, he said, employs 53,000 people (of which the News of the World represented one percent, he pointed out) is surely not a senile old dodderer who was blissfully aware that dark arts being practiced by his journalists.

 Andrew Sullivan:

Murdoch refuses to take any responsibility for the affair. Again: staggering. The notion of the buck stopping at the top seems completely alien to him. The total lack of interest in correcting wrongs, the blithe assurance that he has no ultimate responsibility - the NOTW [News of the World] representing a mere 1 percent of his company. . . .

Even though this corporation had evidence itself of criminality, no one knew of it; and when the police investigated, the review was a couple of hours. The whole thing stinks to heaven.

And as for the board of Murdoch's company, Andrew Ross Sorkin, inThe New York Times, quotes Nell Minow, a member of the board of GovernanceMetrics International and founder of the Corporate Library, a governance consultancy, as saying, "This is a board that qualifies for an ‘F’ in every category. It is the ultimate crony board.”

As Andrew Sullivan puts it, "It looks bleaker and bleaker for News Corp to me."

And this just in, according to Sullivan: Someone has tried to physically attack Murdoch at the hearings and has been taken away in handcuffs.

Addendum: A friend points out that Andy Borowitz has given this explanation for Murdoch's ignorance of his company's activities:

Now, I’m sure many of you are wondering, how could I, Rupert Murdoch, one of the most powerful men in the world, have no idea what is going on?  The answer, my friends, is simple: I get all of my information from my own newspapers.  If you relied on News of the World, The Sun, and The New York Post for your information, I can assure you that you wouldn't have a clue what was going on, either.

In Pictures: Japan defeats the US to win women's World Cup

Japan fans celebrate on a street in Tokyo [Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters]

The Japanese are World Champions [Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters]

Japanese players celebrate [Christof Stache/AFP]

The US lost 3-1 on penalty kicks [Christof Stache/AFP]

US goalkeeper Hope Solo dives in vain for the ball [Patrik Stollarz/AFP]

Alex Morgan of the US celebrates goal against Japan [Ralph Orlowski/Reuters]

Japan's goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori in action [Johannes Eisele/AFP]

Homare Sawa (R) of Japan challenges Carli Lloyd of the US [Alex Domanski/Reuters]

Japan's Saki Kumagai and USA's Carli Lloyd (2nd R) vie for the ball [Johannes Eisele/AFP]

       US fans gear up for the game [Christof Stache/AFP]

The excitement was high prior to the match [Johannes Eisele/AFP]

This is not Ronald Reagan's GOP

Forget the Grand Old Party. Today's maddening, intransigent GOP is a Gang of Purists

This was the week when the grand bargain on the debt ceiling all but died, when Republicans opted to continue impaling themselves on the hook of the Paul Ryan plan — because they really do want to voucherize and destroy Medicare.

House Speaker John Boehner, who had proposed the grand bargain, which the president then advanced in negotiations with both parties, abruptly abandoned it as his caucus rebelled and Majority Leader Eric Cantor schemed a coup to depose him.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who may care about the country but surely understands political strategy, then offered another path out of the box canyon into which Republicans have backed themselves — where they face the prospect of being blamed for collapsing the full faith and credit of the United States, cutting off Social Security checks, and perhaps shattering the national and global economies. McConnell's was a clever and cynical tactic: Give the president the authority to raise the debt limit in three tranches — any one of which Congress could override with a two-thirds majority in both houses — so Democrats would have to cast three votes for higher debt while Republicans could enjoy three votes against it and reinforce a campaign message. McConnell was supported by The Wall Street Journal — which is conservative, not crazy — but scorned by tea-baggers in and out of Congress who live in their own private fiscal world, which bears about as much relationship to economics as creationism does to science. Playing to the extremists, the lupine Cantor then escalated the confrontation by concocting a fable that the president stomped out of the debt talks at the White House; in fact, Obama had rejected Cantor's demands and the session was ending for the day. The president does live and work in the White House — much as Cantor and his ilk can't abide that — and as a matter of course, leaves when a meeting concludes.

Those who hate the government can't run the government — except into the ground.

This cheap attempt to make Obama look bad was too transparent to convince anyone other than Cantor's peanut gallery. But the episode and the entire course of events over the past week reveal the fundamentally misshapen character of today's Republican Party. It is not a governing party: As I've observed before, those who hate the government can't run the government — except into the ground.

Meanwhile, the GOP's presidential candidates are eagerly embracing — or being compelled to coddle — a far-out agenda. Most of them may be rooting for default, and some are claiming, incredibly, that it would be no big deal. (Maybe they should consult former Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson about the crash of Lehman Brothers before they invite the mother of all financial crises.) And the only Republican presidential contenders who might have a plausible chance — Mitt Romney, and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman — are regarded with suspicion in their own ranks, less now for their Mormon religion than for the sin of occasionally looking reasonable. Indeed, this was also the week when two different polls showed Michele Bachman leading Romney in Iowa — by three or thirteen points — while other Republicans were longing for the candidacy of secession-friendly Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

The dominant forces in today's GOP not only propose to roll back the history of the past 75 years; they have also betrayed their own history. They are not the Grand Old Party as we have known it; they are the Gang Of Purists — bent on the politics of polarization, their more sensible leaders held hostage to the threat of defenestration in the next round of primary contests. They invoke Ronald Reagan as their hero, but they are the real RINOs: Reaganites In Name Only. Indeed, they are out of step with every Republican president from Richard Nixon to yes, even George W. Bush, whom they openly disdain after giving him lock-step support while he was in office.

Nixon himself was a polarizing figure — in part because of the Vietnam War, and then because of the paranoia which impelled him to "high crimes and misdemeanors." But there was another Nixon, too, one who was ready to bargain and move — at least on domestic issues — whether his motive was political advantage or the merits of policy making.

When George McGovern and Edward Kennedy took up the issue of hunger in America, Nixon sent Congress a message calling for decisive action. By the end of his foreshortened term, he had expanded the number of Americans receiving food stamps from 3 million to 16 million.

When Edmund Muskie and Scoop Jackson, other senators who were rivals to Nixon's re-election, took up the issue of the environment, the president at first held back, but then advocated and signed landmark legislation, including the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

Nixon had campaigned in 1968 on the Southern Strategy that exploited the region's resentments against civil rights and desegregation. But once in the Oval Office, he instituted the Philadelphia Plan, the first major federal program for affirmative action, and the progenitor of a host of similar initiatives.

These may not have been his priorities, but they were an essential part of a process of governing — and electoral maneuvering — that preempted or compromised with the other party. The process was an expression of the post-New Deal settlement in which Republicans and Democrats differed on the scope and reach of government, but more often than not found answers, somewhere in between, to pressing national problems. Thus it was Richard Nixon, working with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who proposed a guaranteed national income.

All this, I suggest, and not just Watergate, is primarily why contemporary Republicans never refer to a Nixon legacy. Instead they have Reagan, who certainly sounded like a break with the post-New Deal settlement, although he was an old New Dealer himself, and quoted FDR in his 1980 acceptance speech for the Republican nomination.

Reagan got something else from Roosevelt, too — a streak of pragmatism that tempered and sometimes confounded his conservative ideology. He cut taxes, but when economic reality set in, signed two tax increases that together were the largest in peacetime history. He advocated a balanced budget constitutional amendment, but ran deficits every year of his term — during which federal spending was higher than its 40-year average. And he repeatedly raised the federal debt ceiling — a no-brainer to presidents of both parties.

Reagan denounced the "evil empire," then made peace with the Soviets. After his compact with Tip O'Neill to save Social Security, he joined with Democrats Bill Bradley and Dick Gephardt to close loopholes and enact tax reform, and with Ted Kennedy to pass the 1986 immigration reform that provided amnesty and a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants who had entered the United States before 1982.

Reagan was undoubtedly a conservative, but he was ready to make the system and the country work. "Facts," he famously said, "are stubborn things" — and he responded to them. You don't have to agree with all he did to recognize that his leadership was not a relentless exercise in heedless ideology.

Of course, the Republicans of 2011 willfully refuse to comprehend that; they worship the icon of a one-dimensional Reagan who never existed. With equal fervor, they regret the apostasy of the first George Bush, who betrayed the promise which helped him defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988: When we read his lips two years later, he was accurately and correctly saying that it was time for new taxes. As a result, he was challenged for re-nomination by Pat Buchanan, who was pouring rhetorical tea before there was a tea party. Bush's decision, combined with Bill Clinton's 1994 economic plan which passed the House without one Republican vote, gave America a decade of record job growth and a balanced budget for the first time in a generation.

Bush I not only negotiated with congressional Democrats on taxes, but made the prudent decision during the Gulf War to stop short of marching to Baghdad and occupying Iraq. For the latter, he was assailed by the neo-cons.  And both offenses were things Bush II was determined not to repeat. He mired the nation in a needless war and locked his party into intransigent posturing on taxes — which, along with his end-term recession, are the principal contributors to today's deficits. But with this Bush, too, some of the pragmatism remained. For example, he negotiated with Kennedy to achieve a second round of immigration reform — and in the face of potential economic catastrophe and in defiance of Republican dogma, accepted and then pushed through the 2008 TARP bailouts that averted the immediate and wholesale devastation of global finance.

But over time, the rhetoric on the Right has overcome the realities that impelled presidents on the Right to modulate their positions in the national interest. Thus, John McCain had to renounce his own record to secure the GOP nomination in 2008 and then salvage his own Senate seat two years later. The bitter reaction against Obama, who in critical times has compromised again and again in pursuit of bipartisan progress, has been amplified and disgraced by the caricatures of Obama as "the other," a "socialist," "un-American" — and by an almost-spoken racist revolt against the first African-American president.

On the most pressing questions, America needs two major parties that can hammer out solutions together. They may and will campaign hard against each other — and sometimes with brutal unfairness. But as Ronald Reagan said, "When the battle's over and the ground is cool, you see the other general's valor" — and we ask what all of us "can do for our country."

Today's GOP is something very different. It's not the party of Reagan, or Nixon or Bush — and certainly not Theodore Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower. And while fear and irrepressible fact in the last moments will probably extract a debt ceiling increase in some form, but probably not a grand bargain like the Reagan-O'Neill deal on Social Security, the Gang of Purists will promptly return to their new and angry incarnation as the party of no.

Eric Cantor has become the pinched face of this pseudo-Republican Party. And John Boehner embodies the fear of so many of its leaders and members that they could be so easily consigned to the fires of unreason. No wonder he leaves every negotiating session on the debt limit and chain smokes as he climbs into the limo that Cantor covets.

Source:  TheWeek.com

Actually, then candidate Obama did not misstate mother's struggle with healthcare coverage

By The Editor-in-Chief

According to a new book written by Janny Scott titled "A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother," the author claims that then candidate Obama 'misstated' his mother's struggle with healthcare coverage. 

The author asserts that an employer-sponsored health insurance plan paid for all of Dunham's medical bills, except for her deductible and some "uncovered" medical expenses that added up to "several hundred dollars a month." 

According to Scott, Dunham hoped to pay for those extra costs through disability coverage, but her insurer at the time, CIGNA, denied the claim, citing her pre-existing condition.

Scott's reporting is based on copies of letters between Dunham and CIGNA that she obtained via friends of Obama's mother.

The part in bold (above) would actually serve to be a contradiction to the author's claims. 

Below is a YouTube video from the president's debate with John McCain and an objective review of the president's statements on this issue throughout the '08 campaign, would show that the author is merely splitting hairs.

Listen (0:16 - 0:30) to what then candidate Obama says about his mother's struggle with her insurance coverage as it relates to the issue of coverage for her pre-existing condition. 

This was a poor hatchet job and in as much as I disagree with this president on a number of issues, the GOP and its allies are better served focusing on real issues, rather than swatting at flies on the wall.