Amazon is running a deal on the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, selling the new-ish Sprint smartphones for $80 and $25, respectively, with a two-year contract and free activation.

Taptu, the mobile search engine, is announcing today that they’re using the OneRiot search API to provide realtime search results to mobile devices at their touch-friendly mobile web page. The realtime search results will eventually make their way into the Taptu iPhone app. Full press release inside!

Look out Virgin Mobile and Cricket, Walmart is coming for you. The infamous retailer announced today that they are launching their own no-contract cellular service on the 18th, called Straight Talk.

Ok road warriors, here’s one for you. This is a little gadget I wish I’d had back in the day when I used to travel constantly for work. It’s essentially a power strip, with adapters for multiple electronic devices, that zips up into a folding case. Seems quite obvious really, but a cool device none the less.

Smartphones are great. Ubiquitous data access is great. Mobile computing is great. Unfortunately, each smartphone represents its own little walled garden of convenience. Apple’s iPhone is tied tightly with iTunes and various other Apple services. Android is tied tightly with Google services. Each manufacturer makes a modicum of effort to allow their smartphone to sync with someone else’s services, but as is too often the case, such integration is usually lacking some important functionality. After all, there’s little business incentive to allow your users to use someone else’s services, right? Enter Funambol, and their open source mobile cloud sync.

Great Neptune’s trousers!

ARM has just announced the development of a dual core mobile processor capable of breaking the 2GHz barrier. The 40nm Cortex-A9 CPU will use conventional silicon chips and each CPU core will consume less than 0.25 watts of power.

According to Gartner, worldwide mobile phone sales are down about 6% from the same time last year; yet the volume of smartphone sales has increased almost 30% in the same time frame. No doubt the uptick in smartphone sales is due to the release of cool new devices like the iPhone 3GS, the Palm Pre, and the various Android phones coming to market. As expected, Nokia remains king of the hill in terms of both regular and smart phones, though sales of their fancy new N97 have been extremely weak. Compare that with sales of Apple’s iPhone which enjoyed 500% growth in shipments! RIM is number two, yadda yadda yadda.

Apparently it’s not a matter of “if” Microsoft will bring the Xbox, in some capacity, to the wonderful world of mobile entertainment, but “when.” So says< Corporate Vice-President Shane Kim, at least; if you can't trust Mr. Kim, then who can you trust?

I’ve used a number of video surveillance systems for a variety of purposes. In my experience, most of them are merely adequate. I’ve used Axis and Pelco solutions for different things, and have been fairly underwhelmed with both. It’s a laborious, manual process to search through recordings to find stuff, and the interface for the various applications is pretty lame. As such, I was pretty excited to review the Archerfish “mobile video intelligence system.”

If there was any question about the significance of the iPhone 3GS’s impressive video functionality, here’s your answer: YouTube reports that in the six days since the iPhone 3GS was released last week, the number of mobile uploads has increased by a whopping 400%. For a single phone model to have such a major impact on the site is simply phenomenal.

Even without the iPhone, YouTube is seeing major growth across the entire mobile space — the site has seen uploads go up 1700% over the last six months. It’s not hard to guess why. Video-enabled smartphones are becoming increasingly popular, as are high speed data connections. YouTube also attributes part of the growth to a streamlined upload flow (note how easy it is to upload a video from your iPhone to the site), as well as its improved sharing capabilities (you can now syndicate your videos to services like Facebook and Twitter).

I was out for my evening constitutional last night, enjoying the sight of “For Sale” signs on homes throughout my neighborhood, when I spied with my little eye something new and novel. I’ve seen URLs on For Sale signs a couple of times, and always thought that that was a fine way to attract eyeballs to your property. Let’s face it: trawling though MLS listings sucks, so going directly to a property’s URL is a time saver! What I saw last night, though, was even better: a URL specifically geared for mobile phones. “Mobile users, go to prtmobile.com/1908″.

Looks like Intel is about to break into the mobile phone arena in a big way. According to Bloomberg, Intel and Nokia have struck a deal to include Intel CPUs in future Nokia handsets.

Google’s Andy Rubin, Mr. Android himself, remarked yesterday that we can expect to see 18 Android phones in the US world by the end of the year. That’s way, way, way up from “one” last year. We may even see 20 Android phones this year, all coming from eight or nine different companies.

Not content at owning 100% of the world’s brand awareness, Apple is looking into building its own chipset and has even hired a team to work on “multifunction” mobile chips.

In the cellphone world, a chip is a chip. Most of them are ARM-based but there are a few outliers. Most importantly, however, each has a similar power profile. Therefore, by controlling the entire chip themselves, Apple can handle its own graphics, video, and audio output as well optimize for power control – a huge concern with devices like the iPhone.

I was so excited when I got my first Palm Treo: I’d be able to browse the Internet from anywhere! That happy moment was soon shattered by the realization that Blazer was a pretty crappy browser. My youthful exuberance was further crushed by the realization that accessing most websites on a 320×240 screen is only slightly better than a root canal. Even now, on my fancy new iPhone 3G, I still find myself using the web as little as possible.

If you ask me (which you didn’t) there are few things more consumer-unfriendly than charging people for 3G data on their handsets and then charging them again for the privilege of connecting their handsets to a computer in order to use that same 3G data.

According to BGR, Verizon Wireless might be discounting a cornucopia of handsets and EV-DO dongles as early as tomorrow. Motorola makes up the majority of the handsets, but VZW, LG, Casio, Samsung and RIM make up the rest. The most surprising is the Storm. But it looks as if the discount won’t be anything significant. The MIR is expected to jump from $50 to $70 amounting to an additional $20. Hit the jump for the list of devices that could see a discount starting tomorrow.