IBM rolled out a new line of Unix server systems under the Power 7 nameplate on Monday. Analysts said IBM appears to be positioning the new machines as a counter to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s ambitious plans for selling high-end Sparc servers from newly acquired Sun Microsystems.

Both companies are angling to sell powerful (and expensive) systems that combine hardware and software, engineered and optimized for specific uses such as running complex financial operations. IBM’s press release lays out all their technical specs in detail.

But IBM didn’t stop there. Ellison has been trash-talking IBM for months now, and Big Blue answered back today with a feisty Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ServersForTruth) and a YouTube video that digs at Oracle on several points, including an episode last fall when an industry standards group fined Oracle $10,000 for using the group’s name in ads that didn’t meet its rules.

The video, which IBM says it produced in-house, is a fun spoof of a typically over-heated political campaign spot. Borrowing from former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and her much-discussed ad attacking rival Senate candidate Tom Campbell,  IBM even threw in a cameo appearance by a sheep with glowing red eyes.

Below you’ll find my latest observations below.

iPhone

With Apple expected to unveil its tablet computer next Wednesday, my Tech Files column on Monday will be about some of the features I hope the tablet will include.

But I’ve also been thinking a lot about something else that Apple might announce at its special event: iPhone 4.0, the latest version of the operating system that underlies its iPhone and iPod touch gadgets. Apple announced the last two major updates to the iPhone OS at March events, but recent rumors suggest that this update will be unveiled two months early.

The last two updates included significant new features for the iPhone. iPhone 2.0 opened the device to native third-party applications and paved the way for the company’s trend-setting and uber-successful App Store. iPhone 3.0 added long-awaited features, such as copy and paste, multi-media messaging and stereo Bluetooth. I’m hopeful that iPhone 4.0 will be just as significant a release.

Here are some of the things I’d like to see in it:Multi-tasking. This is perhaps the iPhone’s biggest short-coming right now compared with Android phones or other smartphone devices. Unlike those devices, you generally can’t run more than one application at once. (There are a few exceptions, such as pulling up a Web page while you are on the phone, or playing music from the iPod program while doing other tasks.) Instead, in order to pull up another program, you typically have to close down another by pressing the home button.

That’s a pain if you want to switch back and forth between two programs repeatedly. And it also means that you can’t multi-task. On my computer, for instance, I often will check my e-mail while I’m waiting for a Web page to load. You can’t do that on the iPhone.

Most annoyingly, it means that you can’t use any of the great audio programs now available for the iPhone — such as WunderRadio or Pandora — while you are doing anything else, like checking your mail or using a turn-by-turn navigation program. It also would be nice to allow some of the location-based programs — like the yet-to-be-available as a native app Google Latitude — to run in the background while you did other things.

Apple’s excuse in the past for not allowing multi-tasking has been that it would run down the battery too easily. But the Palm Pre and the new Android devices, which run on similar hardware as the iPhone, get similar battery life as Apple’s gadget, despite allow multi-tasking.

Apple has made a stab in the direction of multi-tasking by allowing programs to receive background notifications, even when they aren’t running. But this is a half-solution at best, and doesn’t really address the issue. You can’t listen to Pandora via a background notification.

Unobtrusive notifications. Speaking of notifications, I’d like Apple to take a page from Palm and Google and make them less obtrusive.

On the iPhone, notifications for things such as a new text message or a low battery come in the form of a box that overlays whatever you are looking at at the time. You can dismiss the message, but you have to deal with it in some way before you can go back to what you were doing before. And if you choose to act on the message, the program you were previously working in will be closed.

In contrast, on both the webOS and Android phones, if you get a text message or some other notice, the device alerts you with an icon at the edge of the screen. You can deal with the alert when you want to by clicking on the icon (or pull down the notice bin in Android); you don’t have to stop what you are doing at the time.

In my book, the webOS and Android solutions to notifications are much more elegant and user-friendly than the iPhone’s.

Flash support. I know. Steve Jobs has said that Flash in its current state isn’t a good fit for smartphones. The full PC version of Flash is too system intensive for the devices. And Flash Lite, which the company is pushing for mobile devices, isn’t capable enough.

But that situation looks like it’s about to change. Palm has already announced that the new Pre will support Flash later this year — and so too will Android devices. If the iPhone doesn’t, it risks being left behind.

Because here’s the thing. At least right now — and for the foreseeable future — Flash is a key component of the Web experience. There’s just a lot of content, from videos to games that you can’t view without it.

Apple has tried to work around this by pushing its QuickTime media standard, HTML 5, which is an alternate means of delivering Web content, and by encouraging companies to develop native apps for the iPhone. To some degree that’s helped, but there’s still a lot of content out there on the Web that’s currently inaccessible from the iPhone.

Widgets. This is one of the cool features of Android. Widgets are small programs that are viewable from the phone’s home screen that are always running. They can include such things as weather information, stock quotes or sports scores. But they can do a lot more.

One of my favorite widgets for Android is one that allows you to toggle off and on its various antennas, such as Bluetooth or WiFi, and its syncing services, such as that with Microsoft Exchange. In order to do something similar on the iPhone, you’d have to pull up the Setting programs and got deep within several of its menus. In other words, it’s a lot easier with a widget.

As I mentioned in my review of the Motorola Cliq, Motorola has built its Motoblur service around widgets that deliver updates from users social networks and that display the latest messages in users’ universal inbox. It would be cool to have similar widgets for the iPhone.

Social networking integration. I love the Facebook application for the iPhone. But webOS and Android have taken Facebook (and social networking access in general) to the next level for smartphones. On those phones, your address book not only synchronizes your contacts with those stored Microsoft Exchange mail servers, but also with Facebook and other social networks.

So the address book entry for John Doe might include not only a phone number stored on Exchange, but an e-mail address listed on Facebook, a picture stored on LinkedIn and John’s Twitter address. Motoblur goes even beyond this, allowing users to see a contact’s latest Twitter posts and Facebook updates directly from their address book entry on the phone.

I’d like to see something similar on the iPhone. The latest Facebook app for the device has started to add this feature, but that’s only one social network. I’d like to see much broader support for other networks and Web sites.

Free turn-by-turn navigation. There are now loads of GPS navigation programs available for the iPhone. But they all cost money — sometimes significant chunks of it.

Meanwhile, the trend in turn-by-turn navigation seems to be moving in the other direction. The latest version of Android includes Google’s free turn-by-turn nav service. And Nokia announced today that it would make available a free turn-by-turn nav service for its smartphones, starting with devices like the N97 and the E72. I’d like to see Apple do something similar — or update the Google Maps app to include Google’s nav service.

Motorola Cliq

When Motorola announced the Cliq smartphone in September, I was pretty intrigued.

I wrote a column about how I thought the Cliq’s interface could represent “the next stage in the evolution of the smart-phone.” I think now that I might have overstated the case.

The Cliq was the first Motorola phone to run Google’s Android operating system. What I found interesting about it was that Motorola had built a custom interface on top of Android that it calls Motoblur.The home screen on most smartphones is derived from the PC world: you see either a kind of desktop with a collection of widgets and program icons, or something akin to an application folder that gives you a list of programs.

Motoblur is something different. Essentially the home screen on the Cliq is a collection of “live” widgets that tap into users’ social networks and messaging programs. One widget window shows you posts made by your contacts to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Another shows you the latest messages received in your universal in-box, including e-mail not only from your work, but also sent via the social networks. A third window allows you to post status updates to the various social networks without having to call up a Web brower or a separate program.

And Motoblur extends this social networking connection deep into the device. The Cliq’s address book synchronizes and combines data both from Microsoft Exchange servers and from your various social networks and gives you tabs to see the latest status updates from your contacts. Meanwhile, from the phone’s photo gallery, you can upload pictures directly to sites such as Picasa and Photobucket.

All of these are great ideas. And I think Motoblur still has a lot of potential. But the Cliq is not going to be the phone that will realize it.

The Cliq's slide-out keyboard

The main problem with the Cliq — at least in my testing — was that it was slow. There was a noticeable lag in switching between programs and accessing information on the social networks.

But that’s not the only problem. The Cliq comes with Android 1.5, on older iteration of the operating system. The latest version of Android, 2.1, has a number of improvements over 1.5, including a free turn-by-turn navigation program and the ability to backup applications and settings online. It’s unclear if or when T-Mobile, the only U.S. carrier that is selling the Cliq, will provide an updated version of Android to Cliq users.

And that points to another issue. The Cliq is only available on T-Mobile, which is one of the least popular carriers in the U.S. T-Mobile’s 3G high-speed network — which is needed for allowing Motoblur to tap into all the Web-based social networking data — is among the spottiest of the major carriers.

Then there’s the Cliq’s physical design. Some people like phones with physical keypads. I don’t. I actually find that I can type faster on a virtual one — and I don’t have to worry about rotating the device to slide out the keyboard.

But that’s a personal preference. The keypad on the Cliq is actually a decent one, as these things go, with rounded keys that are easy to distinguish from one another.

Regardless, having a physical keypad makes the phone much bulkier than it would otherwise be. That’s definitely true of the Cliq, which is about 35 percent thicker than the Nexus One, the svelte new Android device that Google is selling directly to consumers. But the Cliq isn’t just thicker, it just feels blocky in the hand.

Meanwhile, its screen is noticeably smaller than that of the iPhone, much less those of Motorola’s Droid or the Nexus One. That’s too bad, because the Motoblur widget windows would be much easier to read and interact with if they had more screen space with which to work.

Overall, I’d rate the Cliq around a 6 on a 10-point scale. Motoblur is a neat idea, but the Cliq itself could stand some work.

Altec-Lansing inMotion Max

At long last, I wanted to write an updated review of the Altec-Lansing inMotion Max iPod speaker system.

As some readers may recall, I planned to test out then-new inMotion Max last spring. However, I soon abandoned the idea of writing a full review of the product, because I ran into a serious glitches.

At random intervals, the device would seize up, stop working and stay that way until I unplugged and reset it. At least one reader experienced a similar problem with the device, so it looks like the glitch might have been with a particular batch of the speaker systems.

But it doesn’t look like the problem was endemic with the device. Altec-Lansing ended up sending me a replacement unit to test out, and I played with that speaker system quite a bit over the next several months. The problem didn’t recur with the new unit. So I don’t feel I can fairly mark the device down for the problem. Just be aware that it can occur.That issue aside, I was only mildly impressed with the inMotion Max. The sound it produces is fairly thin, and it doesn’t do a particularly good job with bass notes.

I also found that the electrical plug for the device — for whatever reason — came out easily. Because the device has a rechargeable backup battery, it would continue to play even if it was unplugged. I often didn’t realize that it had become unplugged until the unit — or my iPod — simply stopped functioning after being completely drained of juice.

And one of my initial criticisms still stands. The unit’s touch-sensitive buttons don’t work well. Because they don’t physically depress, it’s hard to know how hard to push them. And because their surfaces aren’t terribly distinctive, it can be hard to know which button to push unless you’re looking right at it — in bright light.

That said, the inMotion Max does have its attractions. Its rechargeable battery allows it to be portable, meaning you can take it outside or in a car without worrying about finding an outlet. It has a fairly narrow profile, which allows you to place it on most counters without worrying about how much space it will occupy.

And its $200 price is fairly reasonable, given that it produced decent — if not great — sound, includes an FM radio tuner and is iPhone compatible. That’s about the same amount that you’d pay for speaker systems with similar features.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d likely rate it about a 6 or 7. It was fine, but nothing to write home about.

I’m live-blogging/Twittering throughout the day. You can read my latest observations below.

Intel executives hope Larrabee will help them compete with the highly popular graphic chips offered by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

But when Intel gave a little demonstration of its chip last week during the Santa Clara company’s annual San Francisco event for people working on Intel-related products, the reaction among some analysts was less than awestruck.

“The 3D graphics were underwhelming” compared with those offered by Nvidia’s and AMD’s chips, wrote Global Crown Research in a note to its clients.

In its own note, Raymond James called Intel’s unveiling of Larrabee “surprisingly pedestrian” and noted that “the sad demo tells us the project is in trouble.”

Ouch!

Over the weekend at home, my wife received just about the last thing I ever expected to get from Google: A coupon in the mail. I’ve posted photos of it above. The envelope also contained a helpful brochure explaining how Google AdWords works. Pictures of that are also above.

We were both surprised and amused. Google using snail mail to send me a discount? Huh?

Here’s a couple thoughts on why I find this so odd. And I’ve submitted questions about the offer to the Google press office and will include any response I get here. The coupon offers $100 discount for Google AdWords. The page to redeem the coupon is here.

The coupon was actually sent to my wife who formerly was a documentary filmmaker. Back in the late 1990s, she made a film called “The Golf War.” She used to have a site for the film at www.golfwar.org, which is how I suppose Google got her name and home address.

The film examined how a small village was trying to fight efforts by the government of the Philippines to seize its land and build a golf course. Oddly enough, the offer is not addressed to my wife, but rather, Joseph Ejercito Estrada, otherwise known as the former president of the Philippines.

The coupon site says the offer is non-tranferable, so if you see President Estrada, let him know we have a coupon for him.

Now, it’s not that I don’t think coupons are valuable, or a good way to reach potential customers. Heaven knows, newspapers have used them for decades and in tough times, people find them even more useful. But Google using coupons? Or anything in print for that matter? It seems to go against all the efficiencies that Google boosters point to when they marvel at the elegance of its business model. Why is the company of the future using the methods of an industry (newspapers) that everyone keeps telling us is dying?

Here’s the other thing that jumped out at me: The offer expires Sept. 30. After that, the value drops to $75 and then runs out Nov. 75. Why is that significant? Well, Google seems to be in a big hurry for me to use this. And Sept. 30 just happens to be the end of the current fiscal quarter. So does that mean Google is having a tougher quarter than expected? I’ve asked the Google press folks to respond to that question.

In the meantime, if you got one of the Google coupons, or know someone who did, post in the comments below and let me know whether you plan to use it. And whether you think it’s odd or not that Google is using coupons.

UPDATE: Monday afternoon, I received an email with the following statement from a Google spokesperson:

“We have many efforts in place to reach out to entrepreneurs and business owners who haven’t yet discovered that online advertising can be a powerful, measurable and cost-effective way to find potential customers. From time to time over the past few years, we’ve offered promotional coupons to new AdWords advertisers through various means, including via email, U.S. mail, industry events and more.“

Some of you may recall that HP created a buzz last year when it introduced a mini-notebook computer with a striking red floral design on the exterior, created by Tam. Looking somewhat like a stylish purse, it was marketed toward fashion-conscious women who didn’t mind paying a relatively high price ($699 for a netbook) to be able to surf the Web without lugging around a big, ungainly laptop.

This year’s offering, we are told, will have a cover design that reflects Tam’s upcoming spring collection, “inspired by the classic Chinese love story, “Butterfly Lovers,” a beautiful tale of freedom, romance and inspiration.”

And if that’s not enough, the HP announcement adds: “It fuses high fashion, small form factor and innovative function to take the personal computer from a necessity to a lifestyle statement for modern women on the go.”

No word yet on whether Tam will be introducing her own design for an x86 server next fall …

Palm Pixi

After covering Apple’s music event this morning, I met with Palm and got a hands-on look at the company’s new Pixi smartphone, which Palm announced early today

I was a bit underwhelmed by the actual phone, which will be the second to run Palm’s WebOS software. But the Pixi, which Palm plans to launch before the holidays, will have at least one new features that will be very cool.

I found a lot to like about Palm’s Pre, the Pixi’s WebOS predecessor. One of the features that I liked most was something Palm calls Synergy. The feature collects and combines address book information from a variety of sources and displays them all together.

So, if I looked up the contact information for my wife, the Pre, using Synergy, might show a phone number I had stored in Outlook in my office, an e-mail address she had entered on Facebook and her Google Talk address. From that one, combined address book entry, I could then call her or send her an e-mail, text message or instant message.

Considering how spread out people’s contact information is these days, Synergy makes a heck of a lot of sense. It’s one of a number of features that I wish my iPhone had.

Well, with the Pixi, Palm is improving Synergy, adding two new partners: LinkedIn and Yahoo, both of which are excellent additions. I don’t know about you, but I have some contacts on LinkedIn that I just don’t have on other social networks or even in my Outlook address book.

Meanwhile, the addition of Yahoo will allow you to sync not only address book information you may have stored on Yahoo, but Yahoo IM addresses and calendar information.

At one of my previous employers, Yahoo IM was the chat client of choice and I still have a lot of friends and former colleagues who are on the service. Being able to link those IM addresses with other contact information I have would be great. 

Palm plans to add the two new Synergy partners to the Pre as well, but won’t say exactly when. Company representatives say that adding them will require users to download a software update, and they said they can’t say when that will be available.

Because it runs WebOS, the Pixi works in much the same way as the Pre. As with the Pre, it has a capacitive touch-screen that allows for multi-touch gestures. And you can run multiple programs at once and switch between them by minimizing them into “cards.” In my test of the Pre, I really enjoyed the device’s interface, finding it to be superior to even that of the iPhone.

But, in addition to share the Pre’s operating sytem, the Pixi also shares two of the device’s biggest shortcomings.

As is the case with the Pre, Sprint will have the Pixi exclusively at its launch this fall and for some period of time thereafter. That’s unfortunate, because Sprint is significantly smaller than AT&T and Verizon Wireless, meaning that at least for now, the Pixi will be available to a somewhat circumscribed audience. It’s also unfortunate, because Sprint’s service and coverage has generally been regarded as inferior to that of Verizon.

The other big shortcoming is that while Palm is allowing software programmers to write applications for WebOS, there just aren’t that many applications to choose from yet. As of today, there are only about 58 available for the Pre.

Company representatives say that Palm is adding more than 10 applications to its App Catalog every week and the number of available programs should grow even faster when it starts to allow developers to charge for applications. The company has already begun to test that feature.

Still, the number of applications is a drop in the bucket compared with the number that are available for other smartphones, particularly Apple’s iPhone. Palm’s Silicon Valley rival announced Wednesday that it now has 75,000 applications available for its device.

Regardless of how the Pixi stacks up to the iPhone, in many ways, the Pixi will be inferior to its sibling, the Pre.

For example, because the device is a candy-bar design, not a slider like the Pre, Palm had to make room for a keyboard and a screen on the same surface, without making the device too long. The end result is a screen that is noticeably smaller than the Pre’s: 2.6 inches in diagonal, compared with the Pre’s 3.1 inches.

Likewise, the device has a cheaper and less sophisticated camera. It’s only 2 megapixels, compared with the Pre’s 3, and it has a fixed focus, rather than the Pre’s, which offers a wide depth of field.

And the list goes on. The processor, though newer, is slower than the Pre’s and the Pixi, unlike the Pre, doesn’t have a WiFi antenna built in. 

Palm is upfront about these distinctions. And it plans to offer the Pixi at a price that is less than that of the Pre, which the company and partner Sprint reduced to about $150 with a two-year discount. How much less? The company wouldn’t say.

But my sense is that the company may have a hard time pushing the device, unless it gets the price under $100. That’s about the price that Apple and AT&T are charging for the 8-gigabyte iPhone 3G, which Apple originally released last year.

That’s an apt comparison, because although the iPhone’s a year old, it has a number of important things the Pixi won’t: namely, a built-in WiFi antenna and some 75,000 applications to choose from.

But I guess we’ll see when we know more about how much the Pixi will cost and how long it will be on Sprint.