We’ve all seen it, that spiro-graphed, color-splotched invitation to Apple’s Jan. 27 event at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Weekend Update isn’t on the inside, but we hear rumors that Jobs will storm the stage dressed as Moses, carrying the new tablet, which will be made of stone, under his robes. Apparently, that’s where it’s been hiding all along. Either that, or Weekend Update is going a little nuts from “tablet fatigue.”

Before we got to rumors, plans and all important educated guesses, AllThingsD spent the week doing reporting about real companies with products you can actually buy.

Walt’s column wasn’t exactly its normal, gadgety self this week. Maybe he’s saving his strength. Instead of the newest thing that won’t be leaving your pocket, he covered a service that claims to help you remember everything. Evernote, with its adorable little elephant logo, aims to be a sort of digital filing cabinet in the cloud, allowing you to save information, images, notes and just about anything else that can be digitized. Walt had good things to say all around, even if the available apps didn’t give every device the same functionality. Weekend Update liked the auto text-recognition feature that makes pictures of text searchable. We’ll never carry a business card home again. Neither rain nor snow nor tablet rumors can keep Walt from his appointed rounds at Mossberg’s Mailbox, and this week he grabbed a couple questions about e-readers, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer 8 and the right laptop for the young and litigious. Walt cleared up the myth that e-books can’t highlight text (even if they don’t do it in color yet), and then moved on to a question about what IE8 refers to as “accelerators.” Before tying up the mailbag strings for anther week, he also gave counsel to a future counselor. He recommended a moderately priced Windows 7 laptop or a Macbook for the incoming law student, though he suggested it would be a good idea to check with the school and current students for specific needs. Weekend Update thinks that last bit is extra good advice. Katie was busy this week testing the latest Bluetooth earpiece from Aliph’s Jawbone line. The Jawbone Icon is the first earpiece to run with a software package that allows the addition of apps just for the earpiece. Overall Katie thought the Icon represented a step forward for Bluetooth earpieces but hopes for upgrades to the app suite will bring more robust features. Oh yeah, and she was glad that they finally got rid of those tricky hidden control buttons.

At MediaMemo, Peter gave us the continued saga of e-magazines and the world’s slowest moving electronic construction project. It looks like the Time Inc. e-mag prototypes won’t be part of Wednesday’s Apple (AAPL) event even though there was a lot of hullabaloo over the company’s Sports Illustrated prototype. Condé Nast, on the other hand, has declared its GQ mag-as-app tests a success. No word yet on who will be three-quarters naked on the first 10-inch screen edition. Completing the out-with-the-print, in-with-the-electronic trifecta was Peter’s post about the New York Times pay-wall announcement. The Times claims it will erect a metered wall in 2011, which seems like an awfully long time in the shifting sands of the Web. Outside partners may be playing a factor, and some speculate that the 2011 date is just a declaration that New York Times Company (NYT) will be waiting-and-seeing. Peter doesn’t see what that would accomplish and cites experts who assert that a year isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to build a complex pay wall with necessary features.

Digital Daily was on the ball this week with John’s signature hard-hitting hilarity. His early report proved correct when sources suggested that the EU’s approval of the pending Oracle (ORCL)-Sun (JAVA) acquisition was nigh. Not to leave the tablet news out in the cold, John asked some important questions about a future tablet’s data consumption habits, and thinks it might end up in a class of its own. A big, beautiful screen means big, beautiful images and video, which mean gloriously huge file sizes. Hooray for Wi-Fi. To round out the week, John covered a story about Google (GOOG) co-founders Larry and Sergey planning to sell about $5.5 billion in stock over five years. We’re not sure whether the proper term is “cashing out” or “cashing in,” but they are going to be doing a lot of one or the other. The stock sale will remove them as a two-man majority voting block, but their remaining 47 percent will assure that their velvety duet will continue to ring clearly at board meetings.

Boomtown led off with some viral video for the ages. Jimmy Fallon one-upped the “pants on the ground” video by performing the sarcastic ballad as Neil Young. We’re not sure the audience caught that it was Jimmy right way, in part, because Young was making the TV rounds about that time, and in part, because Fallon does a surprisingly good Neal impression. Kara asked her readers to vote on the new tablet’s name, making “iPad” her own prediction. Kara has an eerie way of getting this stuff right so Weekend Update is gonna go ahead and get that tattoo this weekend. Kara finished the week with a quick post about her trip to Sundance and all the geektastic happenings there. Kara’s Winnebago, which we call “Operation Rolling Thunder,” was crammed full of wife, kids, mom, dog, and maybe a few stowaway Bay Area indie filmmakers who tied themselves to the undercarriage. Read the post; there’s never a dull moment on a Swisher expedition.

AllTingsD is back on Monday with some great new stuff to feed that techie habit. And don’t forget to set your homepages here Tuesday (as if they weren’t already) to see live photos and blogging from Apple’s big unveiling. We’ll see you there, and will be sure to let you know if Jobs does, in fact, part the Bay in his walk from Marin to San Francisco that morning.

You’d never believe it, you never would know, that Christmas had come, at least not by the snow. All the geeks in the Valley were typing away, forced to take a short breather on this year’s Christmas day. So read on for info, this update, dear friends, as Christmas is over and a new year begins.

In time for Christmas, in technology news, Walt opened his column on product reviews. It seems, I am told, that holiday travel, with two screaming children can make brains unravel. So what could one bring, on a holiday trek, to keep little ones smiling and not cause a wreck? In a guest post by Nick–Wingfield’s his name–we saw Apple’s iTouch, the best in the game. He talked PSPs, and Nintendo DS’s, but versatile and thin, iPod touch got the yesses.

At Mossberg Solution, Katie was typing, a fresh new post to help holiday griping. For if through your window, this holiday season, a new Mac has drifted, you might have a reason. The keyboard is different, and programs won’t close, all those whoosits and whatzits, no one really knows. But Katie was there, she did not take a rest, to show you the way to make your new Mac the best. Remember to “Quit,” on that Mac she said, ’cause those little red x’s won’t put the program to bed. And one final thought, if it doesn’t seem rude, Katie recommended a new attitude. You see, on the Mac, once they’ve been detected, to remove those hard drives, they must first be “ejected.”

It was all about BoomTown, this week in the news, as Kara looked at upcoming interviews. She’s worked much too hard and now they’ve said yes, but the lineup is set for our CES. With Hastings and Rubin and Rubinstien all, we’ll get their big scoops at the big techie ball. If tech shows are cold, with their gadgets galore, Kara posted a post about what’s in store. She traveled to Twitter and talked with Biz Stone, who thinked up some thoughts on how tweeting has grown. He pensively pondered, and stroked his cute chin. Some thoughts on the future, he gave with a grin. Kara was waving goodbye, flying off to the sand, to spend time with her family, mai-tai in hand. But before she got buckled and the jet engines roared, she solved a small mystery while climbing aboard. It seems, oh you see, that she’d gotten some news, about MySpace, Flixster and movie reviews. The two have been talking, oh talking some talk, with Rotten Tomatoes along for the walk. So she boarded the jet, all shiny and tall, waving goodbye to BoomTown for some vacation, if small.

At MediaMemo HQ, it was Peter this week, opening the media door and taking a peek. Over at TMZ, they are all talking sports, it seems they are thinking, a new venture of sorts. The connection makes sense, though the idea is small. They might thank Tiger Woods for starting it all. And just when you thought you’d bought all your gifts, Peter covered that thing that’s on every geek’s lists. It seems to Peter, that maybe, perhaps, the new Apple (AAPL) tablet would need big tablet-sized apps. That’s just what he found, when looking this week; some big app developers had given a tweak. They’ve made everything bigger, for what we don’t know, but whatever it is, the screen sure did grow. Peter covered it all, including abuse. There were gremlins, not elves, about, on the loose. While most new tech start-ups were shopping for backers, the biggest of bigs were snorched on by hackers. Amazon (AMZN), Wal-Mart (WMT), and more in the cloud, got hit by bad geeks, doing things not allowed. They recovered it quickly, and locked up their gate, making sure all your packages still wouldn’t be late.

So as you relax, and come down from the Yule, whether frozen at home or splayed out by a pool, Weekend Update is here, as is AllThingsD, to keep you informed when you’ve got places to be. Please leave us your comments, thoughts, queries and questions. We’d even adore your most helpful suggestions. And enjoy those around you, this holiday season. It’s friends, family and loved ones that give our lives reason.

“If there is such a thing,” he said at a conference. “I buy everything Apple comes out with.”

He then added, “There is no such thing,” after which Fusion-io President David Flynn interjected, “You’re talking to a guy who has seven [navigation] systems in his car. So he will definitely be buying it.”

The men were there to announce that Fusion-io’s technology will be used for a new solid-state-disk storage technology offered by IBM’s (IBM) servers, called the High IOPS Adapter.

The company said that these technologies are a “new tier of memory,” faster and more cost-effective than disk drives, which will change the way data centers and computer architecture are designed.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Big news often comes in small packages and BoomTown was all over the little moves that meant big stories this week. Kara covered a massive redesign of Microsoft’s MSN homepage that follows the old car-racing-mantra-turned-Web-design ethos: Add power and lightness. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when BoomTown covered the end of the Skype ruckus. All is forgiven, and all it took was a sizable stake in the company and seats on the board. Kara rounded things out by running a quick post about a spankin’ new feature from AllThingsD: Every Friday, the just launched “Almost Famous” will cover interesting start-ups through the eyes of their chief geeks. Kara’s all about geek love.

Digital Daily isn’t usually big into bean-counting, but this week the numbers were where it was happening. The first sales figures came back from Apple’s iPhone launch in China, and the numbers weren’t good. As of pub time for the post, only 5,000 iPhones had been (legitimately) purchased. If the Chinese numbers were a picture of modesty, the App Store’s numbers were parading through Time Square in an orange jumpsuit singing Eddie Grant’s “Electric Avenue.” The two-year-old App store’s epic popularity has pushed its already outsized download numbers past the two-billion mark. Not to be outdone with unprecedented flash, Google (GOOG) violated its own nonrule late in the week and ran a semi-ad on the Google homepage. You say ad, they say synergy, but at the end of the day it was a direct promo for Motorola’s (MOT) new Droid, which runs on Google’s Android platform.

MediaMemo started the week off right with a fresh bite from Apple (AAPL). Peter covered the revamp of Apple TV, which will now be offered for $30 a month. News from News Corp. was no surprise this week, when MediaMemo brought us the story that the media empire (and AllThingsD’s uber-parent company) was doing fine as long as you only pay attention to cable and movies. Broadcast and print? Eh, not so much. Finally, Peter asked a few probing questions of Google CEO Eric Schmidt in regard to his company’s suspicious addition of a “blog” tag attached to some Google News postings. Schmidt speculated, but the ultimate answer wasn’t, as he suggested, because of your mother.

Deep in his Personal Technology bunker, at an undisclosed location somewhere in rural Maryland, Walt got to take a crack at the new Motorola Droid this week, and his response was, well, very positive. He praised the Droid’s exceptional battery life and call clarity, even if the touchscreen wasn’t quite up to the iPhone bar. All in all, he said it was a win for Verizon (VZ) and the Google’s mobile OS.

Mossberg’s Mailbox continues to fill with questions about the speculative Apple tablet. Walt offered some other sage advice about making the Windows 7 switch with 64 bits, and what to do with all that grief over the death of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Outlook Express.

Katie was sweatin’ to the newbies this week, with an energetic review of Fitbit, a wireless fob for tracking calories and exercise stats. The Bluetooth headset-sized clip attaches to your waistband and uploads your activities to the Fitbit Web interface, where you can track how many calories you did or didn’t burn. You can also add water consumed and calories eaten. The Fitbit has been shipping since September, but won’t appear on retail shelves until after the holidays. No word yet on if it will include a “Cheesecake Factory” tab to the interface so as to allow for calorie counts that require exponents.

Like any good gadget lovers, we are all about the small and mighty here at AllThingsD. Stay tuned in with your RSS reader, Twitter feed or the good ol’ homepage. We’ll keep bringing you the little things you need to know.

Theoretical questions no longer. At least for people who visit New York’s Lower East Side for the next few days.

That’s where Gizmodo, Gawker Media’s crazily successful gadget blog, has set up a gallery of odd, cool and awesome stuff. For a very limited time–it opened on Thursday and it runs through this Sunday.

Head Gizmodo geek Brian Lam gave me a tour of the gallery yesterday, and it’s great fun: In addition to the iPhone prototype, there’s a handful of other cool things from Apple (AAPL), including a 20th anniversary edition Mac and a prototype of an Apple Tablet machine that never saw the light of day.

So if you’re at all interested in gadgets, or the people who are, drop on by 151 Orchard Street. It’s free, but they’re happy to accept Toys For Tots donations (which also qualifies you for some cool giveaways).

If you can’t make it, you can see still images on Brian’s site, or you can check out my first attempt at Web video-making with the mandatory All Things Digital Flip camera. I’ve added a few subtitles to compensate for the fact that Brian is soft-spoken and the dudes playing “Call of Duty” in the gallery were loud. The fact that the camera is shaky and that the camera-holder says “awesome” a lot is entirely my fault.

[Image Credit: Gizmodo]