Although he later clarified, “I wasn’t making a value judgment,” maintaining multiple identities, whether it’s as simple as publishing some photos to Picasa and others to Facebook, is becoming a big trend in online life.

Even as Zuckerberg’s Facebook extended its dominance in 2010 to the point where it seems to have a social Web monopoly, it was still a landmark year for social network competition.

Where in the past, tech industry watchers derided new start-ups for launching “yet another social network,” ever more users seem to be constructing multiple online presences that utilize the strengths of various platforms and networks.

And this splintered approach is only going to increase.

Internet users now have plenty of outlets for self-expression. They can prioritize individuality and choose to post on the highly customizable Tumblr, or instead value the comprehensiveness of a network and post on the blander Facebook.

A big part of this shift toward understanding the private online self versus the public online self has been the rise of Twitter. On Twitter, regular users make the sort of decisions celebrities do: What to share about their private lives with their public audience of followers.

Another shift has been the rise of smartphones, along with their quality broadband connections, good cameras and mobile apps.

As an early adopter of various social apps, I’ve recently been confronted with the choice of whether to post a picture taken with my Apple iPhone on-the-go to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Path or Picplz.

Each of them has different audiences, different associations with my personal or professional identities, and different expectations for how people will view and interact with my snapshot. (And I suppose there’s also the option of keeping the pictures to myself on my phone storage.)

Although the people noisiest about privacy on Facebook have at times been the media, publicity of the company’s highly confusing privacy settings seems to have led to many more people being aware of them and perhaps even changing them.

Perhaps that’s why I see an increasing–but still quite small–portion of my Facebook friends using pseudonyms on the service. And when I asked them why, I heard a variety of reasons.

One is a teacher, another prefers to go by the moniker he uses artistically. Yet another is a college student who is applying for jobs and who wants to be more anonymous for a while. Like many of today’s young people, she has become highly conscious of balancing the freedom to be herself online with the way she is perceived by professional contacts.

(A representative for Facebook declined to comment on whether the company has recently been more permissive about allowing pseudonyms, something it has traditionally frowned on.)

Of course, very little of what’s posted online can be trusted to never get out or never be linked to its originator. If you really want to keep your thoughts private and impermanent, of course, keep them in your head.

But there are now many more options for more private communication, many of them having first come out in 2010. They include small-group coordination tools like GroupMe, Fast Society and Beluga. There’s also Path, a start-up from a former Facebooker that is perhaps too limited by design, but is exploring the world of more intimate and personal communications.

For many people, their Facebook network is far from a direct match with their real-world friends, so it will be increasingly important to use these tools to dice circles up and make them more accessible. (Facebook is also trying to address that need with its own Groups tool.)

To be sure, that Facebook map of connections is a highly valuable asset, one the company has fiercely protected, as Google reformulates its approach to the social Web.

Splitting your users into an entirely new social graph will certainly hamper growth. For instance, another early Facebooker launched Jumo, a social network for people connecting with nonprofits that seems to risk being redundant with, and isolated from, similar efforts on other platforms.

And Foursquare, despite its zeitgeisty innovation for sharing real-time location updates, has accumulated only about five million users in the last two years.

However, the speedy growth of new social networks like the addictive Instagram–which is like Twitter for pictures and got one million users in its first two months–shows that there’s still an opportunity to take an independent path.

What seems particularly notable about the current moment is that many people are evolving their approach to expressing themselves online, and they now have many tools and contexts to do so. And it’s up to them if these multiple identities will be unified anywhere except in their heads.

(Image collage at top of post courtesy Flickr user shannonkringen.)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

CityVille is the perfect hospital waiting-room activity. You click to create buildings and plant crops, click to harvest them and collect money from your shops, click to visit your friends’ cities and help them do the same things.

Unlike in a real city, everything you can possibly accomplish in the game is good. You receive money, goods, reputation points, energy and random bonus prizes constantly.

Most of these are useful, but some of them are not. For instance, I currently have a stock of 22 virtual danishes received as bonuses from my in-game coffee shop, and no way to spend them.

Among the early adopter types I know in the tech industry, there’s a sense that casual gaming on Facebook serves an entirely different demographic from their own. The thinking is that games from Zynga and the like replace relatively mindless activities like watching soap operas.

But as someone who has just reorganized her virtual retail shops to be surrounded by virtual trees, so as to accumulate more virtual bonus points, I can see how social gaming–especially as it gets more social–might appeal to the desire for mindless diversions in all of us.

And, I began to get an answer to a question I am asked a lot: Why are so many people playing these seemingly meaningless games?

CityVille is Zynga’s latest attempt to extend the dominance of its breakout social game FarmVille, which has long been the most popular such diversion on Facebook.

Of all of Zynga’s games, CityVille has been heralded as the most social to date, with new features such as a franchise system that allows users to actually participate in the building of their friends’ cities. Personally, I’ve never gotten into FarmVille, although it’s obviously quite addictive as well and hugely popular.

Chalk it up to the new social features, the slightly less awkward and cutesy 3-D graphics, or a momentary openness to mindless diversion on my part, but CityVille is the only Facebook game that’s truly sucked me in so far.

Zynga says CityVille is its fastest-growing game ever. According to AppData, CityVille has 54 million monthly active users, for second place overall (and only two million behind FarmVille).

There are no consequences in CityVille and there is no strategy. There’s also no winning (rather, as in FarmVille, an endlessly extending horizon of tasks to complete).

The worst thing that can happen is a crop can wither or you can allocate your “energy” to collecting rent and not have enough to empty the cash registers at your stores.

But, not to worry–come back in five minutes and there’s another unit of energy waiting for you.

CityVille is satisfying on a superficial level that I hadn’t thought possible. It’s not even like Angry Birds, my former casual game of choice, which breaks all sorts of age and language barriers in its simplicity, but still requires you to position the slingshot correctly and think through the physics of the various projectiles.

In CityVille, all you do is click, click, click.

Zynga seems to want three things from users: Their time, their money and their recruitment of their friends. As for time, I’ve given plenty of it, although you usually run out of stuff to do about 15 minutes into any one session (Zynga wouldn’t want game play to be a burden or feel too complicated).

But I’m not sure my obsession is paying off for Zynga. I’ve spent a grand total of 50 cents on the game. That’s because I wanted to spend the 15 Facebook credits I’d gotten as part of a launch promotion, but Zynga had a minimum purchase of 20 credits. Coughing up two quarters got me the difference–and it also hooked up my Facebook account to my PayPal account for the first time.

I currently have 20 CityVille “neighbors.” They are Facebook connections from all different parts of my life, including high school friends, tech industry people and fellow reporters. We get credits for heading over to each other’s cities and helping out, accepting roles at each other’s city halls and other municipal buildings and setting up franchises in each other’s cities and resupplying them.

And Zynga constantly harasses us to post on our own or other people’s Facebook walls to ask them for in-game gifts and brag about in-game achievements.

Conscious of polluting other people’s walls and admitting to people how much CityVille I play, I usually decline all the offers to broadcast my CityVille needs and accomplishments. But it’s clear Zynga could stand to add even more communication channels if it wanted to; a friend recently emailed me off-game to ask if I could hurry up and send him a CityVille zoning permit.

I get the sense most of my particular set of neighbors haven’t given Zynga a lot of cash for virtual goods, considering our cities are growing at about the same rate and I see them on there at least once a day helping tend to my crops and resupplying their franchises. There are no in-game advertisements.

A few of my neighbors, however, have accumulated premium goodies galore. A certain Facebook exec’s city is decorated with paid-for doodads like a basketball court, tennis court and bronze statue–but I imagine it’s not too hard for him, of all people, to stock up on Facebook credits.

A particular start-up CEO who’s my virtual neighbor seems to play on an hourly basis. He has already hit level 35. You know that somewhere a Zynga engineer is scurrying to create more tasks and content to add more levels to keep up with him and other addicts.

And only one of my neighbors appears to have never returned to the game after setting up her initial city.

Meanwhile, my own city keeps on growing. I’m currently at level 26. I’m now the mayor of my city and considering a run for governor.

But, now that I’m back from the hospital, I’d honestly really like to stop playing this game and let the healing begin.

Update: Since I first wrote a draft of this post on Sunday CityVille added 10 million users. I’ve updated the stats as of Wednesday morning.

Qualcomm once had high hopes for the service. However, Jacobs acknowledged at a Churchill Club event last week that, outside of certain live events such as sports, it probably makes sense to offer mobile TV via on-demand streaming, rather than as a broadcast.

To be fully eligible for the rebate, customers must have purchased and activated the service, though there is also a form for those who didn’t even make it that far.

Qualcomm doesn’t want your unit back (apparently, it doesn’t want a bunch of FloTVs, either). Instead, the company’s Web site lists some recycling options. Or you could always keep it as a collector’s item–an early adopter badge of glory.

It’s worth noting that your service gets deactivated once the refund is processed, so on the off-chance you are still watching your Flo, you might want to wait until March to send in your form.

Welcome to Mobilized, the latest All Things Digital blog devoted to all things mobile. Mobilized will cover the wireless world from cell phones to tablets, as well as the networks they run on (or drop calls on).

In other words, all the issues raised by having the tiny little machines with us at all times.

If you are reading this on your Apple iPhone, Amazon Kindle, BlackBerry from Research in Motion, Google Android or other non-PC device: Congratulations, you are already Mobilized.

But, if you are sitting in front of a laptop or desktop as you are reading this–you might be a little behind the times, although on the plus side, you don’t have to squint nearly as much.

And, even if you printed this article out, I am happy you took the time to read it (Hi, Dad!).

In any case, I am hoping to cut through the jargon and the hype, so that this will be a spot that both the early adopters and the merely curious will be able to find items of interest.

And whether you are a mobile geek or not, mobile technology is poised to reshape your life. Cell phones aren’t just mini-computers and tablets aren’t just notebooks with their keyboards cut off. These products are reshaping not just how we consume media, but also the ways we interact with each
other.

Let me take a moment to introduce myself.

For those that don’t know me, I spent the last decade at CNET, covering everything from Apple and Microsoft to ill-fated products from the Audrey to the Foleo.

While mobile hasn’t been my full-time beat, I have always been a device junkie. I owned a Windows CE 1.0 device and several of the first attempts to marry a phone with a Palm Pilot. Most recently, I have spent the past several years covering Microsoft full-time and recently did a three-part series on the birth of Windows Phone 7.

I am passionate about technology and telling the stories about the people making the products that are changing the way we live. I hope to find room to tell all kinds of different stories in these pages.

I plan to start things off with an interview I did last week in New York with Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci. I also had a chance to catch up there with multitouch pioneer Jeff Han, who is beginning to shift some of his work from giant touchscreens to mobile devices.

Meanwhile, next week is the inaugural D: Dive into Mobile conference. I’ll be providing lots of coverage, of course, including backstage interviews with many of the speakers.

So, that’s my spiel. Be sure to sound off in the forums, whether you think I am right on track or completely off base. You can also drop me a note at the easy-to-remember email: Ina@AllThingsD.com.

Incidentally, if you’re among the early adopters who pre-ordered an iPad 3G when it first went on sale, you’re still likely to receive yours by late April. According to an email message Apple (AAPL) sent out this morning, the company still intends to ship pre-orders by the end of this month, as promised.

To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Thank you for your recent order of the magical and revolutionary iPad 3G.

We would like to confirm that your order will be shipped in late April as communicated at the time you placed your order. You will receive a confirmation notice when your order has shipped.

You can get up-to-date information about your order, including shipping status and tracking number, at Apple Order Status

Thank you for choosing Apple.

Sincerely,
The Apple Store Team

And that will still be a very good business for Amazon (AMZN), Khan says. He figures that a smaller chunk of a much larger market will eventually generate $1 billion in incremental revenue for the e-commerce giant.

You can see his math and assumptions here (click to enlarge):

Khan’s point is part of a larger note making the bull case for Amazon shares, and he argues that his assumptions for the retailer’s e-book business are deliberately conservative.

That sounds right to me, though I’d add one caveat. Khan assumes that e-books will follow the path of music sales, which quickly moved over to digital following the introduction of mobile devices–specifically, Apple’s (AAPL) iPod. But there are several big differences between books and music, and the biggest one is that you don’t need a special device if you want to travel with books–they’re already mobile.

I know plenty of people who swear by their Kindles and tell me that they’re reading more than ever since they got the gadgets. And maybe they’re representative of the larger population. But if it turns out they’re merely very enthusiastic early adopters, we’ll need to rethink some of this math.

Confirming news first leaked by Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself, Apple this morning issued a press release officially announcing the big-box retailer as an iPad launch partner. Its only iPad launch partner–the release includes no mention of AT&T (T).

“iPad connects users with their apps and content in a far more intimate and fun way than ever before,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs enthused in the announcement. “We can’t wait for users to get their hands and fingers on it this weekend.”

Sales at Apple (AAPL) and Best Buy (BBY) stores will begin at 9 am Saturday, with Apple stores offering iPad workshops and a free Personal Setup service for customers looking for a bit of help getting their new iPads configured and loaded up with their favorite apps and media.

If you’re hoping to find iPad at Best Buy, you would do well to arrive early. Leaked documents from the retailer suggest its iPad inventories will be pretty slim, about 15 per store (see highlighted text below; click to enlarge).

Meanwhile, Mac Rumors and Mac Daily News both report that some the earliest of early adopters have begun receiving shipping notifications for their iPads.

[Best Buy Playbook Image Credit: TUAW.com]

FURTHER READING:

Launch Day iPads Sold Out

iPad Available at “Most Best Buy Stores” This Saturday

Apple Grabs iPad Trademark From Fujitsu

Apple Now Accepting iPad App Submissions

Early Supplies of iPad Accessories Dwindling?

Initial iPad Demand Greater Than Initial iPhone Demand

iPad TV?

Apple’s Tablet: Read Different?

Rumored Apple Netbook Actually an E-book?

Coming Soon From Apple: Big Touch?

iTablet: Apple’s Killer App for Higher Ed

COMPLETE IPAD COVERAGE

Initially, only Wi-Fi models will be available, with their 3G counterparts to follow later in the month. Late April will also see the device going on sale in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K.

Given the time between the launch date of the Wi-Fi-only and 3G versions, will any early adopter be patient enough to wait for the latter?

Below, the press release announcing the iPad’s on-sale and shipping dates (Caution, Press release: May contain unnecessary superlatives, profound lack of objectivity).

iPad Available in US on April 3

Pre-Order on March 12

CUPERTINO, Calif., March 5/ — Apple® today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

Beginning a week from today, on March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store (www.apple.com) or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.

“iPad is something completely new,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re excited for customers to get their hands on this magical and revolutionary product and connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

Starting at just $499, iPad lets users browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more. iPad is just 0.5 inches thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds-thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook-and delivers battery life of up to 10 hours.*

iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch™ interface makes surfing the web an entirely new experience, dramatically more interactive and intimate than on a computer. You can read and send email on iPad’s large screen and almost full-size “soft” keyboard or import photos from a Mac®, PC or digital camera, see them organized as albums, and enjoy and share them using iPad’s elegant slideshows. iPad makes it easy to watch movies, TV shows and YouTube, all in HD, or flip through the pages of an ebook you downloaded from Apple’s new iBookstore while listening to your music collection.

The App Store on iPad lets you wirelessly browse, buy and download new apps from the world’s largest app store. iPad includes 12 new innovative apps designed especially for iPad and will run almost all of the more than 150,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®. Developers are already creating exciting new apps designed for iPad that take advantage of its Multi-Touch interface, large screen and high-quality graphics.

The new iBooks app for iPad includes Apple’s new iBookstore, the best way to browse, buy and read books on a mobile product. The iBookstore will feature books from the New York Times Best Seller list from both major and independent publishers, including Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster.

The iTunes® Store gives iPad users access to the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of over 12 million songs, over 55,000 TV episodes and over 8,500 films including over 2,500 in stunning high definition. All the apps and content you download on iPad from the App Store, iTunes Store and iBookstore will be automatically synced to your iTunes library the next time you connect with your computer.

Pricing & Availability

iPad will be available in Wi-Fi models on April 3 in the US for a suggested retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April for a suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. iPad will be sold in the US through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers.

iPad will be available in both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. International pricing will be announced in April. iPad will ship in additional countries later this year.

The iBooks app for iPad including Apple’s iBookstore will be available as a free download from the App Store in the US on April 3, with additional countries added later this year.

In a research note this morning, Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek says he has heard rumblings that production issues at Apple’s (AAPL) manufacturing partners may keep the company’s iPad in short supply when it first goes on sale.

“We have…heard that the upcoming iPad launch may be somewhat limited as a manufacturing bottleneck has impacted production of Apple’s newest device,” Misek writes.

“An unspecified production problem at the iPad’s manufacturer, Hon Hai Precision,” the analyst explains, “will likely limit the launch region to the US and the number of units available to roughly 300K in the month of March, far lower than the company’s initial estimate of 1,000K units.”

Looking ahead, he adds, “The delay in production ramp will likely impact Apple’s April unit estimate of 800K as well. It is also possible that, given the limited number of units available in March, the launch will be delayed for a month.”

If Misek is right–and that’s a big if; Misek’s prediction earlier this year that Apple would debut a brand new iPhone on Verizon (VZ) at its January special event proved woefully off–it’s a slight setback for Apple, which obviously wants to take good advantage of enthusiasm for the device to really blow out first-year sales. That said, since this would be only a temporary production delay, it probably wouldn’t have that much effect on sales.

Says Misek: “We believe that the only material impact from the iPad delay could come in the form of frustrated consumers and some modest loss of lustre for the company’s product launch.” He figures Apple will sell 550,000 units in its third quarter, which ends in June, 1.2 million in fiscal year 2010 and 3.5 million in 2011.

“While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated),” Shope wrote.

Now, it’s a truism that most companies are open to price cuts on any product if they need to increase sales. That said, this is an interesting disclosure coming from Apple (AAPL) execs, particularly so far in advance of the iPad’s actual debut. Certainly, it calls to mind the company’s decision to slash the price of the iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale and the early-adopter rebate it was forced to issue afterward. It seems odd, then, that Apple execs would even hint at the possibility of an early price cut lest they give folks already on the fence about buying the first iteration of the device more reason to stay there.

Unless they’re planning a prerelease price cut to really juice sales. Remember, Apple reportedly stands to make about a 42.9 percent margin on the iPad, so there’s presumably plenty of room for the company to hit an even more aggressive price point that would really put the device in the netbook range.

It remains to be seen whether Apple (AAPL) has created an entirely new computing category with the iPad. But at the very least, analysts seem to believe the company has created an enduring growth engine.

• Charlie Wolf, Needham & Company
  “Because Apple is defining a new category of devices, sales of the iPad are likely to ramp slowly. But the $500 starting price point is low enough to attract a sizable portion of the early adopter crowd, consisting of iPhone and iPod owners. It’s noteworthy that the iPad’s initial price is below the iPhone’s initial price and not much higher than the price of the first iPod, introduced in 2001. Our best guess at this time is the Apple could sell four million iPads in its initial year on the market, which translates into at least $2 billion of revenue.”
• Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray
  “Originally we were estimating sales of 2m units in the first calendar year at a price point of $600-$800. With the actual $499/$629 price point, we believe Apple will sell 3m-4m units in the first 12 months….After using the iPad, we believe it will cannibalize iPod touch sales, but not Mac sales. The gadget is a premium mobile device, not a computer; as such, we see some iPod touch buyers stepping up to the iPad, but consumers looking for an affordable portable computer will likely stick with the MacBook lineup.”
• James McQuivey, Forrester
  “The iPad is a grown up iPod Touch. Apple has taken the safe route of offering its existing customers an option that goes beyond today’s iPod Touch in size and capability, but it has not offered a new category of devices that tackles the 5-6 hours of media we each consume every day. With no integrated social media for sharing photos, recommending books, and sharing home video, the iPad misses a big piece of what makes media so powerful. As it stands, by relying on the App Store as the single most important draw of the device besides its attractiveness, the iPod Touch is a significant step toward making tablets respectable. But making tablets respectable should have been the least of Apple’s ambitions. It had (and still has) the opportunity to create a new media experience in consumers’ lives. As it stands, a quick, well-structured response from Amazon in the next version of Kindle could easily be a contender here. That’s why I say that the iPad is priced lower than expected because it is less revolutionary than expected.”
• Mike Abramsky, RBC
  “Like the first iPod and iPhone, uptake may in time surprise as future versions improve and costs decline. The iPad’s intuitiveness and simplicity at key tasks (browsing, email, media, watching videos, games, reading, working) may appeal to consumers for whom existing PC experiences are intimidating, inadequate, delivering 90%+ of the features of traditional PCs with less complexity than traditional PCs. Uptake however may require in-store demos to truly experience the richness of iPad’s experience.”
• Tavis McCourt, Morgan Keegan
  “The iPad has been long anticipated so we are not shocked by the lack of stock movement. Given the price point, we suspect initial sales will be strong (this is Apple, and there are many enthusiasts), and then simmer down a bit after a few months. The ultimate success of a new product category will be the unique apps developed for this device, and with the SDK just going out today, it is hard to know how impressive they will be. However, the good news is that aside from maybe modest iPod Touch cannibalization, we doubt that the iPad will cannibalize any revenues from the massive margin pools within the iPhone and Mac product categories.”
• Craig Moffett, Bernstein Research
  “Longer term, the iPad offers the potential to redefine the boundaries between print and video, turning formerly passive media into active ones, and in the process making what are currently low bandwidth applications (say, reading a newspaper) become much more bandwidth intensive (e.g. by embedding video rather than still pictures).”
• Mark Moskowitz, J.P. Morgan
  “iPad is not for everyone, and the first-generation product is sure to have its critics given the prelaunch buzz. In our view, the iPad is a smart, nimble device for heavy content users–Apple’s core customer. iPad is a hybrid of sorts, marrying select benefits of the smartphone and notebook. We expect the market to be small at first, but the gamer and education verticals should construct a meaningful growth ramp longer term.”

In your review of the new iPhone 3GS, you said that AT&T had changed its upgrade policy so some buyers of the previous model could get the new-customer price earlier than planned. Can you explain this in more detail?

Almost all cellphones in the U.S. are subsidized by the carriers to bring down prices. Typically, existing customers—who have already benefited from a subsidy—can’t upgrade at the lower new-customer price (in this case $199) until they reach a point in their contracts where this subsidy has been recovered. These dates vary, based on a formula that takes into account things like the customer’s monthly spending rate.

When some early adopters of the 2008 iPhone model, the 3G, discovered they wouldn’t immediately qualify for this $199 “standard upgrade” price—the same as the new-customer price—they got angry. So AT&T made a concession, but only a partial one. It declared that any customer who had been told he or she couldn’t get the $199 price until sometime in July, August or September of 2009 would in fact now be able to qualify for that lower price starting on the first day of availability.

This concession doesn’t apply at all to owners of the original 2007 iPhone, or even every owner of the 2008 3G model. And it isn’t based on when you bought your 3G, but when the system told you that you could buy the new model at the “standard” upgrade price of $199. You can check the price AT&T or Apple will charge you for an upgrade by going to www.att.com/iPhone and clicking on “Check upgrade eligibility.”

I’ve recently heard that the new Palm Pre smart phone is unable to import data from the old Palm Desktop program. In other words, if you have Palm Desktop filled with data from a previous Palm model, you’ll be unable to get that data into your new Palm Pre. Is this true?

No. While the Pre isn’t designed to repeatedly sync with the old Palm Desktop software, Palm does offer a program, for Windows and Mac, that will perform a one-time import of your old data from Palm Desktop. It can also do a one-time import of data from certain other desktop programs as well, including Microsoft Outlook on Windows, and iCal and Address Book on the Mac. This program will help you move your data to one of the online services, such as Google, with which the Pre is designed to sync continuously. The software is called the Palm Data Transfer Assistant and is free at http://bit.ly/3lIaZ.

I am contemplating purchasing the 17” MacBook Pro rather than the 13” or 15” models because the antiglare matte screen is offered only with the 17”. How bad is the glare on the smaller screens and how cumbersome do you find the larger 17” MacBook Pro?

For a laptop of its size, the 17” MacBook Pro is remarkably thin and light. But I did find it cumbersome to use in coach seats on airplanes and to cram into small briefcases. As for the glossy screens, which are now the most common option on many laptops, they bothered me at first, but I don’t notice the glare now. However, both of these are personal issues. So my suggestion is to go to a store and see for yourself.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

“iPhone 3G S Available at AT&T Tomorrow.” That’s the title of the press release that just landed in my inbox–even as lines form outside Apple (AAPL) Stores in New York City and Tokyo (above). Never hurts to state the obvious, I suppose.

Below, something to tide you early adopters over until tomorrow: A video from AT&T (T) showing the device being prepped for the big day.

[Image credit: +D Mobile]

“iPhone 3G S Available at AT&T Tomorrow.” That’s the title of the press release that just landed in my inbox–even as lines form outside Apple (AAPL) Stores in New York City and Tokyo (above). Never hurts to state the obvious, I suppose.

Below, something to tide you early adopters over until tomorrow: A video from AT&T (T) showing the device being prepped for the big day.

[Image credit: +D Mobile]