AT&T announced that the tiny HP Veer 4G smartphone will go on sale May 15 for $99.99 with a two-year contract.

I’ve been using Palm devices for quite a while now and have found its interface to be more intuitive than any other device I’ve used – to the point where I try to swipe on my tablet and for some reason it just doesn’t respond. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get a TouchPad to address that behavioral tick.

The Veer is one of the smallest smart phones out there. You can see from this Veer unboxing video that it is very usable – especially for those folks looking for a small device. Sorry the picture isn't actual size. although depending on your display device -- it might be close.

"Veer is introducing the smartphone experience to a new generation of users," said Stephanie Maes, vice president of smartphone products at the Palm unit inside of HP. It has a powerful processor and includes many features and applications expected by the consumer market today.

AT&T calls the device 4G because it will run over HSPA+ networks with enhanced backhaul where available, giving performance above 3Mbps for downloads.

Notice, I didn’t even use the word mobile in that post.

I’ve been in a few conversations this week where the word “mobile” was thrown into a conversation and it became clear that based on what part of the world or the technical background you’re from that “mobile” means very different things.

For a great many people when they hear mobile they think the conversation is related to the mobile phone. For those with a more desktop infrastructure focus, it could be a laptop/tablet. For some in the application space it is a thin client talking to applications over the network, while for others it is a thick client running on the device itself.

As organizations go to a “mobile first” architectural strategy, it becomes the norm rather than the exception.

It is now so overused and yet so inclusive that it may not mean anything anymore. There is also the whole issue of Mobile workers as well.

Have you seen this phenomenon as well – it’s sort of like what’s happened to the word “cloud”.

Prith Banarjee, HP’s Senior Vice President for Research and director of HP Labs was interviewed earlier this month in a NewEnterprise article. The focus was mainly on cloud and the labs activities to support generating value from it so the interview did cover a range of topics. He mentions the eight major areas of research at HP labs, and how they fit into the larger view of the future.

He talks about a number of shorter term activities related to cloud and storage as well as strategic activities that will not see the market for 5-10 years. He also mentioned my leader –

“Jamie and her team are trying to develop a set of cloud services aimed at verticals like health care and transportation and financials. We’re coming up with some very unique IP in these solution areas.”

I’ve mentioned the importance of defining context from data , this is where the new information analytics lab comes in:

“What they’re trying to do is look at all the structured and unstructured data. About 80 to 90 percent of it is going to be unstructured. The key is tying it together with the structured data and do really deep analytics on that. The work that is going there is being leveraged with a new company that we acquired, called Vertica.”

This article provides a high level overview of the innovation activities taking place in the labs, but like any interview, there is quite a bit more going on underneath. Many of the items mentioned are signpost along the road that point to a new future. Thinking about their implications on your business and investments can help organizations prepare for the kind of future needed to complete.

When I saw the announcement, I was a bit surprised. Not that Skype was getting acquired, but that Microsoft was buying them. There have been rumors of a number of business bidding, but I didn’t recall seeing MS as one of them.

When you look at the capabilities Skype has that others have not been able to perform reliably, it does leave open some interesting possibilities in accelerate the use of X-over-IP techniques in business through the integation of MS products. It will be interesting to see how MS plans to monetize the investment.

Intel’s announcement that it will be moving a 22nm manufacturing process into production will have some significant implications to both power and cost in the near term.

Intel itself characterized its 3-D Tri-Gate technology as a "major technical breakthrough" that has significant advantages over the two-dimensional planar transistors that have powered innumerable devices in countless products from home appliances to cars over the past 50 years.

This technological advancement continues the advancements that were defined as “Moore’s Law” decades ago. “More than 6 million 22nm Tri-Gate transistors could fit in the period at the end of this sentence.” And that can provide unprecedented computing power to the edge of the enterprise as well as the data center itself, extending the abundance of computing.

Technologies like this enables the merger of the virtual and the physical world, allowing us to plan for a different future for the businesses we support.

Back when doing my predictions for 2010, I stated:

“Cloud Computing was at the Peak of Inflated Expectations in Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.  We've started to hear some early stumbles as the market understands how the current implementations of cloud work”.

This understanding through experience is continuing into 2011.

Over the past few weeks there have been concerns expressed about the Amazon storage issue, and the lessons learned from it. There have also been outcries for people to beware of the public cloud. There have even been lessons learned from companies like Microsoft in business magazines like Forbes.

These activities signal that we’re starting to look at the capabilities and application implications in a more realistic manner. Now if we can gets some standards defined to overcome the lock-in scenario felt by many enterprise class clients.