Quite a bit of enthusiasm seems to be building for ARM's upcoming processor for netbooks and other lightweight computing devices. The Cortex-A9 is promised to have substantially better performance than the current crop of AMD processors, and a video released by AMD ARM gives a pretty convincing picture that the Cortex-A9 will have comparable performance to the Atom. Watch the video after the jump.

So, today at CES, Palm held its big keynote thing. Palm's CEO, Jon Rubinstein, aided by several others, had a whole lot to talk about for just one hour, and boy, is this good stuff or what. We've got a boatload of stuff to talk about: two new phones exclusive to Verizon, tethering, video support, Flash 10, native application development, the official launch of the completely open app distribution model we've talked about before, and much more.

InfoWorld's Galen Gruman writes that the main potential game-changing attribute of the Nexus One - that Google is selling the device direct - does nothing to move the industry past carrier lock-in. "At first, I wanted to credit Google for making a tentative step in the direction of smartphone freedom. But that step is so tentative and ineffectual that frankly I think it's a cynical fig leaf covering the usual practices," Gruman writes. At issue is a political battle regarding walled gardens in the U.S. cellular market, a fight that will take years to result in any true consumer freedom. "The only way we'll ever get the ability to choose a smartphone and carrier independently is for the platform providers that count - Apple, Google, and RIM - to first develop only multiband 'world' smartphones and then refuse to sell their devices (or in Google's case, use its Android license to forbid the sale of devices) to carriers that block or interfere with device portability."

It would appear that Microsoft will finally take standards compliance in the browser world seriously, after dragging its feet for years. Back in November 2009, the Redmond giant already revealed that Internet Explorer 9 would come with CSS3 and HTML5 support, and now the cup runneth over, as Microsoft has requested to join the W3C's SVG Working Group.

Even though CES hasn't even officially started yet, the gadget news is already coming in at a very steady stream. We can't report on all of them, obviously, but we can make a selection of the most interesting ones we've seen so far.

I have no inherent problem with computer makers shipping their machines with Windows pre-installed. Of course, I'd much rather see a lot more diversity when I walk into an electronics retailer, but I can't really blame OEMs for taking the safe bet and focussing on what they know customers seem to want. Still, we need better ways to return our unused OEM copies of Windows, and apparently, a lot of people in Italy agree.

Microsoft has revealed Office 2010 pricing for Home and Student, Home and Business, Professional, and Professional Academic editions. Office will come in both boxed versions and "key card" versions that have no media.

In what is probably the least surprising product launch ever, Google has launched its Nexus One phone, but it's only available in the US, the UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Google has all the specifications, and Engadget has a review. Update by ELQ: Let me just say quickly that I now own the Canon 5D Mark II camera that some of the wallpapers that come with the Nexus One by default were shot with (e.g. this one). These amazing Creative Commons-licensed pictures were shot by Google Android engineer Romain Guy (he wrote the "live wallpaper" engine among other projects) who's also an amazing photographer.

The GeeXboX project has announced the first stable release of Enna (version 0.4.0), an open source media center application. It features a simple user interface, based on the Enlightenment Foundations Libraries for its graphical user interface and the GeeXboX libraries for multimedia playback (libplayer) and information retrieval (libvalhalla and libnfo).

God mode. A term usually reserved for games of all shapes and sizes, with the coolest being Rise Of The Triad's god mode, it has now found its way to the world of operating systems. Someone has discovered that Windows 7 has a god mode - but it's not what you think it is.

A petition launched in December by MySQL creator Michael 'Monty' Widenius to 'save' the open-source database from Oracle has quickly gained momentum, collecting nearly 17,000 signatures. Widenius on Monday submitted an initial batch of 14,174 signatures to the European Commission, which is conducting an antitrust review of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, MySQL's current owner. The petition calls for authorities to block the merger unless Oracle agrees to one of three "solutions", including spinning off MySQL to a third party and releasing all past versions and subsequent editions for the next three years under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

Apple certainly isn't going to be the first to announce a 7-10" thing tablet computer. We already had the Joo Joo, and now Freescale has joined in on the fun with a 7" tablet reference design. Let's talk about Freescale's tablet, and as hinted at during yesterday's podcast, let's spend/waste (pick one) a few words on Apple's tablet as well.

"Apple's Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server is aimed squarely at small businesses that, for any number of reasons, need or prefer to host their core Internet services in-house without breaking the bank. Ars kicks the tires on the new combo to see if Apple has another hit on its hands."

The problem with the future is that by the time you get there, everything is pretty normal. Now that we've arrived in 2010 (something I could hardly imagine 10 years ago), we're now met with the annual tradition of predicting what will happen this year. Now that Kroc, Thom and Tess have recovered enough from the new year we discuss KDE 4, desktop OSes vs. the web and the issues of privacy and government involvement in the Internet--that is, when we managed to stay on topic. More coffee!