Las Vegas Again, Twitter Goonery, Cameras and Phones, VW Beetle, More

Good afternoon.

I'm back in Las Vegas this week, this time for Mobile Connections. I got to meet Aaron Hillegass today. I'm a fan.

So I give the Winklevoss twins some credit for persistence. But seriously guys, we get it. Just give it up: You were swindled.

One from the loony files: Twitter is reportedly considering buying TweetDeck for $50 million. WTF? What? It's an app. A free app. 

Apple has updated iTunes yet again, this time to version 10.2.2, in order to fix iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad sync issues. How about updating it to version 11 to fix all those suck issues?

The conventional wisdom is that smart phones have killed, or in the process of killing, a variety of single-purpose devices, including point and click cameras, handheld video cameras (Flip), and personal recorders. As is so often the case, however, the conventional wisdom may be wrong. According to Wired and others, "worldwide still-camera sales increased 10 percent to 141 million units last year." So smartphone use is rocketing, yes. But people still use cameras because of the additional functionality and picture quality.

I've been driving a 2000 VW New Beetle for, well, 11 years now and have sort of been holding out to see what the new version looks like. Today, we found out, as VW unveiled the "New New Beetle" (really, what it calls the 3rd generation VW Beetle). Looks nice. But since I understand VW, I won't even consider this vehicle until at least year two.

AT&T will finally start shipping the February and March updates for Windows Phone 7 tomorrow, on April 19. Why so late? It may be in part because they're including two custom apps.

Speaking of mobile platforms and Microsoft, the software giant has delivered a new mobile photo app ... for iOS. Wah-wah-waaaaah.

Paul Allen agrees with me that Microsoft moves too slowly. I wonder if he's in the penalty box now too. :)