> In order to gift an app, just click the triangle next to any app’s price and choose Gift This App (naturally, you can’t gift free apps). That’ll get you a form you can fill out with your name and e-mail, the recipient’s name and e-mail, and, if you’d like, a personal message. Heck, if you want, you can gift the same app to multiple people by entering several e-mail addresses; you’ll be billed the purchase cost of the app per address. You can either have the gifted app sent by e-mail or print out the gift yourself, for inclusion in a card or letter. > > Gifted apps show up in the iTunes Purchase History of the gifter, so if you need to refund them—for example, because you accidentally bought a camera app for your friend’s camera-less iPod touch—you would do so just as with any app you bought for yourself. It’s about time Apple added this feature. Talked about missed opportunity for revenue the past two years.

It doesn’t look like there’s any way to do this directly on the iPhone or iPod Touch yet. So far, this can only be done in iTunes. Hope that changes soon.

> This problem will get even worse when you all get sucked into buying a 3D TV for your living room where the size of the screen fills even less of your view. And now there’s talk on the rumor mill of re-releasing *Titanic* in 3D? Watch out for a flood of classics being shoved down the fake stereoscopic pipeline and into your Blu-ray player for an extra $10. Hopefully Cameron will continue to help set a higher standard. I’m usually not a big fan of Gizmodo, but this is a revealing article about the movie industry and its push for 3-D.

> Paramount has taken the unusual and aggressive step of telling theaters with a 3-D-capable screen that if they choose not to show it in 3-D, they won’t be provided with a 2-D copy to show instead.  > > “It’s an underhanded threat,” said one California theater operator who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. > > Walt Disney Studios, meanwhile, is looking to keep as many 3-D screens as possible for “Alice in Wonderland,” which has grossed more than $220 million domestically in its first 12 days. I really wish the public would wise up and realize that 3D is nothing more than a cheap ploy by the movie industry to raise ticket prices, but until they do, this sort of thing is going to happen more and more often.

It’s only a matter of time before most movies come out in 3D; what are the studios going to do then? Force movie theaters to spend more money on upgrading to 3D capability on all their screens? Who is going to pay for that?

Stop paying more for blurry, dark movies, people.

> If we could have launched at Verizon prior to the Droid, I think we would have gotten the attention the Droid got. And since I believe we have a better product, I think we could have even done better,” said Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s CEO. I agree with half of this statement. Palm definitely has the better product. But I don’t think an earlier release would have given Palm the “success” the Droid received, necessarily.

How successful the Droid actually was, few people know. We still don’t have complete sales figures. But it appears that at least the opening couple of months were pretty good. I still think the Droid’s audience was limited to über-geek males by the silly marketing campaign Verizon put out. But maybe they knew that audience was their best shot at any sort of success.

The Pre, on the other hand, has much more potential for wider market appeal. Women, in particular, would be much more likely to want a Pre or Pixi over a Droid, I’d guess. So if the Pre had been released on Verizon sooner, AND Verizon had developed a wide-reaching marketing campaign and put as much money behind it as it did the Droid, then yeah. I’d say Rubenstein would be right. But that’s a big IF.

I almost want to pick up a Pre, just to play around with WebOS more. If I could get one unlocked and not bother paying for monthly service, just use it via WiFi, that might be interesting.

I just hate to see Palm in this position. It has the best product to compete against Apple, but no one is buying it. It’s sort of the same position Apple was in throughout the ’90s. If Android stopped getting so much undeserved positive press, Palm would have a much better shot at making a go of it. They wouldn’t overtake the iPhone any time soon, but they don’t have to.