Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

On July 1, HP will launch its HP TouchPad, its WebOS-based tablet, into a crowded sea of tablets already adrift in the wake of Apple's iPad--RIM's PlayBook, any number of Android tablets from Motorola, Toshiba, and so on. With such a late entry to the crowded marketplace, critics have said, HP lags behind competitors who have a huge head start fostering robust app environments. Android and Apple boast hundreds of thousands of apps on their platforms

What product is going to be the iPad killer? Consumers and bloggers alike can't stop asking that question. Search for "iPad Killer" on Google and you'll return 778,000 results.

It's perhaps the most convincing clue yet that Apple may be coming out with an iPhone 5 "Lite": Older iPhone 3GSs and iPad 1s are outselling individual competing units from Android handset makers.

Overseas roaming charges tend to add up during international travel. EZ Roam, a new cell-phone service available in 170 countries, has an alternative.

The BlackBerry PlayBook is a new 7-inch business tablet that shows promise.

01 / Yandex > > For mastering search. The internet search company Yandex is already three times more popular than Google in its home market (Russia) and this year, it made its move onto Google's international turf with the launch of an English-language search engine. One of Yandex's key advantages has always been the complexity of the Russian language, whose Lego-set of prefixes, roots and suffixes has forced it to be a step ahead in the nuance of its algorithms.

The iPad is now having a measurable effect on the PC sales industry, according to a recent analyst report from Deutsche Bank . The bank raised its stock-price target for Apple , and cut price targets for PC makers as a result. Chris Whitmore, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, issued a note to his investors today that's hit the tech headlines for one big reason: He suggests that while PC sales are continuing to grow over recent months, they're proceeding at a much slower rate than industry observers had expected, with one device to blame--the iPad

Google's Android OS has made great strides in seizing marketshare among smartphones, but the fragmentation of devices has finally caught Google's attention--for its Honeycomb tablet OS, hardware specs will be much tighter.

BlackBerry maker RIM just revealed it's signed up to license the patent portfolio of Nathan Myhrvold's IP firm Intellectual Ventures. This will give the company access to a lot of innovative thinking and 30,000 patents. Intellectual Ventures was founded in 2000 as a kind of innovation, invention, and IP asset library or archive, but unlike a "dead" patent hoarder, IV actually raises money (more than $5 billion so far from Fortune 500 companies and academic institutions) to action some of its ideas--most recently we saw the firm associated with a novel nuclear reactor design that could have prevented the disaster that's befalling Japan

1. The battle for advertising market share between Facebook and Google just took an interesting turn: Some Facebook app developers are reporting that Facebook's instructing them to stop using Google's AdSense network. It's because Google hasn't signed Facebook's terms for ad partners, and it's unlikely to--it could impact Google's business model for earning cash.

Google 's cloud-based music service may already be up and running--if you know where to look for it. A hacker from the XDA-Dev forum found something interesting when he forced the Motorola Xoom Android tablet's music app onto his Android smartphone: a "Sync Music" feature. So the hacker tested the out the feature

Apple now has the iPad 2. Research in Motion has its Playbook. Google has a plethora of Android tablets, including the Motorola Zoom getting so much attention.