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Palm is set to preview this week its latest incarnation of mobile operating system — Nova — in a bid to re-ignite the company as a smartphone leader. Latest developments say that Palm will also release a new device that runs Nova as well. The unveiling is expected during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2009, which starts on Thursday, January 8 in Las Vegas.

We have information from a trusted source that the latest Palm smartphone running the Nova operating system will be launched Thursday. The new phone will have a full QWERTY keyboard that will slide down under a portrait-oriented touchscreen. We’ll have a mock-up shortly.

The new operating system is described as “amazing” and there will be a full software bazaar on launch. It will have media playback functions along with standard Palm calendar, email, and contact functionality.

As expected, the phone is described as “iPhone-like” and will probably be sourced by HTC like the Palm Pro. The official Palm announcement should happen this Thursday at CES.

British police may remotely hack into personal computers and e-mail without warrant

Britain’s Home Office will allow police to remotely hack into anyone’s computer without a warrant. From the Times:

The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.

The move follows a green light from the European Union, and also permits British police to access U.K. residents’ computers at the behest of investigators from other countries. This could allow the British to conduct searches on behalf of local agencies bound by more restrictive policies, sharing the results back with them.

Folks have been talking in the U.K about this, and I think their opinion sums up why no-one there takes this sort of thing seriously. Americans assume a level of competence in bureaucracy, no matter how disorganized its visible operations. The British, however, believe their civil service and police are institutionally stupid, barely capable of executing their basic functions. So the Brits simply can’t take seriously the idea that assigning police more powers will affect much of anything.

2009 will be another year where internet browsers will compete for market share.

The past year has seen some exciting changes in the browser market with at least one new player giving the market a shake and an old competitor still battling away with its latest release.

In theory the browser market is commoditised. There is not much money to be made from building a new browser, no matter how good it is. At least that is the theory. But the past year has shown that the browser wars are still in full swing. It’s just that now the stakes are even higher and even non-traditional browser makers are getting in on the act.

A few months ago we got a taste of that as Google released beta versions of its Chrome browser. Although it only worked on Windows machines at launch time, Chrome quickly made its presence felt. Within days of its release there were reports of webmasters seeing more than 2% of their traffic coming from Chrome users and the W3C now pins Chrome’s market share at 3.1%. Which is impressive in a market where after years of competing Opera Software has just 2.3% market share.

It also good news for Google, who clearly is hoping that building a browser optimised for its own online applications will make it a worthy competitor against the likes of Microsoft who has been a little slow coming to market with an online offering.

Microsoft, on the other hand, looks unlikely to release its latest browser, Internet Explorer 8, before the second quarter of 2009. Although it has been in beta for the best part of the year, Microsoft now says that a final beta will be issued in the early part of 2009.

Unfortunately, this could be a little too late for Microsoft. Its competitors are getting stronger by the day and by early 2009, Chrome will be out of beta, Firefox will have racked up millions of new users and Opera will have released its version 10 browser.

A new study shows that the Firefox web browser has increased its share and is now having 20% percent of the browser market. This leaves Internet Explorer with only 69 percent. The study collected data from users worldwide and it shows that browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are not niche products anymore.

The data was collected by the web statistics company Net Applications and showed that Firefox reached 20.78 percent share in November 2008. What is more important, though, is that Microsoft Internet Explorer, the long-time favorite browser for many users, has fallen beneath 70 percent barrier for the first time.

John Lilly, chief executive at Mozilla, stated that the new report, which depicted Firefox as being the second most favorite web browser worldwide, represents a “milestone” both for Mozilla and for Firefox. He added that the huge community of developers boosted the browser’s popularity, as it offers a wide range of applications and plug-ins. This way, users can customize the browser the way they like it to.

In the meantime, Google managed to deliver its Chrome web browser to about 1 percent of the internet users. While it may not mean too much, things are expected to go better for Chrome. That is because the browser is now marketed as a full-release product and we should see some OEMs bundling it to their computers in 2009 and hence, increasing Chrome’s popularity among users.

If you frequently visit any part of Asia such as China, Singapore, Korea, you will already know that they have got a number of dual sim card mobiles, made by their own native brand.

But what we have got here is one by LG, called the LG KS660, its the latest dual sim phone from LG which runs on a tri-band network.

This handset allows users to have both their business and personal lines concurrently on a single device without having to switch sim cards. This function is also ideal for backpackers or travellers.

The KS660 has a 3.0-inch WQVGA (240×400) TFT touch-screen display with feedback, 5.0-megapixel camera with autofocus, flash, and video recording (720×480), 50MB internal memory, microSDHC slot and integrated accelerometer.

The phone will hit China, Russia and few more places by early 2009. If you’re in Europe or the US, you’ll still need to wait abit, no idea for how long though!

Mozilla’s Firefox browser has also surpassed 20 percent market share for the first time.

And Google certainly isn’t reluctant to kick Microsoft while it’s down, as it now automatically recommends that Gmail users running IE6 switch to Firefox or Google’s own Chrome browser (apparently Google is hoping that those users don’t realize that IE7 exists or that IE8 is on the way).

I’m sure the Microsoft dudes are starting to get a bit frantic about the slippage in IE’s market share, and I fully expect IE8 to get nearly as glamorous a launch as Windows 7 in order to try to win back some of those Firefox and Chrome converts.

For those of you included in that group of disenchanted IE users, what would it take to bring you back? Adblock Plus for IE? Or would that just be polishing a turd?

While Microsoft spent the best part of 2008 releasing test versions of its IE8 browser - the first beta was in March - its competitors have been streaking ahead.

In fact, in the time that Microsoft has taken to iron out last-minute problems in IE8 and finish its testing, there are even more browser competitors in the market.

Google, for example, released its Chrome browser as a beta version in early September and just three months later released version 1.0 of the browser. Sure, Chrome doesn’t have half the features that IE8 does, or even Firefox 3, but that hasn’t harmed it. According to NetApplications, Chrome already had close to 1% share of the browser market by November and with version 1.0 being released in December that number is expected to climb even higher.

Firefox, in comparison, topped 20% market share for the first time in November 2008. That’s up from around 16% in January of 2008. Similarly, Apple’s Safari browser is up from 5% in January 2008 to more than 7% in November.

Internet Explorer’s market share has dropped from 75% at the start of 2008 to 69% on November. Which is not an encouraging trend for Microsoft.

When Internet Explorer 8 is finally released in early 2009, no doubt there will be a spike in users who, because they are prompted to update their versions, will switch to the newer browser. And most will be happy with what is essentially the best browser Microsoft has released to date.

But if the company delays the final release too much longer it could be looking at a completely different browser landscape in which it will have much more competition that ever before.