Microsoft lowers the price of Zunes by $20.  Sorry if we didn't hear about this earlier, it was under our radar.  Here's the new lineup vs. the nano equivalent:

• 16 GB: Zune, $179; iPod $199 equiv
• 8 GB: Zune, $139; iPod $149
• 4 GB: Zune, $99; no iPod

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The iPhone and the Apple TV were born together. Sharing the same stage at Macworld 2007, both products were an attempt to extend the reach of products they already had, the iPhone growing on the iPod and the ROKR, and the Apple TV growing on the Mac Mini and iTunes. The spotlight at the event was primarily on the iPhone, as they were banking on it to extend their market reach and to bring multi-touch into the mainstream, but the Apple TV was a sleeper product that they hoped would take over the small but growing industry of Internet TV.

Two years later, the iPhone has exploded into the best selling phone of any cell phone, with high critical acclaim and an App Store that is revolutionizing application distribution, and the Apple TV has, well, been sleeping. Sales numbers haven't been revealed, and the Apple TV remains the hobby that Steve Jobs called it after it flopped. Rabid fanboys have defended the Apple TV, saying that Apple did a great job on it, and its an excellent product if you learn to appreciate it. The problem is, consumers aren't going to pay 230 dollars for a product they have to "learn to appreciate."

According to BGR's non-insured Walmart ninjas, the iPhone isn't just going to Costco after Christmas, it is going to Mr. Walton's lil' franchise.  The move is likely to clear out excess holiday inventories and is expected to drop the price to $149, just like at Cosco.

There's been a lot of noise around the Web on Flash coming to the iPhone.  While some folks are in the "never going to happen" camp, there is some precedent for belief that it will someday be in the iPhone platform.  For instance, take this patent application from Apple (image to the right) that includes both Flash and Windows Media players.

To say that Apple is going  to forgo Flash altogether is probably untrue.  To say that they are taking a wait (and wait, aaaand wait) and see approach is probably closer to accurate.  I'm sure Apple would like to have more control over the Flash player as it currently goes against the App Store's provisions and would need to be in the more natively "blessed" area of the iPhone development world.  Perhaps a specially "disabled version" of Flash that allows what Apple deems worthy (less CPU, less ad spam, more AIR apps) could satisfy both parties.

If you live in the US or Canada, like it or not, your English pretty much sounds the same to the outside world...and the Google iPhone application.   Those outside this area have been having less success with the Google iPhone voice recognition application it seems ... at least that's what some of our commenters have said. 

Is this your experience out there?  What could Google do to fix this?  Perhaps they could use the location information in the app to determine what accent to use? 

The downside of that is that you'll have Americans doing their best Monty Python accents when using iPhones in London and you'll have Brits sounding like surfers in New York...not that we aren't anyway.

What's the big deal?  Google's Voice recognition (iTunes link) which is finally live doesn't understand every word we speak?  Sure it works fairly quicky and acurately for people over the age of five.  I am amazed at how good it works for me and my wife.  But what about the two month old demographic?  When will they be served?  Age discrimination isn't funny people.

According to Digitimes, the iPhone will be in Taiwan for the holidays.

Chunghwa Telecom (CHT), on November 14, announced it has obtained exclusive sales rights for the iPhone 3G in the Taiwan market, with launch tentatively slated for December 2008.

However, CHT did not release any further details about prices and the exact date of launch due to a non-disclosure agreement with Apple.

Gray-market iPhone 3Gs imported privately mainly from New Zealand, Hong Kong and the US have been available for sale in Taiwan for a while, with prices ranging from NT$22,000-24,900 (US$667-755) for an 8GB model and NT$23,680-28,500 for a 16GB one.

This weekend, ARM announced that Ubuntu was going to be ported to the Cortex class processors.  Good news for Linux ARM fans but not that special since there have been videos of Ubuntu running on TI OMAP processors for awhile. 

This morning, ARM and Adobe jointly announced that full Flash 10 was ceritfied to run on ARM 11 Chips (like in the iPhone) at over 200Mhz including Windows Mobile devices.  We think someone is trying to tell Apple that Flash could be on the iPhone if they really wanted it there. 

"I can just remove Tony...Boom!"

For those of you running small businesses, Egnyte's cloud file server and backup is a great product.  We use it at work for distributing files to clients and keeping global files easy to access.  We also backup a few OSX servers using the service.  It is great all around.  We haven't had an outage in the 6 months we've been customers.  I could go on and on..

Last month, however, Egnyte got really Apple friendly by releasing an iPhone web client.  We can now browse our file servers while on the road with an iPhone.  This is actually a great feature if you just need a quick look at a document or image.  The iPhone thinks Egnyte's servers are web servers and if you download a .doc file, it uses the iPhone's Quicklook to look at the file.  This works with all of the iPhone's Quicklook abilities including PDFs, XLS and PPTs.

But this is where it gets interesting...