Emergency Rate Cut. Sorry Ben, shoulda announced this right after your lecture (RIMM news too)

Stocks will stabilize with this news, but the thing is just another band-aid. The earnings reports coming out show how bad the economy will be in the months or years to come. A true Bear Market has been in place for awhile.

RIMM
They finally released their touchscreen phone called Blackberry Storm. They are advertising it as a phone that will take the world by 'Storm', lame, but i get the point. It surely is better than those Windows Sienfeld commercials. The thing that stinks is that its exclusively with Verizon. So its good for the VZ crowd. I have T-Mobile and will soon be stuck with Android as my only 'touchscreen' option. Competition is indeed good, and they have a built in landscape mode for SMS/Email that Apple should quickly integrate, now that RIMM is 'pushing Apples buttons' (pun intended). The Blackberry Storm is noticably fatter than the iPhone and has nowhere near the 3rd party software (or developer community) that is behind the App Store. Still, at least they are not giving up. This should indeed hold down the fort for RIMM.

The question is will Apple exercise its 'Multitouch' patents? If they do, look out... They already learned a hard lesson with MSFT using a clause in a contract that allowed them to produce Windows. So, is Apple able to exercise their intellectual property, when there were other Touchscreens prior to them releasing an iPhone? We shall see.

In either case RIMM at least stays respectable. Releasing 'Storm' will save their stock (and VZ) in the short-term going forward. The iPhone is just in a different class of smartphones. Its an actual hand computer running Mac OS X. And it shows... but consumers often want what the need and have no desire to have all the options afforded them via the iPhone. You can bet that the storm will be given the death name 'iPhone-killer'. RIMMs end to end services have proved for the most part more reliable (despite a few system failures this year) than AT&T. Interesting Smartphone battles, now that Apple has some competition.