The smart-phone wars are heating up. Handset makers are releasing a wave of new devices backed by a flood of advertisements, as some fight for survival in the fast-growing but increasingly crowded market.

Companies such as Motorola Inc. (MOT), Palm Inc. (PALM) and HTC Corp. are hoping new phones will help them reclaim market share from the reigning iPhone and BlackBerry. To do that, they will need a mix of impressive devices, shrewd pricing and aggressive marketing, analysts say.

Motorola has bet its future on a lineup of new phones that run Google Inc. (GOOG) software. On Wednesday, it is expected to unveil a highly anticipated device dubbed the Droid on the Verizon Wireless network. Verizon (VZ) has been touting the phone in TV ads attacking the iPhone.

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A few days after the Palm Pre was released, I wrote a couple of programs for it: a restaurant Tip Calculator, and a port of Dali Clock. These were, as far as I’m aware, the 2nd and 3rd third-party applications for Palm WebOS that were ever available. I got on this boat early.

So why are they still not available in Palm’s (PALM) App Catalog? That’s a very good question. This is my story about attempting to simply distribute this free software that I have written, and how Palm has so far completely prevented me from doing so.

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For two Canadian guys who’ve spent the past 17 years together building one of the world’s most important tech companies, Research in Motion (RIMM) co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis have surprisingly little in common.

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Recently, Palm (PALM) came under fire when programmer Joey Hess discovered the Pre’s smartphone OS was sending users’ GPS locations back to Palm on a daily basis. Although this information was disclosed in the company’s privacy policy, the majority of the phone’s owners were unaware. The incident raised questions about consumer privacy and the extent to which both handset makers and developers were gathering data on mobile users.

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The best days for the Palm (PALM) Pre may already have past. That was the implication of the Sell call on the stock this morning from Morgan Joseph–and the same theme can be found in a similarly bearish note this morning from Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar.

Kumar says that despite being positioned as a flagship product at Sprint (S), Palm shipped under 300,000 units in May and June. He says the company ramped up production aggressively in July when shipments exceeded build levels in the previous two months, but that the “momentum appears to have already peaked.”

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Sales of the Palm (PALM) Pre smartphone may be creeping up to 30,000 a week this week versus a prior trend of 25,000, writes Pali Capital analyst Walter Piecyk in a blog post this morning. (Free registration required to view the post.) Piecyk observes the Pre was available for $99 briefly this week through online orders, but that Sprint (S), which has the exclusive on the Pre, also stepped up a print campaign targeting AT&T (T) customers who may be interested in moving from the Apple (AAPL) iPhone at the end of their contract.

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Since Palm (PALM) to date has refused to give any hard data on sales of the much-ballyhooed Pre smartphone, the Street has resorted to some alternative methods to get a read on how sales are going. While the company still has plenty of fans, the sharp run-up in the stock combined with the lack of information has created a large pool of skeptics. The bears on the stock contend the evidence suggests demand has slowed considerably since the launch in early June–and that the stock is due for a fall.

Palm could clear up the speculation and rumor-mongering by simply providing hard numbers. But they haven’t done that. So as a public service, I’m passing some of the more cautious chatter about Palm now making the rounds on the Street:

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Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu this morning launched coverage of Palm (PALM) with a Hold rating and a $16 price target. He writes in a research note that the company is well-positioned in the smart phone sector with its WebOS software, but that the valuation is expensive; he also is concerned about ongoing operating losses and a weak balance sheet. “While we believe PALM is well-positioned with its webOS software and highly integrated hardware,” he writes, “we are concerned about its balance sheet and continued operating losses over the next four quarters as we don’t model profitability until the August 2010 quarter.”

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Contrary to previous public statements by the company, Palm CFO Douglas C. Jeffries has not been registered as a certified public accountant in the state of California since 1984, records from the California Board of Accountancy show.

In an 8-K filing announcing his appointment last December, Palm stated that Jefferies “is a certified public accountant.” Likewise, the company until this week stated in a bio on its Web site that “Douglas is a CPA.” The company on Tuesday changed the wording of bio following a query on the issue this week from Tech Trader Daily; the new language reads “Douglas was formerly a CPA.”

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To say Palm has a lot riding on the Pre smartphone is an understatement. Amid stiff competition from Apple (AAPL) and Research In Motion (RIMM), Palm’s very survival may hinge on the success of the device, expected to reach Sprint Nextel (S) store shelves no later than June 30.

And while it’s hard to predict demand for the Pre, preliminary analysis suggests Palm (PALM) will make a healthy profit from the units it does sell.

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As recently as late 2008, Pandora Networks’ Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad still had big doubts about the prospects for smartphone maker Palm (PALM). In November, Conrad was among a coterie of software developers invited to Palm headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., to take an early, up-close look at an operating system for use in the company’s phones. “I was totally skeptical when I walked in,” says Conrad, who met Palm execs along with representatives of MySpace, Intuit (INTU), movie site Fandango, and Epocrates, a maker of mobile software for physicians.

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The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.

It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.

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MediaMaster, a free Web-based application that allowed users to upload music from their hard drives and listen to it online or on their mobile devices, made the decision to shutter its doors, and explained on its Web site that “it is not possible to keep a service like this up for free without some sort of large scale userbase (>500,000) to get ads to pay for it.”

“I would like to thank our 95,000 users over time and especially our thousands of regular users,” the company wrote on its blog.

MediaMaster launched in 2006 to glowing reviews–PC World called it one of the ten best non-Google (GOOG) Web applications, and CNET lauded the site’s simplicity and the ease of creating playlists. Soon after, MediaMaster went on to create a Facebook app allowing users to share their playlists, and then adapted its Web-based platform to streaming playlists to Palm (PALM) Treos or Windows Mobile handsets.

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Apple (AAPL) and Palm (PALM) kicked a lot of dirt at each other last week–acting Apple CEO Tim Cook flatly told analysts that “We will not stand for people ripping off our IP” when asked specifically about competition like the Palm Pre, and Palm responded with a similarly explicit “We have the tools necessary to defend ourselves.” At issue, of course, is that the Pre employs a multi-touch screen and gestures almost exactly like those made famous on the iPhone–and if you’ll recall, Steve Jobs introduced multi-touch on the iPhone with a slide reading “Patented!” To top it all off, the past few days have seen a number of media outlets proclaim that Apple’s been awarded a “multitouch patent” without so much as a shred of analysis, instead hyping up a supposed future conflict. That’s just not how we play it, so we enlisted Mathew Gavronski, a patent attorney in the Chicago office of Michael Best & Friedrich, to help us clear up some of the confusion and misinformation that’s out there–read on for more.

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