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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To describe the segmentation of the mobile phone marketplace, analysts and industry professionals use a common lexicon to group similar devices by their relative features and capabilities. The majority of mobile phones that have graced retail shelves in recent years fall into two distinct categories: featurephones and smartphones. Lately, however, a new category has begun to emerge, that of the superphone.

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Palm (PALM) shares received a boost this morning from Cowen analyst Matthew Hoffman, who launched coverage of the company with an Outperform rating. Hoffman asserts that the stock can appreciate more than 30 percent over the next 12 months.

Hoffman sees two catalysts for the stock ahead: a refresh of the “once-aging” Treo lineup, with new models based on Windows Mobile 6.1, and the much-anticipated new Palm OS, which he says “should provide increased product differentiation” by the end of the May 2009 fiscal year.

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In Microsoft’s never-ending search to bloat its software with bells and whistles of questionable use, the company now wants to add touch-screen capabilities to Windows. Raise your hand if you’ve been dying to navigate on your laptop by touching the screen? Anybody? Anyone at all?

This is the company that has been sure the tablet PC would be a success since 1999. It’s never been more than a computing niche. Yeah, touch-screen makes sense on something you hold in your hand, like an iPhone or Treo. But not-so-much with something that sits on your desk.

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After wandering around at CTIA (usually hopelessly lost) I’ve decided that I was wrong. I need a touch screen and I need it bad. When the iPhone came out, the EDGE network, crappy AT&T coverage in Austin and the hype factor kept me away. Plus, the touch screen on my husband’s Treo had always flustered me. I liked the tactile element of hitting keys.

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