Image credit: Percy & Cecil

Image credit: Hangar-7

Big things are happening at SFist Tech, as part of our ongoing bitter rivalry against the cow-molesters at SFist A&M and those stupid frat jocks at University of SFist. This week, your researchers in the labs are in the middle of a zany mix-up involving three Bay Area companies and their wacky misunderstanding of how to market themselves, take advantage of wireless, and handle media rights issues.

Our hapless neighbor who thinks he's sexy but just fails to appeal to anyone, is Palm, formerly PalmOne, originally Palm. While they didn't invent the PDA (what happened, Apple?), they made them ubiquitous and became the 900-pound (408.23 kilo) gorilla of a brand new market. But that was then. This week, they announced falling profits, despite their success with the Treo 650. They've also had issues with quality control, as Palm is being sued by some Treo owners who complain that the Treo fails as both a phone and a PDA.

While we here in SFist labs would describe the plaintiffs using scientific terms such as "overly litigious" and "whiny" for suing over software crashes and dropped calls, we can corroborate the reports of poor quality. Our ugly-but-lovable Treo 600 recently went to live on a farm where it could play with other cellphones, forcing us to get a new Motorola V3 RAZR. While we can't deny that the RAZR makes us a big hit with the ladies, we miss the simpler interface of the Treo and the ability to get a quick, simple, but full-featured internet connection over the phone.

Motorola's got the right idea with the Motorola Q, which aims for the business and "lifestyle" markets, meaning that we'll be able to use mapquest and get lots of tail. Palm's rise to the challenge is the just-revealed Treo 700, which is not a bright, sexy vision of the future, but just a thinner version of the 650 that runs Windows Mobile.

The towels continue to be hers and hers and his, after the jump!