Steve Jobs doesn't like Flash, and his feud with Adobe has made more than a few recent headlines. Given that he's also no fan of Google these days, it's probably fitting that the search giant is integrating the Flash plug-in directly into its Chrome browser.

As Jobs will reportedly tell anyone willing to listen, Flash is a memory hog, it crashes browsers, and it has security issues. Apple's chief is throwing his weight behind HTML 5, and his refusal to support Flash on the iPad may or may not open the door for a tablet competitor like HP's forthcoming Slate, which will run the Adobe software.

Apple has racked up hundreds of thousands of iPad orders since the tablet computer went on pre-sale March 12, according to the Wall Street Journal. That's more or less in line with estimates from earlier this week, although some analysts had suggested that sales had slowed dramatically after a burst of 120,000 on day one.

As noted by Flurry earlier this week, it took Apple 74 days to sell 1 million iPhones. One of the Journal's sources said that the iPad could actually outperform the iPhone's first three months of sales. Considering the devices' difference in price, those kinds of numbers would certainly count as an early success.

Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein says he's optimistic about his company's future, but with its smartphone sales sagging and the mobile competition heating up, Rubinstein may be the only person who feels that way.

In its fiscal third quarter, Palm shipped 960,000 smartphones -- a 23 percent increase from the previous quarter -- but managed to sell only 408,000, which is 29 percent fewer than it moved in its second quarter. Its $150 million in quarterly revenues were well short of what analysts had anticipated.

A pair of new studies are predicting what many observers have called a forgone conclusion: the mobile application market is ready to explode.

Pegged at $4.1 billion globally in 2009, revenue from mobile apps -- including downloads and mobile ads -- could rise to $17.5 billion by 2012, according to a study from Chetan Sharma Consulting, which was sponsored by independent mobile app store GetJar.

BlackBerry users are falling out of love with their RIM smartphones and eyeing sexier competitors, according to market research firm Crowd Science.

In a brand loyalty survey, Crowd Science found that 32 percent of BlackBerry owners would swap their smartphone for the Google Android-based Nexus One. In comparison, only 9 percent of iPhone users said they'd make the switch.

In the wake of its acquisition by Oracle, many of Sun's IT bigwigs took flight (by choice or otherwise). Today, one of them landed, as Tim Bray, Sun's former director of Web technologies, started his first day at Google. And with Google's rivalry with Apple building, it's worth noting that Bray wasted no time firing a verbal volley or two.