I mentioned last week that Verizon was coming out with ads that are directly targeting the iPhone through both the “Droid” ads that feature Android based phones as well as the “there’s a map for that” commercials. Well, I suppose that Verizon definitely does not want to burn its bridges with Apple. Yesterday Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said that he (and Verizon) are still interested in getting the iPhone.

He said, “This is a decision that is exclusively in Apple’s court. Obviously we would be interested if they thought it would make sense for them to have us as a partner.”

Next year, exclusivity between Apple’s iPhone and AT&T Wireless is supposed to be coming to a close. Apple does have the right to extend the exclusivity, but in my opinion, the company could make more with the device if it were on other networks. The only problem I see is that everyone will have an iPhone and other companies like Palm will be seriously harmed because customers who have not wanted to hop on the AT&T bandwagon won’t have to anymore to get the iPhone.

Then again, not everyone wants an iPhone.

It makes you wonder what the terms were in the first place for AT&T to get the exclusive rights to the iPhone. I know that Apple was interested in the carrier because unlike Verizon, it ran on GSM which makes it easy to produce one kind of phone for the whole world. There aren’t any carriers that run on the CDMA networks outside the United States and the only major companies that do here are Verizon and Sprint.

Only time will tell what will happen with the iPhone and other carriers. I would guess that it won’t move over to Sprint or Verizon until the companies have implemented their 4G coverage (which Sprint is working on quite vigorously).

Microsoft is having a hard time in 2009. This year has so far been the worst for the company in years. For the first six months of the year the company saw weak computer sales as well as frozen corporate tech budgets which led to profits declining by 29 percent.

However, things may be looking up for the second half of the year according to CFO Chris Liddell. He wanted to keep everyone’s hopes up after Microsoft missed expectations by $1 billion and the earnings slipped by a steep 29%.

The earnings topped off a fiscal year in which revenues for the company fell for the first time since 1986, when Microsoft first went public. For the entire year, it said that profits went down 17% or $1.62 a share.

Of course investors weren’t happy to hear the news, sending Microsoft’s stock price down $2, which is 7.8%, to $23.56 a share. In April, Intel’s CEO said that it had seen the worst PC sales and that they had “bottomed out” after the holiday season. Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell said, “we couldn’t necessarily see the bottom. I think that at least we are seeing signs now of the bottom,” in a response to Intel’s statement.

Liddell also made the statement that the remainder of the calendar year will be difficult for PC makers and the software giant because Microsoft’s success is directly linked to the PC industry which is expected to sell fewer computers this year than last. Right now, netbooks are still all the rage and if they are running Windows, they are running XP which means less profits for Microsoft. If Windows 7 comes out and is good enough, then they will begin making more money off the sales of the netbooks due to a higher royalty.

In hopes of stirring up a little demand for the products, Microsoft will be releasing Windows 7 on October 22 as well as a new Office suite in the first half of next year, but these alone will not help the company.

Once upon a time Microsoft was the company everyone wanted to own stock in because it seemed like a pretty safe bet. There was no other competition for them as far as operating systems. If there were other operating systems out there no one really ever paid much attention to them. Now, Microsoft is trying to stop Apple from taking more of the market share than it already has and is fighting with a pretty bad recession.

It’s been some time since I’ve written about the Pre or iPhone…almost 2 weeks? It looks like both of these devices have been seeing their fair share of issues.

First, the Palm Pre, being a first generation device, has done pretty good and Palm is sending updates to fix problems that are coming up. However, the phone does get hot and when it begins to heat up, a “cloud” appears at the bottom of the screen. In my opinion it is annoying and completely unappealing. For this reason, I’m returning my phone tomorrow (some of them have this problem, while others don’t).This is all my opinion and what I’ve read on forums across the internet, Palm has not addressed the issue to my knowledge.

Secondly, the iPhone 3Gs now has a serious overheating issue. If the user decides to use “resource intensive” programs in direct sunlight (according to Apple) then it “could” cause an overheating issue and the phone won’t work. In some cases the white phones’ backs turn brown. Apple has acknowledged this issue and is trying to work it out, but right now there are hundreds of thousands (likely) of iPhone 3Gs users out there with phones that my burn them.

People have been saying that they are experiences the overheating issue while the phone is charging. I have to say, my Pre gets ridiculously hot when I have it plugged in and am using intensive features, but except for the cloud at the bottom of the screen, I haven’t had the issues that the iPhone users are having. I would be really angry if my phone I just paid a couple hundred dollars for decided to turn a different color or be able to cook breakfast foods because of the heat coming off the phone.

I do suppose this isn’t an issue just for these two phones, my husband has a HTC Touch Pro that gets really hot. I don’t think it has any issues directly associated with the heat coming from the phone, but it does (at times) get too hot to hold up to your face to talk on. My LG Fusic (which was not a smartphone, it was a flip) also got too hot to hold up to my face at times, but that’s as far back as an “overheating” problem goes with my phones. None of my old Nokia phones or Motorola phones did.