I really hated Palm’s devices the past couple of years. Why? I wrote I hated their small screens. I still do.

But recently I got a look at the smartphone that HP will be announcing in an hour and a half. More on that later today.

What is it? The smallest little phone I’ve ever seen. It’s like a large pebble in your hand. Smooth and really nice to hold.

This still sucks as a competitor for the iPhone or Android.

But they’ve made it so small now that the thing I hated (small screen, which isn’t good for really doing work) is now an attribute.

Why?

Because I could see owning this as a second phone. A “date” phone.

Why?

Because it’s so small it helps me keep my online addiction at bay. But it still lets me tweet or look at the web in an emergency.

It’s fashionable.

It’s cute.

Women are gonna love it.

People who don’t want to look like a geek on their nights out will love it.

That’s the “small” thing HP/Palm is announcing today. I’ll get you some video and photos.

Congrats to HP/Palm on turning around my objection to your crappy small screens and making that a real product attribute.

That’s what they mean in the announcement by “small.” The “big” is their 10-inch tablet. I haven’t seen that or the services that will power all these things. More later today.

I got that image over on the Everything Pre website. Watch that and Techmeme for more.

Well, the CEO at Nokia has finally set all the fan boys who’ve been attacking me for years into their places.

FINALLY.

Some clear thinking at Nokia. Wow. And what a memo it is.

FINALLY. Someone at the top of Nokia notices what I’ve noticed by traveling the world. Nokia is in serious trouble.

Can Stephen Elop jump his company off of the burning platform, as he put it, and do something interesting?

Well, at least the execs are not sounding arrogant anymore (first time in years!) and they aren’t saying “we are the marketshare leader.” As if THAT ever matters! Just ask all the “market share leaders” who have disappeared into the bowels of the Computer History Museum.

So, what’s the post-burn Nokia look like?

We’ll find out Friday, but it sure looks like he’s working on the list of things I laid out.

In the meantime Google’s VP, Vic Gundotra, is adding gas to the fire with his tweet saying “two turkeys do not make an eagle.” What does he mean? Oh, Nokia hardware with Microsoft Windows Phone 7 OS won’t make a good smartphone.

Vic is pretty correct. Microsoft is late to the party and Nokia is even later. Google is in a much better spot, especially on software and services.

But Vic better watch out for this “turkey” NokiaWP7 device, or family of devices. Why? They seem to be playing a lot of Angry Birds over at Nokia and if you put a turkey into a catapult it can do a lot of damage to Google.

It seems to me that Nokia is changing the game, or trying to. While Google is playing Flight Simulator, Nokia is playing Angry Birds. And, no, Google hasn’t been acting like the mighty eagle, either, lately. Just ask the Wave team.

I actually like using Windows Phone 7 better than I like using Android. Can they capitalize on that, or will Google come out with a revamped Android OS with new UI that makes them the user experience thought leader?

Also, counting Microsoft out seems like a no brainer. Hell, I left Microsoft four years ago because I knew the product pipeline was dry. I was right. But now Steve Ballmer has a fire lit under his own behind and can point to Kinect as a consumer success. A huge success. Fastest selling new product in history.

So, if Microsoft and Nokia can pull harder on the Xbox brand they have a real shot at doing some damage to Google. That turkey might end up looking like an Angry Bird that takes out a good piece of a building over in Mountain View.

Plus, Nokia does have nice maps (NAVTEQ and Microsoft have been partners for a long time) and they do make nice hardware. Love those cameras and radios!

So, with a new, flattened Nokia (what happens when your company jumps off something and hits the water? It gets flatter!) and a new partnership with Microsoft, Elop is ready for some Angry Birds wars with Google and Apple.

I’m not counting them out. But Elop sure has to aim that turkey carefully. He only has one shot and if he aims wrong that turkey will fly off the screen without hitting Google or Apple. Aim right, though, and we could have some new fun!

Oh, and GDGT’s Peter Rojas? Right on about the Nokia fanboys. They have always been wrong and now Stephen Elop has put them in the jail they so rightfully deserve being in.

I’ve started taking note of what Accel Partner’s Jim Breyer is up to.

You might have thought he was in Munich last week to catch the fun Duffy concert. You’d be wrong.

Instead, look at who is he’s hanging out with to start to get a picture of the puzzle he’s building.

He’s building a cabal where he’s going to get a cut of nearly every local dollar we spend.

The three companies?

1. Groupon.
2. Foursquare.
3. Qriously.

These three, together, are going to provide the complete local experience. Here’s how.

1. Groupon gets you to go visit new businesses through emails.
2. Foursquare entices you to new businesses when you check in or walk by.
3. Qriously finds out whether you’ll be back or not (or other details), which will let the other two get even better.

UPDATE: Breyer/Accel is only invested in GroupOn, but since most of the money will get collected by Groupon, that’s what matters the most anyway.

You might not know Qriously (the photo on this post is of CEO Christopher Kahler, who has the best business card I collected in the past two weeks while traveling in Germany and Switzerland), but they just signed their first questions deal and they have a set of mobile apps that are mostly a way for them to get feedback from users around the world about businesses you’re in.

I saw the system work tonight in Geneva and it’s pretty interesting.

The guy who showed me how it works showed me a photo app. After you take a photo it asks you a question, like, “did you like your meal?”

Wait a second, how did it know I was at a place that serves meals? Oh, yeah, Foursquare.

On it you use your finger to instantly vote yes or no.

Or, it could ask you “were you happy with your deal and would you come back?”

This can be used to prove to businesses that Groupon is working fine.

Damn that Jim Breyer, he’s so smart. I just saw how with three companies he’s gonna get a cut of nearly every local dollar spent.

I wish I had been invited to the dinner in Munich where the four of them got together to talk about business.

Don’t think they have the industry’s attention? Check out the photo that I shot at DLD where Foursquare and GroupOn were on stage.

Funny that they didn’t talk about what they REALLY were doing in Munich! That’s OK, we’ll all figure it out in 2012 when these four take over the local marketplace.

By the way, the cartoon on this post is by Hugh Macleod of http://gapingvoid.com — Rackspace hired him to come up with a series of cartoons and this one seemed to fit this post.

UPDATE: I updated this post to correct what companies Accel is actually invested in.

This post was republished from Rackspace’s Building43.

The world of payments is changing, but not without a fight. In the future you won’t pull out your Visa or MasterCard; instead, you’ll pull out your cellphone or a card you can swipe on a sensor. One company making that future a reality is mPayy.

So why can’t we pay our bills via our phones yet? Why does everything still involve our credit cards?

“It’s a business model issue,” says Conrad Sheehan, founder, president and CEO of mPayy, an alternative electronic payment system. “We see the mobile carrier as being an emergent dominant relationship you have in your life. But ‘business model’ is sometimes code for ‘who’s going to make money?’ In the world of payments, it’s a fixed pie. Something has to give. There’s a world of issuing banks, a world of acquiring banks, and then there’s Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discover in the middle: the three-person party. How do you get a wireless carrier in there? Then, by extension, the OEM—the phone manufacturer? They’ve got to make money in order for this to work.”

Amid these major forces, mPayy’s strategy is to “come in at a right angle”: building software for a payment system focusing on purchases too small to pay with plastic, or utility bills, where you might have to pay extra to use a credit card.

In Sheehan’s view, the current design of credit cards is something we’d change completely, if we could have a do-over. “They were built for an offline, mechanical world. That’s why the numbers are raised: the financial data is sitting right on the card. You could be blind and still get it. This hasn’t changed one bit, in light of the ubiquitous world of the internet: it’s still the same exact product. If you were to do a new one, you would never put sensitive financial data in plain text on a card.”

More info:
mPayy web site: https://www.mpayy.com/
mPayy on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mpayy
mPayy profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mpayy

Techcrunch has the news about SkyGrid’s new social messaging and aggregation platform, I have the first look. Last week SkyGrid’s CEO, Kevin Pomplun, came over to show me what they are doing and what’s behind his company’s latest moves.

You can check it out at SkyGrid Groups.

I’m hearing from a few of my sources that Nokia is readying a major restructuring that will be announced to the company on Feb. 11th. Analysts might already be getting briefed on the changes. I haven’t heard specifics yet, most employees, even executives, haven’t heard either other than they know something is up.

Which leaves us to speculate and guess what’s up.

As you know I’m no friend of Nokia’s lately. Been really bashing them, like in my note to Tomi Ahonen.

My bashing has largely been proven right. Nokia’s “head” has been cut off by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android and now the world can see the evidence with layoffs and lower profits announced since I wrote that note to Tomi.

But a new sheriff is in town. Stephen Elop, who arrived from Microsoft.

The big question is still unanswered: can he get Nokia back into the super smartphone race that’s so dominated by Apple and Google?

Well, I’ve been talking to folks inside Nokia and here’s what I’ve learned:

1. He must flatten the structure at Nokia. One employee told me that the folks who do the work are seven to 10 layers of management from Stephen’s office. Funny, all Elop has to do is look to another Steven back at Microsoft to see what needs to be done. Steve Sinofsky, who runs the Windows team, flattened Microsoft’s structure from about eight levels to about four, which greatly improved morale and ability to get stuff done.

2. He needs to bet the company on a new OS. The folks I’ve been talking with inside the company are praying that Elop dumps Symbian and either picks the newer Meego OS, which is largely unproven and behind schedule in many places, or just goes and makes a deal with Microsoft and chooses the Windows Phone 7 OS.

3. He needs a team to work with developers. I’ve been hearing Microsoft has been very tough to deal with. Heck, Angry Birds is still not available on Windows Phone 7, which says volumes about how Microsoft has been executing on getting apps developed for Windows Phone 7. Elop needs to make Nokia execute way better than Microsoft in the app development space.

4. He needs to pull out all the stops on a cool showcase piece of hardware. Nokia still has great hardware developers. Get them to build the best hardware they’ve ever built and get them to ship it on time. That will help Nokia excite developers (aka my point #3).

5. He needs to simplify the product line so that everyone in the world can explain Nokia’s products to other people. Right now I’ve lost track of how many different devices Nokia sells and how they connect with each other.

6. He needs a developer tools division. See point #3. What will the folks working with developers need? Simple development tools for delivering ultra high quality apps. Meego or Windows Phone 7 OS-based tools will be fine, although I’m hearing from developers that Microsoft’s tools are more mature.

7. He needs a world-wide marketing message around Nokia’s top-of-the-line phone, which will communicate Nokia’s strategy and vision.

8. He needs to ensure that Nokia’s famous distribution system is reenergized and remains best in the business.

That already is a HUGE amount of work to do, is Elop up to the job? We’ll find out shortly after Feb. 11th.

What do you think? Can Elop and his team at Nokia make the sizeable organizational shifts, which probably include more layoffs (which are difficult to implement under Finnish employment law) in order to make this happen?

I actually am hoping they can. The more competitors that Apple and Google have the better off we all are, even those of us who probably will stick with either Apple or Google products.

Not to mention that Nokia owns a great deal of services, like Navteq, which just bought my favorite Trapster (lets you see where cops are hanging out on freeways).

Good luck to Elop, we’re cheering you on!