Iomega’s Rev drives compete with portable hard drives from Seagate and Western Digital; EMC hopes to buy the company and turbocharge the brand. Image: Iomega

What happened to Iomega (IOM)?

It was a gravity-defying technology stock during its best run a decade ago. At its peak in 1996, the company’s nearly $6 billion valuation meant many investors were betting it would be the future of digital storage.

Iomega seemed to be at the right place at the right time; broadband connections and music downloads were not yet common, and few tech companies recognized that storage would be a growth market. Meanwhile Iomega’s proprietary Zip disks and Zip drives provided the capacity of a computer hard drive and the portability of a floppy disk, making it a snap to move chunky files like digital images or huge spreadsheets from one PC to another.

The HP Mini laptop is aimed at the education market, but it could appeal to road warriors as well. Image: HP

Pick up HP’s new $500 mini-laptop, and the first thing you notice is the aluminum casing. Though the thing weighs only about 2.5 pounds, what’s striking is how its sleek skin makes it feel solid and professional – not at all what you’d expect from a budget PC.

I’m in a suite at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco getting a first look at Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) latest machine, which the company hopes will help it steal share from Dell (DELL) and Apple (AAPL) in the education market. (Each of the three companies has just under 20 percent of the worldwide market.) HP’s development team, I’m told, consulted educators as they designed the 2133 Mini-Note, and as I turn the laptop over in my hands that comes through in little details.

Lenovo’s critically acclaimed ThinkPad X300 laptop does without a hard drive. Image: Lenovo

While munching on a reuben at Birk’s, a steakhouse in Silicon Valley, Seagate (STX) CEO Bill Watkins is explaining why he’s not too worried about a these trendy new laptops that have everything but a hard drive.

On the surface, this would seem to be a big problem. Seagate, after all, is the world’s largest hard drive maker with expected sales of more than $3 billion this quarter – so Watkins likes to see his wares go into more gadgets, not fewer. It’s easy to see why he tends not to favor devices like Lenovo’s sleek ThinkPad X300, which is winning raves for its light weight and silent operation, and its 64-gigabyte flash storage drive.

Last year’s iPhone introduction was an A+, with a beyond-cool gadget, new software and new services. So how did Apple (AAPL) score this year with its Macworld presentations? A slim laptop with Intel (INTC) inside won bonus points, but aside from that, CEO Steve Jobs had to rely on his top-notch presentation skills. This is how we graded his keynote announcements:

Flash-based laptops? Suped-up iPhones? The wait is over for Apple’s biggest announcements of the year.

The crowd at Macworld 2008 settles in for the Steve Jobs keynote. Photo: Jon Fortt

SAN FRANCISCO — The keynote has begun. There’s a Mac vs. PC commercial showing. PC is talking about what a bad year 2007 was, with all of Apple’s announcements including the iPhone. PC says 2008, though, will be a great year. “What are you going to do?” Mac asks. “I’m just going to copy everything you did in 2007.”

Steve Jobs walks onstage from the left.

Journalists prepare for the start of the Sony pre-CES press conference. Image: Jon Fortt

LAS VEGAS - Fresh from its news that Warner has backed its Blu-ray format for high definition, Sony (SNE) is vying to show that it is still an electronics innovator, and isn’t languishing in the shadow of iPod maker Apple (AAPL).

To that end, the electronics giant said it will immediately begin selling an 11-inch version of a super-slim TV in the United States. The TV uses OLED techonology, which allows devices to be thinner than today’s LCDs and more power efficient. Sony also showed off new cell phones, cameras and the Rolly speaker system, a novel egg-shaped robotic speaker system that actually moves to the sound of the music it plays. Below, the way the Sony press conference unfolded:

At next month’s Macworld show, will the trendsetter say goodbye to hard drives?

Apple’s MacBook Pro could get a storage upgrade soon. Image: Apple

What do you get when you cross an iPod with a Mac?

A super-slim laptop that uses chip-based flash memory in place of a spinning hard drive, of course. If the rumors are right, Apple (AAPL) will unveil one at the annual Macworld confab next month.

Before you begin salivating from gadget lust however, be forewarned. The rumors should be taken with a grain of salt (or a whole tub of it if you have one handy) — and not just because Apple prognosticators have predicted for years that an ultra-light dream machine is right around the corner.

As credit fears worsen, technology stocks are among the hardest hit

The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell more than 2 percent Monday, despite evidence of strong holiday sales online.

After an upbeat first weekend of holiday sales, there was reason to hope that the rest of the shopping season will be strong, too — perhaps strong enough to give the economy a boost and lift tech stocks in the process.

But after the markets closed Monday those hopes didn’t seem so high.

Tech stocks tanked to start the week after Thanksgiving, despite a heavy Black Friday retail turnout and high expectations for its online equivalent, Cyber Monday. Rather than focus on the ringing cash registers, investors worried that the good times won’t last because faltering credit markets will pave the way toward a recession.

The iPod family. Image: Apple

Greg Joswiak has what you might call a busy job — he’s charged with marketing two of Apple’s biggest hit products, the iPod and the iPhone. That might sound easy considering the buzz Apple’s product announcements generate, but there’s more to the task than promotion; he works with the company’s engineering teams to decide what the next iPods and iPhones will look like, what features they’ll have, and what they’ll cost. He’s also got a knack for product positioning; Apple (AAPL) insiders say that in his previous job managing Apple’s overall hardware marketing, he pushed for the company to produce a 14-inch iBook, despite the misgivings of CEO Steve Jobs. The product turned out to be a hit. To get his sense of the future, I talked to Joswiak about the iPod and iPhone’s holiday prospects, and the company’s plans for expansion.

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For a long time you managed Apple’s Mac laptop business, which is also going gangbusters these days, and I know you were really involved in discussions about how those products were designed and positioned in the product family. How was that job different from managing the iPod and iPhone?

First of all I manage product marketing and product management — I don’t actually own the engineering. But we work very closely with them, as you know, on the features we create and what the product’s going to be about. I look in a lot of ways at some of the similarities.

Apple’s iPod is the king of holiday gadgets. But can the company deliver another round of blowout sales in its make-or-break season?

iPod nano. Image: Jon Fortt

It’s 7 p.m. at an Apple Store less than six miles from the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters, and even in early November, it’s already a madhouse. Throughout the upscale mall space, customers are busily poking and prodding the latest iPods and Macs, gushing about how gorgeous everything is.

To make more room for the admiring hordes in this newly redesigned shop, Apple’s (AAPL) retail planners have done away with cash registers altogether. Instead, black-shirted salespeople mill about, answering shoppers’ questions then immediately handling their purchases using wireless handheld checkout scanners – an impressive display of retail efficiency.