SuperSite Blog Daily Update: January 1, 2011

Happy New Year!

The BBC is reporting that "a number of people" with Hotmail accounts have noticed missing emails. Apparently, the BBC has resorted to trolling around the Microsoft support forums looking for stories. Excuse me, that's not even original reporting: It's the AP that's trolling around. Unreal.

RIM refutes claims (which I previously described as somewhat fanciful) that the battery life of its upcoming PlayBook tablet is poor. "Any testing or observation of battery life to date by anyone outside of RIM would have been performed using pre-beta units that were built without power management implemented," the BlackBerry maker said in an emailed statement. There you go.

Barnes & Noble now says that their own eBook reader, the Nook Color, is the best-selling product it has ever sold. Sounds familiar. And it looks like Apple isn't the only company with Kindle envy. Which leads me to the next obvious conclusion: Buying a Nook makes even less sense than buying an iPad right now.

Speaking of the superior eBook platform, Amazon enabled book lending for Kindle customers.

Bloomberg says that the Verizon iPhone will be announced within weeks, or right after CES. It's hard to say what the long-term impact will be here, if this happens, but it's going to be huge short-term.