Microsoft may have inadvertently confirmed the price points of its Surface RT tablets prematurely. For a brief time this morning, Surface RT tablets were up for pre-order on Microsoft's website, and since there are no take-backs or do-overs on the Internet, we now know what Microsoft's pricing strategy looks like. The cost of entry starts at $499 for the 32GB version without a Touch Cover.

HTC continues to struggle to find a way to flip the kind of profits it did during the company's heyday, back when it was moving handsets like gangbusters and practically had a license to print money. But the times, they are a-changin' and the HTC of old is having trouble competing in this new landscape dominated by Apple and Samsung, the latter of which has picked up the Android torch that HTC helped ignite. Ginormous profit dips are the norm for HTC these days, which today posted a record 79 percent drop in quarterly profit.

Microsoft has to be pleased as punch to see so many hardware partners unveil Windows 8-based products leading up to the next generation operating system's launch later this month. Today that entails Acer lifting the curtain from its Iconia W700 tablet PC. Or, as the company is pitching it, a high-performance mobile PC in a tablet PC form factor. The $800 price tag certainly matches that description, but what about the rest of the device?

Want to know why hardware and software makers are putting so much emphasis into the mobile market? It's because the mobile market is a ginormous freight train that keeps picking up passengers along the way. According to a recent survey by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) and The Economist Group, 22 percent of all adults living in the U.S. own a tablet, 44 percent own a smartphone, and half of them own either one.