What hasn’t gotten as much attention, however, is the implication of RIMM’s quarter on their partners, suppliers, and competitors. The earnings call revealed a number of notable insights with implication beyond RIMM’s own results. I’ll highlight the top three and then hypothesize their impact on the broader ecosystem.

• Unit shipments for the quarter reached 7.8 million units up from prior quarter of 6.7M (15% sequential growth).
• Net new accounts were 3.9M (>50% sequential growth).
• Strong carrier promotion, with the Verizon (VZ) buy-one-get-one-free campaign (including Storm).

• Approximately 70% of the 3.9M net new subscribers were non-enterprise, bringing non-enterprise to over 50% of the user base.
• Announcement of the BlackBerry App World as an answer to iPhone AppStore, clearly not just aimed at non-enterprise, but probably weighted in that direction.

• RIMM execs were vague in details on their next device launches, but as CNBC reported, the buzz is about a touchscreen + QWERTY phone – an answer to the Palm Pre.
• Reference to new multimedia products. Ongoing but everything is sort of getting reloaded into the summertime. I just can’t get specific right now but lots of packaging, lots of multimedia, lots of new air link. Some surprising things for sure.

Possibly the most direct line can be drawn to suppliers. Marvell (MRVL) and Qualcomm (QCOM) are major suppliers to the BlackBerry line, and Synaptics (SYNA) produces the touch screen interface for the Storm, which appears to have had a solid launch and ramp, given the solid non-enterprise unit shipments. Synaptics and Cypress (CY) are both rumored (reported on CNBC 4/3) to be key suppliers for the touch/QUERTY product, which should give them an extra bounce. Another reason to like the suppliers is that margin, one of the major concerns of the analyst community given the land grab environment in smartphones, should have relatively lesser impact on the component suppliers than on RIMM or the carriers.

During these past few months of turbulence and bearish trends in the market, I’ve heard increasing interest in the new classes of short – and double short – ETFs. An attractive premise: make money on the downward moves, even if you’re not able to short or aren’t able to locate shares, and with relatively low management fees, they’re a much more attractive option than traditional short selling or put options.

However, there’s a very significant yet very subtle cost to holding these ETFs. This cost, while explained in the prospectus and in a handful of posts and comments on Seeking Alpha, is not well understood by many.

Much has been written in the past few months about declines in housing prices across various regions of the US. Generally, analysis will talk about the median price declines in metro areas like Las Vegas, Phoenix, New York City, or the Bay Area and will feature headline numbers from Case-Shiller, NAR, or Zillow. What’s missing from almost every analysis is commentary about what’s happening within these metro areas.

Synaptics (SYNA) reported last night for the September 30 quarter, and judging by the reactions of analysts and after-market traders, they knocked the ball out of the park.

I've been following SYNA since January and am impressed by their prospects for growth in the relatively near-term (where "near-term" is defined more by the general market conditions than anything else).

In the past 24 hours, the Bernanke, Paulson, & Co. talking points have begun to take great care to emphasize that just because the plan is going to cost $700B, that doesn't mean it'll cost $700B of taxpayer money. They're just purchasing assets, after all, with notional values of $700B (in this case, notional means they're pretending that's their value...). Heck, taxpayers could turn a tidy profit!

Yesterday afternoon, I happened to catch Bill Gross of PIMCO on CNBC taking his own cut at the Bernanke & Co. rationale. He explained that this mortgage plan was a heck of a deal for John Q Taxpayer. His simple math said if $100 worth of debt (face value) was purchased for the bargain price of $65, it'd kick off 10-15% in interest every year. Since the US borrows at 3-5%, that's a positive spread of 7-10%. Wow, thanks Bill. I'm starting to count my share of the profits already!

Drilling domestic oil reserves (read the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - ANWR) has been, and will continue to be, a hot political topic, with the pro/con sides wrapping themselves in the US flag and Greenpeace flag, respectively. I'd like to wrap myself in the Adam Smith flag and make a case for not tapping into the reserves, just yet...

Being an economic realist (and a political cynic), I've observed that the ONLY thing which has really catalyzed the kinds of economic investments we've seen in the past couple of years (offshore drilling technologies, alternative energy research, etc...) that will end up providing the 50 year solution to our dependence on foreign oil has been the recent short term (past 2 years) surge in oil prices.