Microsoft best get Windows Mobile 7 to market, and soon, because its delay may be causing the company to lose traction in the enterprise market. In a note to clients Thursday, UBS Securities analyst Maynard Um noted that Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone is making some inroads in the enterprise space and they’re coming at Microsoft’s (MSFT) expense.

“We believe Apple is likely gaining some iPhone traction in enterprise with 19 of top 100 Fortune 1000 companies having iPhones deployed,” Um wrote. “However, we do not think this is a displacement of solutions such as BlackBerry but, rather, believe it is likely at the expense of other Microsoft Exchange capable smartphones.”

What happened between Apple’s January 5 disclosure of Steve Jobs’s “hormonal imbalance” and its January 14 announcement that the CEO would be taking a six-month leave of absence? That’s the focus of an ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission probe into Steve Jobs’s health, which seems to, well, be going nowhere. People familiar with the matter tell Bloomberg that Apple’s handling of the matter remains under scrutiny and that company directors Art Levinson and Bill Campbell had been briefed by Jobs’s doctors on his medical condition at the time of the January disclosures, but little else.

Now, the path from “Steve is suffering from a common bug” to “a hormone imbalance has been robbing Steve of the proteins his body needs to be healthy” to “Steve has undergone a liver transplant” is obviously something of an eyebrow-raiser. But whether it was material to Apple’s business and therefore requiring disclosure isn’t clear. After all, Apple (AAPL) did just fine while Jobs was on sabbatical; the debut of new Macs, iPods and iPhones is testament to that. Beyond that, there’s this: Apple’s stock posted a 59 percent gain while he was away.

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”

– Palm investor Roger McNamee

Palm shares are on a tear this morning, rallying on the company’s fourth-quarter financials and the promise of its new Pre handset. Palm (PALM) is trading at $15.30 as I write this, up more than nine percent in reaction to the company’s claims that the Pre and Palm’s webOS are off to a strong start.

“We think the Palm Pre is by far the best product we’ve ever shipped and I am very happy with how we are managing the launch,” CEO Jon Rubinstein said on an earnings call Thursday, though he refused to disclose actual sales numbers. “We are successfully ramping supply to meet demand that is strong and growing.”

Too bad Palm (PALM) launched the Pre a week after the close of its fiscal fourth quarter. If it had brought the device to market earlier, the quarterly results (.pdf) it posted Thursday afternoon might have been even better.

Wall Street had expected Palm to report a loss of 62 cents a share on revenue of $80.6 million. Instead, the company reported a net loss of $105 million, or 78 cents a share. But excluding items, the loss came to 40 cents a share. Revenue was $86.8 million, down from the $296 million Palm posted in the year-ago quarter. Palm shipped a total of 351,000 smartphones during the quarter–a year-over-year decline of 62 percent. But this was a six percent increase over the third quarter.

“We would love dearly to win one of the big guys, that really is the smartphone game, it really is a concentrated set of suppliers,” Intel CFO Stacy Smith told Bloomberg earlier this year. “We’re lurking behind every bush and showing them our product line.”

Well, the ambushes to which Smith referred appear to have finally paid off: Intel (INTC) has landed a deal to develop chips with Nokia (NOK).

Palm’s Pre is the first non-Apple device to successfully link with iTunes in years. And it may also be the last. On Tuesday, Apple issued an advisory warning that it does not support iTunes integration with third-party digital media players.

Apple is aware that some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players and, because software changes over time, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players.

The long-standing legal dispute between Toys R Us and Amazon (AMZN) has been resolved in the toy retailer’s favor, but at a much discounted price. In a regulatory filing submitted to the SEC Friday, Amazon said it has agreed to pay Toys R Us $51 million to settle claims that it violated an earlier exclusivity agreement with the company. Quite a sum, but far less than the $93 million in damages Toys R Us demanded when it first sued Amazon in 2004, accusing it of violating their partnership by allowing other merchants to peddle toys and baby products on its pages.

Amazon (AMZN) hasn’t yet commented on the settlement beyond the filing, which offers little more information than that it was “unanticipated” and will be charged to “other operating expense” in the second quarter.

What a brilliant move.

The European Commission claims that Microsoft’s practice of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows violates European competition laws, so the company strips IE out of European versions of Windows 7. Now the Commission can’t argue that Microsoft’s behavior distorts fair competition in the browser market because, well, there’s no browser.

The Palm (PALM) Pre officially went on sale this morning, and judging from initial reports–and my experience at a local Northern California Sprint store–neither demand or supply was particularly overwhelming. Certainly, lines for the device were far shorter than those that extended from Apple (AAPL) stores for the launches of the iPhone and the iPhone 3G.

For many years, Google, on its Explanation of Our Search Results page, claimed that “a site’s ranking in Google’s search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.” Then in May of 2007, that statement changed: “A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.” In this third and final interview with Google’s search team, Google Fellow Amit Singhal helps us understand why.

John Paczkowski: Talk a bit about the history of search evaluation and your role in it.