While the swine flu epidemic was more or less a bust, iPad Envy has hit Silicon Valley in a big way. Lots of people want one but corporate affiliation may mean that if you get one you might have to keep yours in the closet. If you bought and boasted about your new Kindle in 2009, then buy one of those iPad book covers to conceal it — we don't want to hear how much you love it. If you work for any one of a long list of companies including Intel, Google and Microsoft then you can't take your iPad to work. Probably the worst case of iPad Envy may be HP which on Wednesday said it would pay $1.2 Billion to acquire Palm and subsequently went on to say that Palm's webOS was a key dealmaker cause HP needed an OS for building things like ...iPads. Since we don't know the details it's hard to say whether this will be a success or not and there seems to be a lot of value in the Palm patent portfolio. An argument can be made that HP could have been a stronger player in the mobile market if it was device agnostic and treated things like smart phones and tablets like disposable devices. However, with this acquisition we're past that point. You've got to wonder why HP would want to take on a competitor like Apple. HP's enemies list is pretty big — longstanding were IBM and Dell. More recently Cisco. Now add Apple and Google into that mix and you end up fighting battles on too many fronts. With regard to Palm, one of our readers who shall remain nameless sent in this final advice learned from the Palm debacle — for heaven's sake, don't call your hot new product the "Pixi." Blackberry, iPhone, Danger, Android — all OK names. But Pixi? That's a mistake you can't recover from.