With the iPhone launch just days away, it would appear that Microsoft and Palm might be about to reveal how they might counter Apple’s offering. Palm has announced that they will introduce “a new category of mobile device” which sounds like it could be their answer to the iPhone that Verizon was referring to. Then there’s Microsoft’s big announcement at 12:01am tomorrow. Engadget is claiming that this is some sort of gesture based interface that can scale to anything from a Zune to a home media center like the XBox.

Both announcements sound interesting, but one has to wonder if these announcements can take any of the excitement out of the iPhone? Sure, I am a bit of an Apple fan-boy, but I am not convinced that MS or Palm is capable of making a sexy hardware/software combo and generate the same type of excitement about it. To date, neither company has been successful about generating positive buzz about their products. No one cares about Vista much, and the Treo 750 has really amounted to nothing more than better Treo 700. However, I will be delightfully shocked if one of these announcements is actually cool.