Product Pipeline
Next Treo: PalmOne's Treo 650 cell phone-PDA
hybrid addresses many of the minor complaints users had about the popular Treo
600. Improvements in the new model include a high-resolution (320-by-320)
screen, a faster CPU, a more ergonomic thumb keyboard, a removable rechargeable
battery, and a VGA camera that now captures video as well as still images.
Carriers and prices had not been announced at press time.
Chips Ahoy! Intel and AMD have launched their latest salvos in the war for bragging rights to the fastest chip on the block. AMD has released the new 2.6-GHz Athlon 64 FX-55, which uses a 2-GHz HyperTransport bus and has 1MB of L2 cache. NVidia and Via each will offer motherboards for Athlon 64 chips with PCI Express graphics to further pump up system speed. Meanwhile, Intel has released the 3.46-GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, which boasts 2MB of L2 cache and now features a 1066-MHz frontside bus (up from 800 MHz). Expect these chips to appear in fully decked-out gaming systems in time for the holidays.
Photograph: Marc Simon
Phone Astronomer: Beginning stargazers who
sometimes have to ask "Is that Orion's belt or the Big Dipper?" now have mobile
help to call on. This winter, cell phone software maker Digital Chocolate will
roll out StarGazer 2Go, and the program will be available from leading wireless
carriers. Punch in your area code, and StarGazer 2Go can render the night sky
on your cell phone display, allowing you to look up and identify the names of
the stars and constellations above.
Tidbytes
Photograph: Marc Simon
Big Things in Little Packages: Now you can cram
8GB of data on a CompactFlash Type I card. The offering has the largest
capacity of any Type I card of its kind, says its manufacturer, SanDisk. The
Ultra II CompactFlash card costs $960. The matchbook-size storage device with
Grand Canyon capacity can write data at 9 megabytes per second and read it at
10 MBps.
Free Remote Desktop Access: Genuinely free and valuable Internet services are difficult to find. 3am Labs may be an exception to the rule, though. The company's free LogMeIn desktop remote control system permits you to access a PC from thousands of miles away. You can use it to check e-mail, for instance, or to open a crucial document that you left on your home computer. If you want to transfer files, however, you'll have to pony up $99 per year for a LogMeIn Pro account.
Photograph: Marc Simon
AOL Adds Password Protection: Want a more secure
America Online account? That'll be $2 extra per month for a service called AOL
PassCode. AOL adds an extra layer of password protection to thwart account
break-ins with a keychain-size device that locks up your account tighter than
Fort Knox. The PassCode device and AOL's servers are synchronized so that a
code generated by the device will match a six-digit number generated every 60
seconds by the servers. To log in, you type your screen name and password, as
you would normally; then you also enter the number displayed on the PassCode
device.
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