Mobile Computing News, Reviews, & Tips

PDA First Look: Palm's Notebook Alternative

PC World reviewer Eric Dahl recently spent some time with a preproduction model of the PalmOne's new LifeDrive ($499). Eric found that with its 4GB internal hard drive--the first for a PDA in the U.S.--as well as other features, the LifeDrive is a fairly capable notebook alternative. The LifeDrive has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, a great-looking 320-by-480 color display, the ability to view and edit most Office documents via Documents To Go, and more. (For the latest prices, check the PC World Product Finder.)

Notebook News: A Charitable HP Notebook

Buy an HP Special Edition L2000 notebook PC for $999 and up, and Hewlett-Packard and Advanced Micro Devices (which makes the Turion processor inside) will donate $50 to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. The charitable organization, founded by the perennial Tour de France champion, raises money for cancer research and education. The L2000, available in the U.S. only, is equipped with a 14-inch wide-screen display and weighs 5.3 pounds.

Gadget News: IRiver's Candy-Colored Music Players

Sporty, flashy, colorful: That's the image IRiver is hoping to project with its new music players. The T10 models come in three bright colors (lime green, cherry red, orange-yellow) and store music in varying flash memory capacities from 256MB to 1GB. Each offers up to 53 hours of playback time on one AA alkaline battery, the company claims. Prices are $120 to $200, depending on storage capacity.

Tablet PC News: A Lighter, Cooler, More Powerful Tablet

Motion Computing's newest Tablet PC, the Motion LE1600, incorporates the company's familiar slate design into a lighter, more powerful package, the company claims. The new Tablet PC weighs 3.1 pounds and has a 12.1-inch display. Pentium M ($2199) and Celeron M ($1899) versions are available.

Notebook First Look: Mini Libretto, Maximum Power

Toshiba's new Libretto U100 mini-notebook ($1999) is about the size of a video cassette and weighs only about 2 pounds--but it offers big performance, says PC World contributor Michael Lasky.

Still, there are trade-offs. The crisp and bright 7.2-inch wide-screen display offers up to 1280-by-768 resolution, though fonts and icons appear small. The keyboard is smallish, making even pointing and clicking a challenge. Also, the Libretto U100 includes a protective--but perhaps overly sensitive--3D accelerometer that senses sudden movement and parks the hard drive to protect your data.

Tablet PC Review: Microsoft's Free Download Worthy of Your Time

Microsoft's new Experience Pack for Tablet PC offers some cool tools and tools for Tablet PC users, says PC World's Yardena Arar. Among them is the Ink Desktop, for scribbling quick notes directly onto a touch screen; and Snipping Tool 2, which lets you define a portion of the screen, "snip" it, and then edit it using new image editor-style tools.

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