Mobile Computing News, Reviews, & Tips

Smart Phone News: Palm's Affordable, Media-Friendly Treo 680

Palm recently announced the 680 series of Treo smart phones. The new devices will appeal to "price-sensitive" customers, Palm says, though as of this writing no pricing had been announced. The Treo 680 is a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone for use in the U.S. and Europe. The smart phone will include music, video, and photo slide-show features.

Additionally, the company announced a new Palm OS-optimized Google Maps application that will let Treo users get directions, perform local searches, view satellite images, and get on-the-go traffic updates.

Notebook News: Fujitsu Laptops With Flash-Disk Option

Fujitsu will soon sell notebooks that use flash memory instead of a traditional hard drive. New B-series and Q-series portables will offer a 16GB or 32GB flash memory disk as an option. The portables are due this fall in Japan and are under consideration for U.S. release.

Notebook Review: HP's Pavilion dv2000t

Hewlett-Packard's new Pavilion dv2000t has an attention-getting design, says our reviewer Carla Thornton. The exterior features an advanced molding technique that incorporates attractive patterns into the surface. The high-gloss metallic and piano-black finish has a subtle wave design, just as some cell-phone casings and luxury-car interiors do. Our test configuration (which cost only $1739) included one of the first 14.1-inch high-definition wide-screen displays, along with first-rate Altec-Lansing stereo speakers and two stereo headphone jacks. The Pavilion dv2000t turned in solid performance, and the 12-cell battery we tested lasted 7.1 hours.

Suggestion Box

Is there a particularly cool mobile computing product or service I've missed? Got a spare story idea in your back pocket? Tell me about it. However, I regret that I'm unable to respond to tech-support questions, due to the volume of e-mail I receive.

Sign up to have the Mobile Computing Newsletter e-mailed to you each week.