September 2007 - Posts
Palm |
The new, smaller Palm Centro.
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Palm desperately needs some good news. No one is really buying PDAs anymore. Their Treo smartphone design has been aging ungracefully. And their Palm Foleo (small laptop which connects to a smartphone) was stillborn when it was cancelled days before its release.
Palm is hoping to turn that all around with its new smartphone, which looks a lot like their old Treo smartphone – only smaller. Overall, it’s 30-percent smaller in every direction. Except for some new chrome trim in places the family resemblance is easy to spot.
Centro has a full QWERTY keyboard and it’s a whole lot smaller than the Treo’s.
Centro runs on the tried and true Palm operating system. It does photos (1.3 megapixel camera), plays music, surfs the Web via its Blazer browser, handles your e-mail (even Microsoft Outlook mail) and can handle many different flavors of instant messaging.
There’s built-in Bluetooth, Google Maps, Sprint TV, news services and picture mail plus a voice and memo recorder. E-mail attachment viewing is done thru Documents-to-Go software.
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Pinnacle Systems |
HTC's Advantage is part smartphone, part mini-laptop with a lot of features crammed inside.
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You don’t need to spend big bucks to watch high definition television on an expensive flat-screen TV.
Pinnacle Systems has created a much cheaper way. All you need is their $129.99 PCTV – HD Pro Stick and a laptop computer.
The Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick lets you watch high quality, over-the-air digital, high-definition and standard definition TV shows. No monthly fees or subscriptions are necessary.
The HD Pro stick package contains an HDTV video and audio card built inside a small USB 2.0 device.
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Apple |
The iPhone.
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Apple doesn’t make them easy to find but if you know where to look you can save even more on your new iPhone.
If you don’t mind the idea of buying a reconditioned product then Apple is ready and willing to sell you an 8GB handset for $349 - a $50 savings.
Apple hasn’t done much publicizing of these phones and they don’t make it very easy to find where you can buy them.
Nor does Apple say exactly how many of these reconditioned phones they have available at any given time. It might upset buyers to think about just how many bad iPhones there have been so far.
Reconditioned usually means products that have been accepted for return to the company (for whatever reason) and have been checked over and/or fixed if something was broken.
Apple makes it clear that their reconditioned products undergo a rigorous process to make sure it can meet their high quality standards.
Once it does, it’s sold on their Web site. It comes with their standard one-year limited warranty. And just like any other Apple product, you can also purchase an AppleCare Protect plan ($69) an insurance policy that extends your warranty for an additional year.
Everything about your reconditioned iPhone should be the same as if you bought a brand new one in an Apple store. As you should know by now, the iPhone has the most intuitive user interface on the market. But, it also comes with very expensive monthly usage charges from AT&T that you need if you want to get the most out of all the phone’s features.
Remember, the current iPhone model is a first generation device. New features, as well as updated phone designs, are rumored to be arriving in the near future. If that’s true, prices for the original model may drop even further.
Consider yourself warned.
