With a user-friendly interface, decent performance, and an affordable price point, the Palm Treo 680 is a good smart phone for the first-time buyer or for mobile users looking to be more productive on the road; we just wish it had a better camera and Wi-Fi support.

Though on the bulky side, the UTStarcom PPC-6700 offers a powerful feature set for Alltel’s business customers.

The RIM BlackBerry 7130e brings the consumer-friendly and compact 7100 series to Alltel, and it offers some nice features for the mobile professional.

The famed Palm Treo lands at Alltel, offering an older but solid all-in-one solution for mobile professionals.

The HP iPaq hw6900 series offers a lot for the road warrior, including GPS functionality, e-mail, and productivity tools, but there are better-designed and faster-performing smart phones out there.

The HP iPaq hw6900 series offers a lot for the road warrior, including GPS functionality, e-mail, and productivity tools, but there are better-designed and faster-performing smart phones out there.

The HP iPaq hw6900 series offers a lot for the road warrior, including GPS functionality, e-mail, and productivity tools, but there are better-designed and faster-performing smart phones out there.

The HP iPaq hw6900 series offers a lot for the road warrior, including GPS functionality, e-mail, and productivity tools, but there are better-designed and faster-performing smart phones out there.

Despite some spotty call quality, the RIM BlackBerry 8703e for Verizon Wireless is a great messaging device offering reliable e-mail delivery, a full QWERTY keyboard, a gorgeous screen, and EV-DO support.

Unless your business requires you to travel overseas frequently, there are a number of sleeker and better-performing Windows Mobile smart phones than the Samsung IP-830w.

The Limited Edition LRG Sidekick 3 will appeal to young urbanites with its fresh look courtesy of the hip clothing company.

For all you young fashionistas out there, the Limited Edition Diane von Furstenberg Sidekick 3 is the hottest phone to come down the runway; we bet Paris Hilton has one.

With a sleek design, good performance, and a robust set of productivity and wireless options, the T-Mobile Dash is an all-in-one hit and earns its reputation as a Motorola Q killer.

The Nokia 5300 is a well-designed, user-friendly music cell phone that offers an amazing range of features backed up by outstanding performance.

Plagued by a bulky design and poor call quality, the I-mate Jaq can’t stand up to the competition of other Windows Mobile smart phones.

Though it won’t replace your digital camcorder or camera, the powerful Nokia N93 does a respectable job of integrating quality multimedia capabilities into a cell phone. That said, it’s a bulky handset and is best suited for convergence fanatics and gadget hounds.

The Cingular 3125 changes the look of smart phones with its sleek, flip phone design, and while some minor quirks and performance issues exist, it’s still a solid Windows Mobile device.

The Sony Ericsson P990i may be the perfect smart phone for tech-minded consumers, but its exorbitantly high price may put a lot of people off.

The Palm Treo 700wx brings some needed improvements to the Windows Mobile smart phone, such as more memory, but it’s still far from perfect.

Filed under: Peripherals, Wireless

We wouldn’t even think of buying a cellphone that didn’t incorporate both WiFi and Bluetooth, so you better believe we were excited to learn of semiconductor manufacturer Marvell’s new combo 802.11a/b/g – BT chip for portables, which is supposedly the first of its kind. The so-called 88W8688 — which supports Bluetooth 2.0 and hardware acceleration for UMA, IMS, etc. — has a footprint of less than 80-square-millimeters, or about half the size of current two-chip combinations. For consumers, this will mean smaller versions of all the gadgets we love, and most importantly for us, those super-functional-but-chunky smartphones that we feel naked without. Although the chip is currently shipping to select Marvell OEM partners, it has yet to announced which specific device categories will see the first implementations; our plea: get these puppies to HTC as quickly as possible!

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The Nokia E61 certainly isn’t for everyone, but with its powerful productivity apps, connectivity options, and good call quality, the smart phone will make a good addition a corporate user’s arsenal.

The Sony Ericsson M600i is a great little smart phone that’s big on style and features. Even though we wish it had a few extra functions and better performance, we still think this is an excellent smart phone for those who want a stylish smart phone in a small package.

Filed under: Handsets, Multimedia, Nokia, Symbian, GSM, EDGE, UMTS

Even if you're a die-hard Palm or Windows Mobile fan, it's hard to deny the appeal of Nokia's N-series lineup of S60-powered "multimedia computers," whose connectivity and imaging options are some of the best you can find on a smartphone today. As promised, the company has just officially released both the N73 (pictured, bottom) and N93 (pictured, top) handsets that we've been following for some time, and although you probably won't be able to pick them up through traditional channels, we know that they'll definitely be available at your local Nokia retail outlet. As a quick refresher, both of the phones (we know, we know, we're not supposed to call them phones) are highlighted by 3.2 megapixel, Zeiss lens-equipped cameras, with the N93 throwing in a 3x optical zoom and support for 30fps VGA video. Both models also feature high-res 2.4-inch displays, Bluetooth radios, a miniSD slot for image capture or rocking tunes, and quad-band GSM plus 3G UMTS capability. On top of all these attractive features, the N93 also gives you built-in WiFi with UPnP functionality, video out for replaying your precious memories on a big screen, and what sounds like better-than-average in-camera editing. We're still gonna stick with our current smartphones for now, but these models are so hot that we're seriously reconsidering our snobby insistence on rocking those handy QWERTY thumboards at all times.

Read- N73
Read- N93
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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One of us—ok it was me—picked up a T-Mobile MDA (HTC Wizard) yesterday and have been messing with it nonstop. It's very timely that our buddy Phillip Torrone from MAKE pointed us to the video he made using the old pPod software that Apple had canned a while back to turn the MDA into a makeshift iPod.

The controls work fairly well using the touch-screen of the MDA and mimics, in our opinion, the best generation of iPod controls.

The software's still floating around, so if you want to try it yourself you can either google "Turn Your Pocket Pc Into An Ipod!" or take a look at one of the links in this post. Guess which one!– Jason Chen

The iPod phone - Pocket PC to iPod [MAKE]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

So Palm has officially announced one of those three Treos we were promised at the end of last year, and just as we expected, this Windows Mobile 5 AKU2-powered model will be sold exclusively overseas. Unfortunately the company neglected to include a detailed spec sheet in its press release — more information will be available closer to the as-yet-unspecified launch date — so all we really know at this point is that it’s destined for Vodafone’s 3G UMTS network in several European countries. Also unclear is how this model relates to other upcoming Treos we’ve seen under such codenames as Hollywood, Lowrider, Nitro, and Lennon — we sure wish Palm would be a little more forthcoming with its product roadmaps. As usual, though, you can always count on us to bring you every little bit of Treo news we get our hands on, even if Palm and friends don’t give us much help putting it in context.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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