Mobile Phones

Building on its vision that the future of personal computing is mobile computing, Palm, Inc. announced the Palm(R) Foleo(TM), its first smartphone companion product. The Foleo mobile companion has a large screen and full-size keyboard with which to view and edit email and office documents residing on a smartphone. Edits made on Foleo automatically are reflected on its paired smartphone and vice versa. Foleo and its paired smartphone stay synchronized throughout the day or at the touch of a button. This powerful combination is for productivity-minded business people who want a more complete mobile solution for email, attachments and access to the web.

The Foleo mobile companion turns on and off instantly and features fast navigation, a compact and elegant design, and a battery that lasts up to 5 hours of use. Its applications include email, full-screen web browser, and editors or viewers for common business documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files. The Foleo stays synchronized via Bluetooth(R) wireless technology and uses the smartphone's radio or the Foleo's built-in Wi-Fi radio for general Internet connectivity.

Like its predecessors, the C3b maintains the same boxy shape and is garbed in a matte silver finish throughout. Pantech provides its users the ability to dress up their devices by quickly snapping off the phone's textured front cover and replacing it with one of a different color. The device ships with sedate looking blue and silver covers, but we opted for the snazzy bright orange one that came with our review unit. Additional color plates can be purchased directly from Cingular's website.

The overall build of the Pantech C3b is quite sturdy. The hinge seemed durable and should weather well. Because of its diminutive size, the C3b's top flip can not extend open as fully as on other clamshells, which may be an issue for some users. The front of the C3b is where you'll find the 1" 262k color TFT (96x96 pixel) resolution display. Pantech makes good use of it by providing time and date, caller ID, battery status, and signal strength information. Just below it sits the phone's VGA camera lens and flash. Up top is where the handset's external antenna is located, and on the bottom can be found the device's charging port. The phone's volume rocker sits on the left edge of the device, just below the covered headset port. From the phone's closed position, the volume rocker's up key also doubles as a camera shutter button while the down key will activate the phone's camera flash to act as a flashlight.

Opening the C3b, you will find a bright 1.5" color, 128x128 pixel resolution display, a surprisingly spacious flush keypad, d-pad, two softkeys, green and red send and end keys, and a clear/back key. Due to the elfish size of the C3b, you would think that the alphanumeric keys would feel cramped, but that is not the case. A few time saving shortcuts are available on the keypad. Long pressing the * key puts the device in vibrate mode, long pressing the back/clear key brings up the calendar, and hitting the left menu softkey followed by the * key will lock/unlock the phone.

• Integrated, true instant messaging via AIM, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, or Windows Live Messenger
• Real HTML Web browsing
• Speakerphone for handsfree calling; polyphonic ringtones and vibrating alert
• Vibrant, full-color swivel screen
• QWERTY keyboard with dial pad

For Pleasure
The Sidekick iD covers all your messaging needs with support for text messaging and instant messaging. If you want email on the go, the Sidekick iD has you covered there, too. With a Sidekick Unlimited data plan, you get your own 6 MB email account from T-Mobile, and you can also set up as many as three other personal email accounts to deliver email directly to the Sidekick iD's email application. Web browsing is also easy. View full Web pages with the device's embedded browser and surf T-Mobile's t-zones service, which offers news headlines, weather updates, game and ringtone downloads, and more. When it's time to get your game on, the Sidekick iD is able to run exciting Java based games and applications.