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cell phones
Three Is Charmed
 With a full five-row querty keyboard and a built-in trackball, T-Mobile’s Sidekick 3 continues to close the gap between full-fledged-but-tiny computer and cell phone. T-Mobile has stuffed a number of features into the unit to beef up the experience of doing desktop chores on a computer the size of your palm. Web pages, for instance, show up as compressed files on the backlit 2.5-inch flip screen, and e-mails also show up with compressed full-color pictures. The Sidekick, always on, “pushes” e-mail and IMs to you full-time, saving messages in a queue if the signal fades.
Like everything these days, the Sidekick 3 is loaded with extras. For example, there’s a 1.3-megapixel camera with flash that’s good enough to replace the separate camera you bought five years ago — not that we have anything against it. Other amenities include full Bluetooth compliance, which makes it easy to hook up to a wireless headset, plus a speakerphone, 64MB of flash memory (expandable to 2GB), an MP3 player (the device can hold about 250 songs), and an address book. Phew. ($349.99 with a one-year contract or $249.99 with a two-year contract; t-mobile.com) — Bryant Urstadt
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Twisted
 Nokia’s N93 is one of the coolest phones we’ve seen, unless you consider it a camera. Its 2.4-inch high-resolution screen has a viewing angle of 160-degrees — which means you can see it from pretty much every angle except behind. And with 30 frames per second of recording power in the 3.2-megapixel camera, you can make stills and full-motion video and display both on a TV with an adapter, included with the phone. The N93 also offers an MP3 player and FM tuner. ($500–$700 depending on service plan; nokiausa.com) — B.U.
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Jock Rock
 Sony Ericsson claims its new W710 is the first phone designed for the serious jogger and workout fanatic. It’s meant to be worn on your shoulder, not in your pocket, and comes with an arm strap to prove it. Inside is a full-function pedometer, as well as a timer and stopwatch. Tunes are served up courtesy of a 512 MB MP3 player. And it’s got a camera too, so you can take pictures of yourself as you cross the finish line. Even the color schemes — performance graphite or hatha violet — are cutting-edge. (sonyericsson.com) — B.U.
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The Way It Works
Flip open Samsung’s latest phone, the SCH-a930, and you could be checking your messages or watching clips from last weekend’s football games. Video-on-demand is an early offering in what may be the next big thing in cell phones: television. To get an idea of how this technology works, and where it might be going, we called Muzibul Khan, Samsung’s vice president of product management and engineering.
“Right now video-on-demand is more like streaming video than anything else,” adds Khan, explaining that users download tiny movies that are sent as data in the same way your cell calls are. Currently, there’s not much selection, and the programs are short, rarely longer than about three minutes. That’s about to change, says Khan, as soon as the big U.S. carriers can agree on new broadcast standards and formats, which will more efficiently send the information over the air.
In Europe and Asia, a bunch of competing formats are in operation and waging a heated battle. The first was Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, or S-DMB. Launched in Korea, it’s a subscription-based format offering a variety of television programs at 25 to 30 frames per second. “It’s much better than portable television,” Khan says. The signals are beamed down from satellites, as the format’s name would suggest.
The second format is Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, or T-DMB. It’s ad-based, much like conventional television, and transmits at a different frequency. And it uses towers to broadcast its signal, which lowers the cost of transmission. A third format is Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld, which is like T-DMB but with a different protocol. DVB-H and a similar format are working all over Europe, especially in Germany and Italy.
As for the quality of the new formats, says Khan, “It’s a good picture, and when you see it, you’ll be delighted.” — B.U.
Click here for Go Gadgets/On The Road.
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Photographs by Brian Urkevic (Sony, Nokia)
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