Product shootout articles are more difficult to do than a single product review. It can often take a huge amount of coordination among manufacturers, PR reps, and our editorial team to get all the devices in and compare them side-by-side. Fortunately, we’ve managed to assemble an interesting collection of portable drives. Among our contenders is a drive that could have been great, but’s a terrible failure do to a stupid marketing decision and two drives that rate perfect 5 out of 5 scores.

This week, reader letters take us all over, from HDTV on the roof, to the water meter, to anywhere a cheap PDA can go. This one’s interesting, so read it and learn.

If you’re in the market for a PDA smartphone, you’ve got a lot of great choices. Here at Computing Unplugged, we’ve been tracking the war between Palm and Pocket PC devices since January of 1998, so when Palm came out with their first Pocket PC smartphone, we thought this event worthy of investigation. In this article, we’re letting three leading devices shoot it out. The big news, of course, is Palm’s Treo 700w, their first foray into the Pocket PC world and possibly a taste of the future of Palm handhelds. Another exciting device is the PPC-6700, Sprint’s version of the amazingly powerful and versatile device we reviewed previously in its Verizon incarnation. Which should you buy? You’ll be surprised.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been covering the changes in the Palm OS and its apparent eventual migration into something called ALP. As is always the case when trying to understand something new and relatively poorly documented, we got some of our facts wrong. Fortunately, we’ve gotten some excellent clarification on ALP from two PalmSource executives who would know: Maureen O’Connell, Senior Director, Corporate Communications and David "Lefty" Schlesinger, Director, Core Tools and Technologies. These two comments provide some excellent clues about what we might expect in the future from PalmSource.

Senior Editor James Booth has turned to the Dark side. For years he’s been searching for a device that would combine his Palm handheld and Verizon cell phone, but he hates the Treos. James is now hooked on Pocket PCs and Verizon’s XV6700. Read on to find out what the XV6700 is and what’s so great about it.

By now, you’ve probably noticed the little RSS icons that appeared all over Computing Unplugged in the past month or so. In this article, we explain what it all means.

From December of 2002 through February of 2003, Computing Unplugged Senior Technical Editor Jason Perlow was Software Developer Liaison for Sharp Electronics’ Zaurus. As some of you may recall, the Zaurus was also a Linux PDA, which shared many similarities with the ALP platform, and like ACCESS and PalmSource, the Zaurus was also the product of a Japanese company. The Zaurus had many things going for it, but it failed miserably in the US and European consumer market. In this important article, Jason shares his insights into what went wrong and what ACCESS has to do to get it right.

Recently, ACCESS briefed Computing Unplugged on its new strategy to bring the Palm OS to embedded Linux. We also discussed how it intends to transition its traditional Palm OS developer community over to its new ALP, the ACCESS Linux Platform, which is now confirmed to be based on Wind River’s Platform For Consumer Devices, Linux Edition. In this article, we take a close look at the details of the ACCESS plan.

It’s been a while since we’ve published some of the many letters we get each week from Computing Unplugged readers. So, this week, we’ve decided to catch up and publish a few.

According to Wikipedia, "Planned obsolescence is the conscious decision on the part of an agency to produce a consumer product that will become obsolete and/or non-functional in a defined time frame." In theory, planned obsolescence is bad, because the devices we paid a lot for are no longer functional. But, especially in the world of mobile technology, sometimes the devices we use work for a lot longer than might be practical. That’s the subject of this article. In it, we ask the tough question: should you replace a perfectly good laptop?