If your Pocket PC is equipped with a GPS receiver (either internal or external), MySportTraining GPS allows you to record the duration, distance, pace, ascent (altitude gain) and visualize the route of your workouts, without having to purchase additional sport tracking equipment. Simply turn your GPS receiver on and start tracking your workouts. Ideal for casual or competitive walking, hiking, running, road cycling, mountain biking, kayaking, golfing, skiing, etc. At the end of your workout, the route, duration, distance, pace and ascent can be saved in a workout within MySportTraining, so you don’t have to write in the information. You can then visualize the route you went through during the workout. MySportTraining also calculates the calories you burned along the corresponding fat loss automatically.

We all spend an awful lot of time sat in front of computers. Whether we’re gaming or working, we are at the mercy of what many would argue is the most important element of any system–the monitor. A well-defined monitor can make using a system a pleasure. Likewise, being forced to squint at a 15-inch CRT at 60Hz can make us weep in pain and long for a nice LCD to while away our hours at. A good display makes all the difference. This article investigates how CRTs and LCDs work, and also examines some of the issues pertaining to monitors, such as Refresh Rate and Vsync as well as looking into our crystal ball to see the future of displays.

DiscoverOurTown, an Internet city guide for 2,000 USA cities, is now available in a mobile GPS-enabled format for Palm OS and Windows Mobile PDAs and smartphones. The new travel guides are powered by Earthcomber, a mobile service that matches people’s favorite interests to spots around them. Anyone interested in exploring towns of all sizes along America’s highways will enjoy these free listings–travelers select favorite types of amusements, eateries, historical points and other interests, and Earthcomber alerts them to nearby attractions that match. As people travel through an area, DiscoverOurTown can help them find local hotels, unique shops, local services, restaurants, businesses, events and relocation information. All users of Earthcomber automatically receive the DiscoverOurTown listings when they download Earthcomber maps and location data.

Yahoo plans to activate Internet phone capabilities for Yahoo Messenger users in the U.S., a little more than three months after announcing this feature. The upgrade to the instant messaging service, called Yahoo Messenger with Voice, lets users dial out from the IM interface to traditional or mobile phones. Yahoo Messenger users are also able to rent one or more phone numbers from Yahoo to receive phone calls through the IM interface. Calls made to phone numbers in the U.S. and 30 other countries with heavy telecommunications traffic will cost 2 cents per minute or less.

Lawmakers in Iowa are proposing a special “passport” meant to protect victims of identity theft against false criminal action and credit charges. The “Identity Theft Passport” will be a card or certificate that victims of identity fraud can show to police or creditors to help demonstrate their innocence, Tom Sands, a state representative of the Iowa House and supporter of the proposal, said in an e-mail interview Tuesday. The passport can be presented to law enforcement officials to help prevent arrest or detention for an offense committed by someone using the victim’s identity, according to the text of the bill proposing the measure.

Yes, it has been 10 years since Palm Computing launched its first product, the Pilot 1000. The handheld pioneer has had a checkered decade of bad management decisions, botched acquisitions and increasing competition from phone companies. However, Palm officials said a new relationship with Microsoft, a focus on smart phones and a future of software partnerships have put the company back on track.

Users of Pocket PCs, Smartphones and Java-enabled mobile phones running Web browsers can now access a lightweight version of the Wikipedia on-line encyclopedia. New Zealand-based Instinct has created a mobile version of Wikipedia for mobile devices, currently available as a beta Web site.

Microsoft is designing a new handheld gaming device that can also play music and video in a potential challenge to market leaders Sony, Nintendo, and Apple Computer, according to published reports. The company has assembled a crack team of engineers from its Xbox division to work on the product, which may take a year or even two years to reach the market, the reports said. The project is being led by game executive J Allard and directed by Greg Gibson, the system designer behind Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console, according to a report in Monday’s San Jose Mercury News. Microsoft reorganized its gaming and entertainment divisions to assemble the team for the project, an indication of how seriously it is about building a successful rival to Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP), the paper said.

iAnywhere, a subsidiary of Sybase, announced the general availability of ##the AvantGo Travel Guide,## a mobile companion for subscribers of its popular AvantGo mobile Internet service. The Travel Guide is available as an additional “tab” within the AvantGo application, enabling users to quickly and easily access flight itineraries, weather, directions, maps and city guides. The Travel Guide, sponsored by Cadillac, brings together access to user account information from top travel partners including Expedia Corporate Travel, Northwest Airlines, Sabre Virtually There, Travelocity Business and United Airlines.

SYWARE announced that Visual CE, the rapid application development software for database and forms development on Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PCs, has added direct support for HP Pocket PCs’ built-in cameras. When applications built with Visual CE are run on HP Pocket PCs with built-in cameras, end users can take pictures and either save them directly into a database running on their device or save them as external files linked to the database record. They can move the pictures to their desktop database using the Visual CE synchronizer and print them out with a portable printer.