With the Freedom mini-GPS keychain from Proporta, GPS is as close an your keychain. The size of a remote key-fob, the Freedom mini-GPS is the smallest, self-powered, self-contained GPS receiver ZATZ Senior Editor James Booth has ever seen. Can something so small actually work? Read on to find out.

Read this Computing Unplugged article.

Could the Palm Centro spell salvation for the struggling smartphone innovator that has fallen on tough times? Or is it a doomed effort to hang on in an increasingly competitive market? Palm designed the Centro to attract buyers who are younger and less affluent than its traditional Treo customers, and the new phone will probably succeed in buying Palm some time. But it may not be enough to reverse the company’s flagging fortunes.

HTC, provider of Microsoft Windows Mobile smart devices, launched the HTC Touch Cruise, the third member of the HTC Touch product family and the first to feature built-in GPS for personal navigation. Building on the popularity of the HTC Touch and the HTC Touch Dual, the Touch Cruise also includes 3G-HSDPA wireless connectivity. The new Touch Cruise boasts of super fast HSDPA/3.5G connectivity plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, making it a highly connected device for consumers on the move. Its 2.8-inch screen is great for enjoying mobile multimedia and because it runs on Windows Mobile 6 Professional, the built-in Windows Media Player is ideal for music and movies.

Apple has pushed out its 1.1.2 firmware update for the iPhone and iPod touch, which fixes a bug in rendering TIFF images. The bug has been used by several groups to create software hacks for unlocking the phone and for “jailbreaking” the phone to run third-party applications. It also made the iPhone extremely vulnerable to malicious exploits.

IBM Lotus Expeditor provides an end-to-end environment that includes a server, a client that provides support for desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, and a toolkit that provides a complete, integrated set of tools you can use to develop, debug, test, package, and deploy client applications. The toolkit is built using Eclipse technology and leverages the Eclipse plug-in framework. This article describes how to use Lotus Expeditor Toolkit to debug and deploy an application to a Windows Mobile 5.0 device and a Windows Mobile 5.0 emulator.

Fun Factory is a fresh-off-the-line Mini-Game Pack for Windows Mobile Classic, Professional, and Pocket PC devices. Test your skills and flex your brain in the Fun Factory; five entertaining games stylized graphics, whimsical music and audio, and intuitive controls.

Spb Software House has released the Smartphone version of Spb Insight, a news reader that makes full-text and image articles available for offline reading. The software not only decreases data usage, but also saves time by turning those spare moments into quality news reading experiences. Spb Insight is distinguished from mere RSS readers by its capability to deliver full article texts, optimized for viewing on mobile devices. The Spb Insight Online Catalog offers over a thousand news feeds in categories such as Sports & Leisure, Business & Finance, Entertainment, General News & Media, and over 70 more.

Looking for that special book for the digital lifestyler or DIY-er on your holiday list? Check out O’Reilly’s handy, geeky, Digital Media Holiday Gift Guide of new books for iPhone lovers, digital photogs, backyard astronomers, and Lego maniacs on your gift list. All these publications from O’Reilly Media answer questions, explore new techniques, demystify digital gear, and inspire creativity.

Microsoft and the GSM Association are promoting 3G (third generation) mobile telecommunications by asking companies to build laptop PCs that automatically connect to the Internet wirelessly over mobile phone networks.

They’re hosting a contest challenging companies to design mobile phone-like connectivity into easy-to-use laptops aimed at mainstream users looking for a hassle-free device able to connect them to the Internet wirelessly anytime, anywhere.

These laptops will be aimed at the mass-market consumer laptop PC segment in the $500 to $1,000 price range, the GSMA said in a statement. The group, a promoter of mobile phone networks and technology, points out that mobile phone networks offer far greater range than competing wireless technologies.

As promised, we’ve now got ads running in the RSS feeds and are doing testing of this beta feature. If you notice any functional problems with the RSS feeds over the next day or so, please send a note to david@zatz.com.

During the implementation process, we realized that ads in feeds allowed us to do something cool that’ll make the feeds more useful to everyone. Up until now, when you clicked on a link in a feed news item, you were taken to our permalink page for that news item, rather than the actual news item itself. To get to the news item itself required a second click.

The reason for this was economic, of course. If you read the news items solely in the feed and just clicked through to the destination, you’d never see any of our sponsors’ ads, and we wouldn’t be able to continue to provide the service, since that’s what pays for the business.

But now, since you’re seeing ads in the feeds, we can let you click directly to the news items, bypassing the Web page permalink, getting you to the news you’re interested in with one click, rather than two.

In effect, rather than the feeds being a promotional vehicle for our Web site, the feeds become our new news medium directly. We’ll let you know how that all turns out. For now, though, click away, support our sponsors, and let us know if you run into any snags.