Palm and Claro announced the availability of the Treo 680 smartphone in Guatemala. The Treo 680 GSM/GPRS/EDGE quad-band world phone, running on the Palm OS, boasts Palm’s hallmark ease of use. Slim, compact, and packed with features beyond its stellar phone capability–such as email, Web browsing, messaging, multimedia, calendar, contacts and more–the Treo 680 will keep any user productive.

Nationwide Building Society, a U.K. financial services provider, has been fined $1.9 million after a laptop containing sensitive customer data was stolen from an employee. The Financial Services Authority hit Nationwide with the fine on Wednesday, following an investigation into the theft, which occurred in November 2006 at the employee’s house. According to the FSA, Nationwide was guilty of failing to have effective systems and controls in place to manage its information security risks.

The cell phone industry must improve the mobile music experience for consumers or risk losing out to new competitors like Apple, Warner Music Group’s CEO warned Wednesday at the 3GSM World Congress. Edgar Bronfman Jr. said in a keynote speech here that although there are already millions of music phones available throughout the world, only about 8.8 percent of people with the devices actually buy their music over the air. The reason, he said, is because such purchases are expensive, complicated and slow.

iPods are indisputably the most popular gadgets of recent years. The iPod, however comes with very little documentation. As such, NotePage, Inc. has created a downloadable pdf that explains the ins and outs of iPods. The free iPod tutorial explains the differences between the iPod models. It also deciphers the technical jargon used on Web sites to explain the iPods various features and functions. The iPod tutorial includes screenshots to assist users in setting up the basics, from the date and time, to their contacts. The iPod tutorial is designed to even help advanced iPod users to take advantage of the iPods more advanced and complex features.

SYWARE announced a beta release of Visual CE that supports Windows Mobile devices without touchscreens, such as the Motorola Q and Samsung BlackJack. The powerful, inexpensive, award winning database development software makes it easy to build applications for all types of Windows Mobile devices: Pocket PC, Pocket PC Phone Edition and Smartphone.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been very fortunate to enlist the help of Martyn Mallick, one of the leading experts on RFID technology. This week, we’ll discuss the real-world implications of RFID, including privacy, tracking, embedded tags, and more. This is truly a fascinating conclusion for a very informative series.

Read this Computing Unplugged article.

Isaac Daniel calls the tiny Global Positioning System chip he’s embedded into a line of sneakers “peace of mind.” He wishes his 8-year-old son had been wearing them when he got a call from his school in 2002 saying the boy was missing. The worried father hopped a flight to Atlanta from New York where he had been on business to find the incident had been a miscommunication and his son was safe. Days later, the engineer started working on a prototype of Quantum Satellite Technology, a line of $325 to $350 adult sneakers that hit shelves next month. It promises to locate the wearer anywhere in the world with the press of a button. A children’s line will be out this summer.

The recent launch of Apple’s iPhone does not pose a threat to Research In Motion’s consumer-geared BlackBerry Pearl and simply marks the entry of yet another competitor into the smartphone market, RIM’s co-chief executive said in an interview.

Researchers at McAfee said malware is hitting mobile device users around the world at increasing rates. The study, which was performed by Informa Telecoms and Media and sponsored by McAfee, found 83 percent of mobile operators surveyed have been hit by mobile device infections, and that nearly half of the operators that have experienced mobile malware outbreaks have had one within the last three months.

Visto Corporation, the partner company behind mobile email services from more than 30 of the world’s largest mobile service providers, announced the findings of a survey the company commissioned to identify and target key drivers for mobile email adoption. Based on the research, Visto predicts that market penetration of mobile email could reach as high as 70 percent of mobile professionals by the end of 2007. Close to 60 percent of those surveyed admitted that, just a year ago, they regarded mobile email as solely the domain of the elite within an organization, too expensive, or limited to a few special devices. Today, those attitudes have changed, with 70 percent believing that the service had become less exclusive, more affordable, and with far greater device choice.