For almost a year now, I have been using the Palm Treo 650 as my cell phone-PDA device. This is not the latest and greatest Palm PDA, having been superceded by the 700, then the 750, then the 680, but it serves me very well. It can browse the web with data connection over the air (which I not actually do), but it lacks wi-fi.

I will be traveling overseas this fall, so I was pondering how to blog while gone. The very small QWERTY keyboard on the 650 is suitable for messaging and email, but not much more. As for writing blog posts, fuggitaboutit.

Enter a new class of PCs or PC-like devices, so new that the industry press is still figuring out what to call the category. Pocket PC won’t work since there is already a class of devices with that name. I’ve seen the new class called mini-notebooks, which may stick, and that is what I’ll use for now. Other names I’ve seen are “handheld notebooks” and “pocket notebooks,” the latter being an exaggeration since these devices won’t really fit in a pocket. This class of devices is smaller and lighter than the class Amazon.com call “thin and light,” the smallest of which is the Sony VAIO VGN-T140P, which sports a 10.6-inch screen.

That makes the Sony’s screen marginally larger than the new Palm Foleo, to be available on the 22nd of this month, according to reports. Palm calls it a “mobile companion,” intended to bridge the gap between the Palm PDA phones and a full-size notebook or desktop computer.

The Foleo is equipped with built-in wi-fi. Where wi-fi is not available, you connect via Bluetooth to your browsing-capable cell phone (and apparently not just Palm brands). With a 10-inch screen and nearly full-size keyboard, the Foleo would seem ideal for trip blogging. Using Documents to Go software, you can also view and edit MS Word and Excel documents, though not with the full editing range of the actual MS apps found on Windows-based systems (my Treo 650 also has Docs to Go, but I never use it. One, I hate Word and use WordPerfect and two, I don’t need to write away from home, except for blogging, and I do that online rather than with a word-processing program). The Foleo also comes with a native email program.

However, the Sony VAIO computer costs $1,999 while the Foleo’s introductory price will be $499. For my purposes, the Foleo does everything I need when traveling. Brighthand.com got enough of a look at the Foleo to post a review. Palm’s site says,

Email—use its big screen and keyboard to type longer emails and see more of attachments. Connect wirelessly with your smartphone and sync email with the touch of a button.

Attachments—edit and create Word and Excel® compatible docs, view PDFs, and deliver PowerPoint® presentations, all on its stunning 10-inch wide color screen. Plus, open and view photos you receive from frieds and family.

Web browsing—get a bigger look at the web pages you’d normally view on your smartphone. You’ll see maps, images, news and more, only now in widescreen.2 Plus, get Internet access in more places—anywhere you have cell phone coverage, or when you’re within range of a Wi-Fi hotspot.

But Palm is not the only company in the mini-notebook game. Asus is also supposed to release this month its new EEE 701 mini-notebook. Originally announced at a $199 price point, the price has crept steadily upward and now it is said to be coming out at $250 - still dirt cheap.

Unlike the Foleo’s Palm OS, the EEE uses a Linux OS. Like the Foleo, the EEE has built-in wi-fi. Notebookreview.com reports,

Combine a small Linux footprint OS with a flash based hard drive and what results is this speedy startup that the device has. Just because the OS is light doesn’t mean it doesn’t do much. There’s a ton of software features on board that will most definitely serve all of your basic needs. You can browse the web using FireFox, use Skype with the built-in web cam and microphone, open Word and Excel docs and edit them, view photos, listen to music files, use AOL IM, MSN messenger or just about any other major chat client via Kopete. In other words, all the basic functions you perform on a PC you can do on the Eee PC.

What the Foleo and EEE alike lack is a large hard drive - the Foleo’s capacity hasn’t been announced and the EEE’s will top out at 16 GB, though both units accept additional storage via USB ports or dedicated card ports.

The EEE’s screen is 7 inches, three inches smaller than the Foleo’s. Other basic specs of the EEE:

Display: 7″
Processor: Intel mobile CPU (Intel 910 chipset, 900MHz Dothan Pentium M)
Memory: 512MB RAM
OS: Linux (Asus customized flavor)
Storage: 8GB or 16GB flash hard drive
Webcam: 300K pixel video camera
Battery life: 3 hours using 4-cell battery
Weight: 2lbs
Dimensions: 8.9 in x 6.5 in x 0.82 in - 1.37 in (width x depth x thickness)
Ports: 3 USB ports, 1 VGA out, SD card reader, modem, Ethernet, headphone out, microphone in

I have not found anything about the EEE that indicates it can connect via Bluetooth to my Palm 650 where wi-fi is not available.

For my purposes, the Foleo seems to be the better choice. I don’t need an actual computer for my upcoming travel. My HP notebook, sporting a 15.4-inch widescreen, is too big, heavy and power hungry for tourist-type travel. I certainly wouldn’t lug it around during the day! But either the Foleo, at 2.5 pounds, or the EEE, at 2 pounds, would be just fine. Both also claim long battery life - three hours for the EEE and five for the Foleo, and both feature instant-on booting. Those features combine for all-day availability for me. The Foleo’s ability to browse via my Treo’s Bluetooth connection is a big plus over the EEE, as it will enable me to browse and post during ground travel.

I am aware that small, notebook-style computers have been around for awhile, such as the NEC Mobile Pro 900 or HP Jornada, but they are older technology and lack essential features such as wi-fi; the Jornada has a built-in dial-up modem, but that’s it.

The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet PC is price competitive at $359. It includes both wi-fi and Bluetooth browsing, but is really made for only browsing rather than both browsing and writing - it has no keyboard and is very small with only a 4.1-inch screen. (Actually, it has keyboard that pops up on its touchscreen, but I’d rather not try to write a post with a stylus.)

Here’s Brighthand’s Youtube video of the Foleo:

… too much time on his hands?

… more money than sense?

… to get the latest gadget, any gadget?

… wants to be the first on her block to own a USB-powered can cooler?

I kid you not.

KnoxViews carries a user review of the Garmin Nuvi 650 GPS, a fairly high-end unit for driving.

I use the Mio c310x GPS. The Mio went on sale a few months ago for $199, about $150 off the list. So I pounced.

As I researched GPS units before buying, I concluded two things:

First, the main difference between high-cost units and lower-cost units is mainly features other than the mapping and driving usefulness. That is, lower-cost units have basically the same mapping and driving usefulness as high-cost units. The extra money buys other stuff such as enhanced MP3 playing, bluetooth integration with cell phones, more points of interest, picture viewers, mpeg viewers, traffic updating, etc. But the basic maps are the same. More expensive units also often feature text-to-speech (TTS) so that the GPS tells you,”Turn left on Maple Street in 100 yards,” rather than, “Turn left in 100 yards.”

TTS was a feature I wanted, but none of the units within my budget offered it. My Mio doesn’t have it. However, I’ve found I’ve never wished I had it. The directions without it are still so precise that I’ve never gone wrong without TTS. Moreover, the Mio - and I’m sure any other non-TTS units - displays the name of the next street at the top of the screen. Yes, you have to take your eyes off the road to read it, but I place the MIO atop the dash, anyway, so it’s minor.

One review I read of a TTS unit pointed out that the street names are, well, synthesized, so unusual names can get mangled to the point of incomprehensibility. The reviewer said that street names derived from American Indian words especially stumped the TTS, but other unusual names did, too.

Second, brand does matter. The Garmin reviewer says that Garmins are probably the best and I agree, based on my own research. But Garmins are also the priciest - often by quite a lot. It’s seems true that with GPS units, “you get what you pay for.” I was pretty leery of the Mio because it was relatively cheap, but extensive research persuaded me that almost alone among low-cost units it was a good buy. I’ve never been disappointed.

Generally, units made by audio companies (Pioneer, JVC, Sony) didn’t fare well in user reviews. Those companies’ units were heavy on things like picture viewing and MP3 playing, but their mapping and drivability features were lacking, sometimes badly so, according to the reviews I read.

Power management is also something to consider. Most units are rechargeable and come with a in-car power adapter. My Mio has that and a USB adapter that recharges it quicker than the car adapter. Because all the maps are stored internally in the unit, the USB connection just recharges it. It will play MP3s loaded on an SD card, for which there is a port in the unit, but I have never done that. The unit has a headphone jack, which I suppose I could rig to play through my car’s audio system. I don’t see the need, though, since the unit’s own speaker is plenty loud for its spoken directions, even for my artillery ears. Back to power management, the Mio has a setting that reduces screen backlighting by about 90 percent after a few seconds. It returns to full lighting when the unit gives new directions. Very useful for extending battery life. Also, you can use the GPS connected to the in-car charger without exhausting the battery at all.

I recommend doing hearty research before buying, and don’t run out and buy the first thing that looks like a steal - vendors almost always charge a restock fee for returns that can be pretty hefty.

Another tip: the more POIs a unit has, the better. Before you ever use a GPS, POIs available might not seem important, but they are. I have also found that entering custom POIs is very handy.

The 2007 JD Power Co. rankings of Initial Quality Surveys (IQS) is out and it’s good news for domestic manufacturers, especially Ford. The IQS ranks cars and brands on the number of defects identified by customers during the first three months of ownership. The rankings indicate the number of problem per 100 cars.

Ford Motor Company shows dramatic quality improvement in this year’s study, particularly its Land Rover and Lincoln divisions. Land Rover was the most improved nameplate in the 2007 IQS, and Lincoln rose from No. 12 to a No. 3 overall industry ranking behind No. 2 Lexus and Porsche, which is the highest ranked nameplate in the study. Mercury and Ford also performed well in the 2007 IQS.

The overall results are here. Porsche tops the list with 91 defects per 100 cars, earning five stars overall (well, five colored circles), also earned by Lexus, which ranks second. Completing the top five, in order, are Lincoln, Honda and Mercedes-Benz, each with four stars.

Surprises? Jaguar - another Ford company - tied with Toyota for the sixth spot; Mercury nudged out Infiniti for eighth and hyper-expensive Acura comes in 17th, two places behind Chevrolet. Nissan, whose North American headquarters is right here in Franklin, Tenn., came in at 19, dogged by quality problems of new models.

“It’s typical that when you launch a new model, that you will have a few more defects than you may have on the outgoing model,” said Doug Betts, Nissan’s senior vice president for total customer satisfaction. The auto-maker recently introduced the Versa, a new Sentra and a redesigned Altima, which accounts for about a quarter of the company’s U.S. sales.

I remember as a lad hearing the grownups say never to buy a car its first year out, which seems valid advice. Last year Nissan overall had 121 defects per 100 cars; this year, with the new models, it has 132 overall with the Versa an extremely poor 171. But its established models, such as the Maxima, still rank very high.

Another highlight for Ford:

For the first time since 1999, a North American assembly plant receives the Platinum Plant Quality Award for producing vehicles yielding the fewest defects. Ford Motor Company’s Wixom assembly plant in Michigan, which produced the Lincoln Town Car, averages just 35 PP100. Plant awards are based solely on defect counts.

Domestic brands are closing the gap rapidly on foreign labels in productivity and quality. Auto journalist Mark Phelan reports that domestic makers’ production efficiency now only marginally trails that of Japanese marques.

While the Detroit 3 still trail Japan’s Big 3, the gap has narrowed dramatically, said Ron Harbour, president of Harbour Consulting, the Troy firm that rates automakers’ efficiency.

“Toyota still has the lead, but it is a very slim and marginal lead” in the total labor to build a car, engine and transmission, Harbour said.

In vehicle assembly, in fact, GM has closed to within a negligible 6 minutes of labor time per vehicle of Toyota. GM had the most productive plants for vehicle assembly (Oshawa No. 1 in Canada,) engines (Spring Hill, Tenn.) and automatic transmissions (Toledo).

It’s the first time a single company has topped three different categories, Harbour said. Honda’s Marysville, Ohio, stamping plant led the remaining category. …

Efficiency doesn’t guarantee success, but it helps. Labor used to cost Chrysler, GM or Ford $1,500 more to build a vehicle than it did Honda, Nissan or Toyota, but the gap has narrowed to $250 to $300 today.

Eliminating that difference would allow the local automakers to woo customers by adding features without charging more, he said. Think of it as getting curtain air bags, stability control, a killer stereo or a power tailgate free.

Combine that with an appealing and up-to-date car, and you’re onto something. That appears to be what GM has done with the Saturn Aura. It won both Free Press and North American Car of the Year awards.

According to the Harbour Report, it takes nearly two hours less labor to build an Aura than a Toyota Camry. The gap widens to 2 1/2 hours compared to the Honda Accord.

That 2.5 hours difference between an Aura and an Accord comes to a very large sum of money in saved labor costs, I’m guessing a couple of thousand dollars per car, maybe more. There’s much more to pricing a car than that, of course, but like any very large corporation, an auto company’s labor and other personnel costs comprise the largest single chunk of its total spending. Raising production efficiency means that each car has less labor cost in it than before.

But the IQS is not the last word, or even the most important word. After all, any defects a new-car buyer finds within the first htree months will be covered under warranty. Defects in short-term quality measure customer aggravation more than the actual reliability of the cars. What I consider more important is a car’s reliability beyond the three-year mark, when most full-car warranties have expired. For that I found JD Power’s web site of little help. Consumer Reports is the place to go for those rankings (by model only, not by brand). I’ve also found Consumer Guide to be a great resource.

The latest email bomb goes like this:

Don’t pump gas on May 15th.

In April, 1997, there was a “gas out” conducted nationwide in protest of gas prices. Gasoline prices dropped 30 cents a gallon overnight. On May 15th, 2007 all internet users are asked to not go to a gas station and pump gas in protest of high gas prices. Gas is now over $3.00 a gallon in most places.

There are 73,000,000+ American members currently on the internet network, and the average car takes about 30 to 50 dollars to fill up. If all users did not go to the pump on the 15th, it would take $2,292,000,000.00 (that’s almost 3 BILLION) out of the oil companies pockets for just one day, so please do not go to the gas station on May 15th and lets try to put a dent in the middle eastern oil industry for at least one day.

If you agree, re-send this to everyone on your contact list with it saying ‘’Don’t pump gas on May 15th”.

The problem, of course, is that even if every driver in American actually did stay away from the pumps on May 15, all they would do is give the station owners a free vacation day. As Snopes reasonably explains, the “gas out” day does not actually reduce gasoline sales because drivers still drive their normal miles that day. The people who would have bought fuel on May 15 will instead buy fuel on the 14th or 16th.

Nor was there a gas out in April 1997 that caused gas prices to drop 30 cents overnight. Sam Cook explains,

David Emery, author of Urban Legends and Folklore, debunks the claim of a 1997 Gas Out on his Web site.

“There was one in 1999, but it didn’t cause gas prices to drop 30 cents per gallon overnight,'’ he says. “In fact, it didn’t cause them to drop at all. Despite the popularity of the e-mail campaign, the event itself attracted scant participation and was completely ineffectual.'’

Now, my wife will sign up for dinner out on May 15 - or any other day of the year - but we’ll let the “gas out” roll on by.

What happens when a six-year-old girls sings a song written by her mother for her son who is serving in Iraq? It gets posted on Youtube and gets more than 1.7 million downloads, that’s what.

Tom Nankervis has details.

CACHE, Okla. (UMNS) - Six-year-old Heather Martin, accompanied only by her mother on piano, has become an overnight Internet sensation for a song performed at their rural Oklahoma church.

Written for her brother Shaun serving in Iraq, the song became one of YouTube’s most requested videos of all time in December after a member at Cache First United Methodist Church recorded and posted Heather’s performance on the video-sharing Web site. The video had received 1.7 million hits as of early February.

“My friend called me Christmas Eve and she says, ‘They’ve featured your video and the numbers are just going up and up,’” Cindy Martin said of her daughter’s video. “She said, ‘It’s going to snowball.’ And sure enough, she was right. It’s snowballed.”

Since then, the song has aired on radio station KMGZ-FM in nearby Lawton, Okla., and has become a hit among soldiers overseas.

“I’ve seen an incredible outpouring from the community and from the church,” said the Rev. Jennifer Long, the family’s pastor, who in 2003 lost a family member in a grenade attack in Iraq. “It’s opened a lot of hearts to let out some things that people have been holding in.”

Cindy wrote “When Are You Coming Home?” after learning that 22-year-old Shaun would not be home for Christmas. She and Heather performed the song to give Shaun as a Christmas gift.

“When I had told (Heather) that he wasn’t going to be home for Christmas, she reacted so sadly,” Cindy said. “When I was writing the words, I thought it just really made sense that … it should be written from her point of view.”

The video was recorded during a church service.

More at the link. A TV news report of the family is also onYoutube.

Well, not exactly - only papers made of, well, paper can fold. But it seems that New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years… .” He went on to say that the news outlet will likely move entirely onto the internet. James Joyner has details, including this rejoinder to Pinch’s declaration that the Times’ web site will charge readers to read: “Then the New York Times will exist only as a niche paper. Slate, Salon, and others have tried and failed going the subscription-only route.”

What I’ve not seen anyone point out - a scoop coming here, folks! - is that it simply takes longer to scan and read a newspaper online than on paper. You can flip pages, snapshot headlines printed thereon and quickly read the lead paragraph of a paper edition than you can click and wait for a page to load for an online edition - and then you’re seeing only one story at a time, even if the headlines (and only the headlines) for a section are visible on an index page. I don’t think people will pay to go slower.

But Amazon’s download service is excellent, just slow

Admittedly, Wal-Mart’s video download service is still in beta, which W-M does not disguise, but my experience with it shows it has a long way to go to alpha.

I signed up out of curiousity more than anything else. I have an All-In-Wonder TV card in my computer with cable TV running into it and from time to time I’ll record a movie onto my hard drive. I don’t record “keepers” that way; movies I want for my permanent library I get on DVD, and that’s not very many. The movies I record to hard drive I usually record to VCD resolution, just under 600MB per hour. Sometimes I’ll record a show to timeshift for my wife, and VCD resolution makes it convenient to write it to CD. Furthermore, I watch these shows while I do other work on the computer, with the media player shrunk to a box in the upper-right corner of the screen.

That’s why the W-M video download service appealed to the geeky side of me. It costs more than renting the DVD from Blockbuster (downloads range from $7.50-$9.88, with “hot” movies ranging up to $14.88), but I own the movie as long as I want. That price is also less money than buying the DVD, which I’d do for only a small number of movies anyway, and just as permanent.

But I haven’t able to make the download service work. It seems a simple process, though not a short one. You have to register, of course, and after that you must permit an Active-X control to be loaded, then download and install a series of propietary software control programs, one of which is the actual “Wal-Mart Video Download Manager.” Then you have to give your computer a name on another setup page, then, presumably, you can proceed. This page advises,

By naming you’re computer, you are authorizing it to play the videos you buy on our site. You can also transfer and watch videos on as many as three portable players.

Keep in mind: You can install the Wal-Mart Video Download Manager on as many computers as you like. But, the computer you use to download a video is the only computer you can use to view that video.

“Presumably,” I say, because that’s as far as W-M’s pages will let me go. Their servers refuse to accept any name I try to give my computer on the site, so that’s where it sits as of now. I’ve tried several times as I’ve been writing this, and not only did it refuse to accept any name it also zeroed out my shopping cart.

Although I have not yet been able to download or watch one of the movies, I have learned that you can copy the movie to other media such as a writable DVD, but cannot convert it into actual DVD format. If you want to watch one of the movies on a real TV, you need to download it to a computer that is equipped for TV output, such as a notebook computer. I do not know how large the files are, W-M only claims that they download in a surprisingly short time.

Not only movies can be downloaded. TV shows can, too. For example, you can buy a whole season of Fox’s “24″ for $36.25; single episodes are $1.96. Episodes of the current season are available up to Feb. 5’s show.

Wal-Mart, of course, isn’t the only game in town for this kind of service (and pffft to it, anyway). Amazon.com also has just started a service called Amazon Unbox. Unlike Wally World, Amazon emphasizes downloads of TV shows, charging $1.99 per episode, and also claims DVD quality.

Some of the most popular shows on TV (24, Prison Break, CSI and more) are available for download from Amazon Unbox. Which means you can enjoy them without commercials, and in DVD quality — before they come out on DVD.

It does offer movies, too. Unlike W-M, you can rent a movie by downloading it.

Your rental video can be stored on your PC for 30 days. Once you press play, you have 24 hours to watch the video before it expires.

Rentals seem to average $3.99 each. Download purchases pretty much track W-M’s pricing, with a twist. While both services allow transfer of the movie from PC to portable viewer (can you say iPod, boys and girls?), Amazon says, “you can keep purchased videos on 2 PCs and 2 portable video players at the same time.” Like W-M, you have to download and install propietary Amazon software.

Both W-M and Amazon offer shopping by movie genre, studio and TV channel. It appears to me that Amazon’s TV offerings are far greater and just as current for this season as Wal-Mart’s. I never got W-M to download, but Amazon claimed a DL time of 2.5 minutes for a 6MBPS connection, twice that for a 3MBPS connection, and 52 minutes for a 1.5 MBPS connection; this for a 1.93GB movie file. Well, it took almost an hour to finish downloading to my desktop machine. I ran the speed download speed test at PC Pitstop just afterward, which said that my connection is 3.3MBPS. What gives? I dunno.

Picture and sound quality:

This applies to the mandatory-install Amazon video player: Neither the sound nor the picture approach DVD quality. Heck, the sound isn’t even CD quality. It’s a low-power FM station kind of sound. The video quality is absolutely horrid. The image is extremely low resolution, much, much worse than the VCD video I can record off cable. There is an enormous amount of ghosting and fading with extremely poor color reproduction, all overdrawn with jigglies and swaths of lost detail.

But using Windows media player gives you an altogether different picture. The file is WMV format. I can’t honestly say the video is actual DVD quality, but it is excellent. The sound, however, is stereo and reasonably clear, and that’s it.

Will this kind of service take with the public? No question, I think. It’s convenient and not priced very high. Media storage costs and capacities are low and high, respectively, and I imagine there are a lot of folks like me who are content to keep an eyeball on a movie in the corner or the screen, instantly accessible on a hard drive, for a few dollars, rather than peel bills for a DVD that has to be shelved, located and loaded.

Both services can use a lot more titles, but that will come quickly, I would think. The main market may be the TV shows, though, for people who want to time-shift their favorite programs but don’t have a DVR and are put off by the price of getting one. I think the ability to watch shows on a personal media device will find favor with airline flyers. Amazon even features a way to buy a show on one computer and download it to another. My only complaint is that download speeds are still way too slow, but I am saying that after only one test, I admit.

Try it out! Buy link on the left; rent link on the right:

Update: I learned how Amazon enforces the 24-hours-to view rule. After 24 hours, the video file self-destructs and does not wind up in the recycle bin. Crude but effective.