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Staying Connected

The Samsung P735 swiveling flip phone Photo courtesy Samsung

  As technology advances, there are more and more ways for everyone to stay connected without the cumbersome wires and stationary necessity of landlines for phones and computers. Here are some of our favorite new products on the wireless frontier.

The PalmOne Treo 650 from Sprint Photo courtesy Sprint

More than just a cell phone, the Samsung P735 flip phone allows you to swivel the full-color screen horizontally so you can take photos with the built-in megapixel camera. That camera takes film-quality pictures that can be printed up to 4-by-6-inches, and there is a memory card to help you store the images. It also has a video camera with playback. The tri-band phone works with international calls, there's an external caller ID, an MP3 music player, a currency converter for travelers, a voice recorder, calculator, calendar, phone book, infrared data transmission, and MegaTones, wallpaper and games by Download Fun™ and predictive text input to make messaging easy. It sells for $499.99 with new service activation from T-Mobile.

The BlackBerry 7290 from Cingular Photo courtesy Cingular

The palmOne Treo 650 offers a features-packed amalgamation of wireless phone that can operate worldwide and a personal digital assistant (PDA), providing a multimedia messaging service, an integrated phone and speakerphone, a camera for picture messaging and optional external memory port. It also gives the user a backlit QWERTY keyboard, datebook, memo pad, calendar, calculator, world clock, to-do and contact lists, email, Web browsing, MP3 player, and a digital camera that can take still shots or video. For the phone part of it, the Treo 650 has an on-screen dial pad, speed dial, conference calling, caller ID and more. There also are options that allow email access from anywhere as well as photos, HTML and other computer program attachments. There's also an infrared port to send information and software between devices. It sells for about $449, and Sprint offers a $150 rebate. The voice-enabled BlackBerry 7290 incorporates, phone, email, Web browsing and international roaming capabilities, hands-free voice communications with Bluetooth, and all kinds of organizer functions in a handheld unit. It was specially designed for business people who have to travel internationally. It has a 33-key QWERTY keyboard with highlighted number keys, a backlit display that supports more than 65,000 colors, and the capacity to view attachments with file formats such as Word, WordPerfect, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint and ASCII. It sells for $299.99 with a two-year contract from Cingular, which offers a $50 mail-in rebate.

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