Handhelds for your business

Quite a few handhelds now feature an integrated thumb keyboard – shown here is the Handspring Treo 600.

With the exception of the £59 Palm Zire, nearly all models have colour displays, but they vary in terms of size, resolution and brightness. An integrated thumb keyboard -- once a novelty found primarily on the BlackBerry, is now prevalent in the Handspring Treo line, Palm Tungsten W and C, and several Sony models. Finally, most models include expansion slots, typically SD, CompactFlash or Memory Stick, for boosting storage or adding features.

Sizing up the software

Despite their advanced capabilities, most handhelds are still used primarily as digital Filofaxes. All handhelds have an address book, an appointment calendar, a task list and notes, which you can synchronise with Microsoft Outlook or other popular personal information managers. But handhelds are capable of much more. All Pocket PCs come with pocket versions of Word and Excel for viewing and editing documents, and many Palm OS-based devices also include DataViz's Documents To Go or other third-party applications that perform the same tasks -- in some cases, better than Microsoft's own software. When you're out of the office, many handhelds also include entertainment applications such as MP3 players, electronic photo albums, e-book readers and games.

But the most recent advances in handhelds have been in the area of wireless communications. Bluetooth lets you synchronise wirelessly, exchange files or connect to other Bluetooth-enabled devices such as mobile phones. Wi-Fi lets you access a public hot spot or a LAN (local-area network) at home or at the office to check email and browse the Web. Finally, wide-area networking uses cellular networks such as GSM/GPRS to stay connected over broader areas, albeit at much slower speeds. Some handhelds in this last category also support voice communications, serving as both a handheld and a mobile phone in one. Some models look like handhelds with phone functionality (examples include the Orange SPV M1000, , BlackBerry 7230, Handspring Treo 600 and Palm Tungsten W); others are smart phones that add handheld features (Orange SPV E200 and Sony Ericsson P800).

The bottom line: whether you simply need a handheld to get organised or are looking for a flashy conversation piece, you have plenty of models to choose from, at prices to suit any budget. Here are some of our top choices at each extreme and all points in between.

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		Product	Date	Editors' Rating	Readers' Rating
		Palm Tungsten E	[06 Oct 2003]	7.7	7.3
		Handspring Treo 600	[22 Oct 2003]	8.7	8.4
		HP iPAQ H1940	[02 Jul 2003]	8.3	9.0
		Mitac Mio 558	[06 Apr 2004]	8.0	7.8
		O2 xda II	[28 Oct 2003]	8.2	8.3
		Sony CLIE PEG-TH55	[23 Apr 2004]	8.0	9.0
		Toshiba Pocket PC e800 Wi-Fi	[12 Mar 2004]	7.7	8.1
		Dell Axim X30 (64MB, 624MHz processor)	[25 May 2004]	8.3	9.1
		HP iPAQ H4150	[03 Nov 2003]	8.0	8.5
		Sony CLIE PEG-UX50	[13 Oct 2003]	8.7	7.4
		Product	Date	Editors' Rating	Readers' Rating

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