What's 3G got to do with 3G? Add in the location of the cell tower and your GPS-enabled phone can look in the right part of the sky for satellites, so it gets a fix more quickly and uses less power to do it. Online POIs are more up to date, you can get maps over the air rather than loading them in advance and calculating a route on a powerful server should be faster than doing it on your phone. That's the theory: on our last US trip we checked out Ask GPS and Nokia Maps in practice. My review on Tom's Hardware reminds me of sunny days in Las Vegas and driving through the Cascades looking for espresso huts, taxi drivers in New York and Cincinatti who didn't know where they were going - and how often I longed to throw the N95 out of the window... I did Google Maps, Windows Live Search Mobile and Yahoo Go 2 back in the summer but I need to revisit Google Maps now it has the excellent locate without GPS feature and I want to review CoPilot 7 on the O2 XDA Stella... handy that we have a road trip coming up then...

and it's got GPS and 3G built in. QWERTY, check; Wi-Fi-, check; true slate format because the keyboard is magnetic, check. But the HTC Advantage (I reviewed it at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/133941/htc-advantage-x7500.html) runs Windows Mobile; is that the only reason it didn't generate the same excitement as the Eee PC?

EDIT: note - I'm curious in terms of how many people have said they want the Eee PC with a 3G card, which means I consider it fair game to price the Advantage with a data contract, reducing it significantly from the non-contract price. The comments make me think it's the price for the size that is appealing to most of you,.

Want a multitouch phone now? There's the Prada and the iPhone. And for the rest of us there's the HTC Touch. Simon and I don't quite agree on this one; for business users who don't like QWERTY I think this is a pretty good phone. Here's why

I've been playing with more phones for IT Pro....

The HTC Excalibur - also known as the T-Mobile Dash - is a smart, capable, lightweight smartphone with multimedia features good enough to let you keep it in your pocket out of business hours. By the time the Motorola Q finally makes it to the UK, the S620 may have stolen its market.
Read on at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/118512/htc-s620-smartphone.html

The first BlackBerry to combine a full keyboard and camera, the 8300 Curve doesn't have the visceral desirability of the Pearl - or the slab-like bulk of the 8800 - but it does have QWERTY and trackball, spell checking and competent multimedia in a small and neat package.
Read on at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/119405/blackberry-8300-curve.html

I like them both and I've stuck with the Excalibur for personal use to replace the Treo 750v - the battery life, the better call quality and the standard connector plus the slimmer size made up for losing the extra software features. If you're a BlackBerry fan - and you have BES - the 8300 is an excellent phone. Incidentally, I wrote the review of it on the flight from San Francisco to Indianapolis...

Rummaging around for another link I found the second part of my PDA/smartphone buying guides on Tom's Hardware...

Smartphones have plenty of tools and services, but if you don't fancy viewing them on a very small screen and using them with a couple of softkeys and a four-way controller, look at a PDA phone. You get the widest choice of applications and input, plus a bigger screen-and you don't have to sacrifice phone features either.

If you've used a PDA already, you'll find the familiar names and operating systems here like Palm and iPAQ, alongside Symbian devices from phone manufactures such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson. As with smartphones, many Windows Mobile devices are made by HTC and branded by the operators (the T-Mobile Dash, the O2 XDA range, the Orange SPV models and the Cingular and Verizon own-brand models), though HTC now uses its own brand as well as i-mate and Qtek and other Pocket PC manufacturers like Samsung and Mio have phone models now. Blackberry isn't just for business users and the Sidekick may not have as many applications as other devices but it's more like a PDA than a pager these days. Read the rest...

I wasn't going to be talking about this in public until Monday, even though we saw it at CES, but thanks to La Tribune I dropped everything in the middle of a press event yesterday to write up the features of Windows Mobile 6 for IT Pro. I'm really looking forward to predictive dialling on the more powerful Windows Mobile devices, to HTML email and to searching my whole mailbox via Exchange 2007 (lucky sbisson gets to install Exchange 2007). I don't like that I still can't search the body of emails on the phone and I think Microsoft has looked too much at Symbian in some places. No CardSpace, no XML file formats for a while. But an update I'll want to get. Pretty please Mr Network Operator...

"To give you an idea where we are with power, consider the little green LED that blinks whenever you've got a data connection.  On a device I was working on recently, I increased the total device standby time by 12% by reducing the amount of time the green LED was on from 200 milliseconds to 50.  We're talking about almost a day of standby time here. "
NOR, NAND and XIP
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2006/06/19/637638.aspx

That's for a PDA. I'm now going to go look for a registry key that lets me set that LED! I'm thinking about battery technology for a feature I'm writing; we're getting further with evolutionary sensible optimisation than we are with revolutionary new chemistry.