Another possible limitation is battery life

Another possible limitation is battery life. There was more than enough juice if the phone was recharged overnight every day. Surfing and downloading for an hour or two drained the battery only by half until the nightly charge. But making a lot of phone calls might present a problem.Looking back on the experience, I found the entertainment fun for a little while but it would take lower prices and a bigger selection of content or business applications for me to upgrade.

But in order to take advantage of these convenient features, you have to be able to get access to them. While I had no trouble connecting from my office near downtown, I could only connect about HP Dv2700 battery half the time from inside my apartment near Green Lake, where the device once again beckoned me toward a window. It wasn't exactly the on-the-go Internet access I had hoped for.

Adding to the frustration is that for the Palm VII's high-tech appeal, it uses some old technology. Unlike other devices in its price range that use Lithium Ion batteries, the Palm VII still runs on two AAA batteries that, when surfing moderately, last about a week and can, if you are not careful, leave you stranded.

This bundled software barely counts as an "editing" tool — it only lets you trim the start and end of a clip and stitch together separate videos into a mini-movie. You can try editing these files in other movie programs, but many can't read them. Instead, Flip's software mainly focuses on sharing your videos online.

The Wi-Fi connection allows users to browse PC content from the remote's color LCD display screen. It's intended to work with plug-and-play digital devices designed to be easy to hook up to a PC or home network.

Philips hopes to begin selling the remote in the first or second quarter of this year.Peter Liu is manufacturing what may be the next must-have item at Starbucks, a little heating pad for keeping coffee HP DV2300 battery warm. What's different about his HT2001 CAFE Pad is that it gets its power from a USB cord that plugs into a laptop or desktop computer.

The PC industry is already shifting toward smaller and smaller machines. Laptop sales are expected to grow 15 percent annually from 2004 through 2008, compared with 4 percent for desktops, according to Gartner research data that Mitchell presented. He said sales "can be tremendously more than that if we do our jobs right."

To get there, the industry needs to overcome the perception that a PC is a balky machine that sits on a desk. It also needs to start developing systems that operate all day on a single HP DV2200 battery charge, are constantly connected to the Internet, start instantly and don't require a keyboard and mouse to operate, Mitchell said.