When announced, Sony Ericsson's W800 was the first of the company's now blossoming line of Walkman branded music phones. Based on the K750 that it was launched with, the wild-looking orange and white W800 went on to receive rave reviews in the press. Now, a year later, Sony Ericsson has toned down the look a bit, added some new UI tweaks, and upgraded to quad-band GSM/EDGE support to come up with the W810, the subject of this review. The W810 is certainly an incremental upgrade from the W800, but the sheer number of incremental changes should make the W810 an appealing upgrade to many.

No less an authority than CEO Ed Colligan said late last year that Palm would roll out three additional smartphones in 2006; after he, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Verizon Wireless CEO Denny Strigl introduced the company's first Windows Mobile device, the Treo 700w. One of these new models, code-named 'Hollywood', is rumored to be Motorola RAZR-thin. It was also said to nix the traditional Treo antenna, feature high-speed EV-DO networking support and possibly find a home with Verizon (or maybe Sprint).

Geeks.com were very kind to supply us with a number of their products for the purposes of this review. We give a quick look to a VoIP USB headset, a PC headset, two flash memory cards and a USB/Firewire PCMCIA combo card.

Bill Gates has a secret weapon -- a little-known Taiwanese company with the bland name of High Tech Computer Corp. Microsoft Corp. has long wanted to extend Windows territory to include smartphones, those souped-up handsets that can duplicate many of a desktop's functions.

Bluetake was very kind to send us in a unit of their brand new i-PHONO BT450Px Bluetooth Stereo transmitter for the SONY PSP devices, and we gave it whirl.

Qtopia software is an ideal application platform and user interface for Linux-based consumer electronic devices. Kangaroo TV demonstrated this by using Qtopia to develop a graphical user interface (GUI) for a handheld device that enhances the fan sporting experience. The GUI is part of a service that captures live video, audio and real-time data and broadcasts it to the device putting fans in the middle of the sporting action. Today, Kangaroo TV is offered by Sprint as the NASCAR NEXTEL FanView™. The device is available for rent during NASCAR NEXTEL Cup series race weekends. The device can be used for a variety of sporting events such as football, professional golfing and baseball.

The G500 is a quad band GSM phone which is sold unlocked for use with any carrier. Just pop in your SIM and you're ready to make calls. Enter your carrier's GPRS settings and you'll be able to surf the Net and do email. The G500 is not offered by any carrier in the US but is sold by online retailers and requires no contract. It's also a full-featured Pocket PC with the usual Outlook synchronization, mobile Office applications, IE mobile, email and more. Those of you who are familiar with E-TEN's M600, or even the older M500 will feel at home with the G500, which has a very similar form factor, feature set and compliment of software.

Here are two interesting reviews of the Acer n311 and the Fujitsu Siemens N560 PocketPCs. One is in Russian and one in Italian.

A Linux-based handheld gaming platform that runs native and emulated games is shipping in the US. Gamepark's GP2X is powered by a pair of ARM9 processors, has an "open-source" API and development tools, and can run thousands of classic console video games, online retailer Dynamism says.

Joel checked out the OQO model 01+ a couple of weeks ago and then sent it to me for a few days before we had to return the review sample.