Faster, Better Web Mail
Plus: A Windows Mobile Treo, and phone-based music stores.
The Buzz:Viewing e-mail through a Web service like Hotmail has always been convenient but clunky--messages sometimes take a long time to open, and sorting through a large inbox is painfully slow. But new Web mail services from Microsoft and Yahoo promise to bring the power and speed of desktop e-mail applications to your browser. Yahoo started an invitation-only beta test of its new Web mail interface in September. The new Yahoo Mail service lets you file messages by dragging and dropping them, opens new messages in Firefox-like tabs, and scrolls quickly through the most jam-packed inboxes (no more clicking through multiple pages of e-mail). Microsoft's service, code-named Kahuna, uses a similar drag-and-drop, desktop-friendly style, but isn't quite as far along as Yahoo's offering.
Bottom Line: As slick as the new mail services are, there's still one good reason to keep your desktop mail program around: offline e-mail reading and composition.
The Buzz: The Cubs didn't even make the playoffs this year, so hell can't have frozen over, but Palm's latest smart-phone announcement has to have dropped the temperature down there a few degrees. The upcoming Treo 700w will be the company's first device to run the Windows Mobile operating system. Early next year Verizon Wireless will be the first carrier to offer the new Treo--on its EvDO network, which supports data download speeds of 400 to 700 kbps. The 700w will run version 5 of Microsoft's handheld OS and will come with 64MB of memory, a 1-megapixel camera, Bluetooth support, and a 240-by-240-pixel screen.
Bottom Line: Most of the Treo users I know are pretty happy with the Palm OS-based version of the device, so the Windows Mobile flavor will appeal primarily to business users whose picky IT departments won't support Palm PDAs--as well as to addicts of Windows Mobile's Jawbreaker puzzle game.
The Buzz: Who needs ring tones, when you can download whole tracks or even albums to your wireless phone? Wireless providers are ready to enter the music business: Cingular will launch a music store (with Apple) early next year, Sprint is working with Rhapsody and Sirius, and Verizon says it's planning its own music service, too.
Bottom Line: Ring tones, SMS messages, picture mail, roaming charges, and now music stores? Soon parents will be starting mobile phone funds at the same time they begin saving for college.
Future Tech: Holographic Storage
Imagine storing 300GB on a piece of plastic not much larger than a DVD. That is the premise behind InPhase Technologies' new holographic storage technology, which uses a pair of lasers to create three-dimensional interference patterns that can represent up to a million bits at once. InPhase hopes to bring a product to market sometime during 2006. Toshiba has invested in a competing firm called Optoware that is developing a 1.6-terabyte holographic disc format. Rumor has it that Hollywood is already working on ways to make these discs a huge pain to use.
Eric Dahl
You can contact PC World Senior Editor Eric Dahl at eric_dahl@pcworld.com.
