For most people who aren't fortunate enough to work in the consumer electronics industry, it's not all that easy to get "hands-on" with the latest gadgets and games until they hit the store shelves.  Even then, the only people you get to talk to are the store representatives.  Enter DigitalLife. DigitalLife is a trade show specifically for consumers to come check out cool stuff, and hear directly from the companies who make the products!  The event is October 12-15 at the Javits Center in New York City, and it’s free to attend!  Click on the tickets page, then enter this code: INSIDER  I'll be there with bells on.  Well, bells and Slingboxes and digital cameras and cell phones and Xbox 360s and ...

Many new electronic devices are using LCD screens. If you break it, you might feel absolutely sick! Don't despair! Usually, you can take the unit apart and find a part number on the LCD. Simply Google or ebay the part number, and chances are you'll find a replacement for a good price. This is especially nice because many electronic device manufacturers buy their LCD's from other companies - and they charge more so that they can make a profit off the LCDs. In other words, you are buying straight from the original manufacturer of the LCD, so there is no price markup.

Over a year and a half ago in December 2004, the much anticipated Treo 650 smartphone arrived on the market. This first model was a CDMA version from Sprint, but several months later a GSM version and then a version from Verizon also became available. Since its release, the 650 has become the most popular smartphone (combination PDA / mobile phone) device on the market. Time has not stood still for...

Personal Data Assistant (PDA) technology has come a long way since the original PalmPilot. We live in a veritable smorgasbord of choices with Palms, Pocket PCs (PPC), Blackberries, Sidekicks and snazzy cell phones all vying for our money. Thanks to the logical marriage of cell phones and PDAs, however, being on the go no longer means being out of touch. While this may or may not be a good thing, current technology means wherever you go, you can access...

Last year when we were talking about PDA's I predicted a more integrated product, with a large hard drive. Now, the first version of what I have been waiting for has been released. Meet the Creative Vision M It has a beautiful High resolution screen for photo and video content. A 30 GIG hard drive. MP3 player. Voice recorder for notes. and it syncs with Outlook! Finally - a device to combine a pda, mp3 player, portable hard drive, video player and voice recorder all in one. This the first expensive pocket size computing device that I have bought for myself. I just ordered in Hot Pink. :-) So... I will eagerly await its arival. I will report back once I get it.

It took me awhile to sift through all the products and gear I took in at the show but I think I have finally narrowed down my list of "cool things" to this group of products. I think most of us can safely ignore the bulk of the announcements as they seem to be little more than enhancements to existing technologies that very few of us are going to appreciate. For example, 1080p televisions will offer even higher defintion that the sets that are already on store shelves. Next-generation optical discs will provide higher quality and greater capacity that today's DVDs. Portable video players are coming out of the woodwork and support more formats than previous generations but are no easier to use for the average guy. And the list goes on. For this report, I chose to concentrate on things that should be of interest to the mainstream audience.Get Off The Couch and PlayFirst up is an amazing game console from Xavix which requires you to get off the couch to play. The console itself is tiny, about as big as a portable DVD player. And CHEAP! Compared to the next-gen gaming systems from Microsoft and Sony which are ...

I couldn't take it. WM5 on my Axim 50v was killing me, and the last straw was its attempted murder of my battery.I got to work in the AM and cabled it to the PC, expecting it to draw power. I came back from a 90 minute meeting to find the power down to 68%. I proceeded to re-connect it, only to find it wouldn't pick up the cable's presence. Now it was draining the battery just by connecting to the USB cable. Processor was stepped down to slowest, nothing running, but I could literally refresh the battery screen and see it degrade.I shut it down, tried some tweaks off Aximsite. Even worse. I shut it off, brought it home at 6% power remaining. Helpful note: you cannot update the ROM unless you have a battery at 40% or more. Even swapping out the low battery with a fresh one did not matter, because WM5 insisted the new battery was low as well. More WM5 problems.Dell helpfully provided a rollback ROM. It takes 35 minutes roundtrip: you cradle, perform the upgrade, hard reset, then walk away for fifteen minutes (otherwise you'll see the frozen startup icon and think it's not ...

Dell came through and dropped the promised WM5 upgrade (code named Magneto) in my mailbox, a month late but there it was. I held off doing any upgrading for a personal-record three hours.I had already known that the upgrade would be bumpy and I had to pay close attention to the warnings throughout the CD readmes. First among all? Your current Dell backup of your Axim will NOT restore to WM5. This sucked, for a variety of reasons:backing up data was now a manual process using either "Explore" from your ActiveSync connection or copying to a CF/SD card, assumingyou had spaceMicrosoft and Dell both knew that the upgrade was coming, and had enough time to roll even a one-off data import utility to get that backup restored into WM5 properlyWell, I copied my must-saves to the 6Gb microDrive and did the deal. You upgrade ActiveSync to 4.0, then update the ROM. You do a hard reset twice in the process, and eventually you get WM5 and the onerous task of re-installing your apps.Dell does provide a two-CD set which has trial apps and limited-utility versions of apps you might like. Software issues so far:Bejeweled 2 does not work in WM5 ...