10 Things Every Mobile User Should Know

Make your next gadget-laden journey as painless and productive as possible

Want to minimize the hassle of juggling two carry-on bags? The smartly designed, wheeled Victorinox Coliseum Wheeled Overnight Brief ($399) features an external pocket big enough to hold a laptop bag, plus a capacious interior for clothes, reading material, and other items. You can get it from retailers like .

1. An iPod (and other portable USB storage devices) can hold computer files, Outlook data, Internet Explorer favorites, desktop wallpaper, and in some cases, applications. Connect the iPod to a borrowed PC, and voil--it's like having access to your own computer. Later, sync the
2. iPod with your PC back home. The ($30) and ($30) utilities each provide this capability.
3. charges $2 per month plus 15 cents per page to forward faxes as PDF files in e-mail.
   Raise your chances of being reunited with a lost laptop by registering it with . You'll receive a sticker to put on your notebook, informing others of a reward for its return. To contact you, the finder dials the toll-free number on the sticker or goes to the StuffBak Web site. A $6 sticker provides two years of free return service.
4. You should always take a grounded (three-prong) extension cord with at least three outlets so you can recharge multiple gadgets; blank CDs, for transferring files to another PC or burning tunes to play in the rental car; an RJ-11 phone cord, because you never know when you'll need one; an ethernet cable, for the same reason; and your AC adapter, with airline and car power adapters.
5. Before booking a flight, head over to . Charts reveal which seats on domestic and international flights have the greatest width and pitch and provide in-seat power ports.

On the Road

1. The free Google Maps for Palm, BlackBerry, and other smart phones shows nearby businesses, gives directions, and delivers real-time traffic info (in 30 U.S. markets).
2. Most Bluetooth phones (and some others) include data-modem capabilities, enabling you to use your phone to connect your laptop to the Web wirelessly. Check with your carrier for a connection kit and compatible data plan.
3. If there's no hotspot at the airport, you can often connect through a lounge. With a you gain admission into 500 lounges in some 300 airports. Standard membership is $99 per year plus $24 per visit. Also, some clubs now offer $50 day passes.
4. Listing more than 120,000 hotspots worldwide, is the place to go when you're sniffing around for a Wi-Fi connection. And its Hotspot Helper software ($25 per year; free ten-day trial) lets you locate hotspots offline, too.
5. Some hotel rooms still offer only wired broadband access. But a portable router--such as Apple's AirPort Express ($129) or Linksys's Wireless-G Travel Router ($100)--lets you create your own wireless network, so you're not shackled to the uncomfortable guest-room desk.

ViewSonic VLED221wm 22-Inch LCD Monitor

Though the attractive specs and smooth design of this LCD monitor are impressive, its premium price will turn off most people
ViewSonic's 22-inch wide-screen VLED221wm is the world's first sub-$1000 LCD monitor with LED backlight technology, which delivers an evenly bright screen and a wide color gamut.
The VLED221wm, which should be available in late February, offers a 12,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio that allows the display of impressive blacks; provides great color reproduction due to its ability to represent up to 118 percent of the NTSC color gamut; has a 1680 by 1050 native resolution; and boasts a 5ms response time. At $800 (as of 1/29/08), the VLED221wm costs more than double the price of the HP w2207, currently our highest-ranked 22-inch display.
The cleanly designed VLED221wm has a thin, glossy, deep-black bezel. Most glossy bezels collect fingerprints and dirt, making the monitor look as if it were part of a CSI crime scene. The VLED221wm, however, proved smudge and fingerprint resistant, despite my repeated attempts to dirty it up. The built-in stereo speakers blend nicely and unobtrusively into the bezel, too. Though the display tilts, it does not swivel or pivot. In the user-friendly OSD (on-screen display) menu, you can adjust the color settings, the brightness and contrast, and the audio volume by using the up, down, and select buttons on the front of the display.
Sound quality was lacking. In my informal audio-quality tests, the high frequencies were too high, and the lows lacked the punch that a stand-alone speaker system would provide. While the tinny sound won't please audiophiles, it is satisfactory if low background music is all you want.
In image-quality tests performed by the PC World Test Center, we were surprised to see the VLED221wm fail to outperform all of its cheaper, non-LED-backlit competitors. Nevertheless, it didn't score poorly, ranking fourth in our graphics tests overall and sixth in our text-clarity tests. This display produced better-quality images than 18 other 20- and 22-inch displays we looked at.
While viewing a scene from Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones, I noticed that the colors seemed inaccurate, but a quick tinkering with the color-temperature settings fixed the problem. Afterward the on-screen colors were bright and clear, not oversaturated. Red lasers shot from starfighters looked so brilliant and intense that they reminded me of images from Mitsubishi's Laser HDTV, which exhibits the latest in display technology and, in a demo, showed the brightest colors I've ever seen.
Though ViewSonic packed a lot of high-end features into the VLED221wm, the impressive specs did not produce a huge image-quality boost in our testing. This monitor is best suited for a movie buff, for a multimedia/graphic designer who needs to see a wide gamut of bright colors, or for any tech enthusiast with money to burn. For the price, though, $800 would be better spent on a larger LCD monitor, or even a dual-monitor setup.

LG Super Blu BH200 Dual-Format HD Player

The BH200 offers two high-def formats in one player, but its price is too high
LG Electronics made a splash earlier this year with the first set-top high-def video player that could play both Blu-ray and HD DVD movies; however, critical missing features kept that model from being a home run. The new $999 Super Blu BH200 rights its predecessor's wrongs by fully implementing the HD DVD spec, so you can properly view the fancy menus and extra content to be found on an HD DVD disc. It also adds support for audio CD playback and for upscaling standard-definition DVDs to 1080p.
The more I used the BH200, the more I liked its design. It's sleek and stylish, with a black finish and soft-touch buttons on the front (moved from their former, confounding placement on top). A clean, easy-to-follow on-screen interface makes using the player a breeze.
The player's specs are solid. It fully supports the Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD specifications, and the recently implemented Blu-ray Bonus View picture-in-picture functionality. This allows you to watch the talking head of a director superimposed over the movie, for example. It can also handle decoding Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio in-unit, or pass those audio signals to an audio receiver in bit-stream format. We have not yet formally lab-tested the player's image quality; check our Web site for the results and a full PCW Rating when that information becomes available.
My one noteworthy complaint: The player is pokey with some discs--at startup, when identifying whether you've inserted a Blu-ray or an HD DVD disc, when changing chapters, or when navigating disc menus. Some discs have more pauses during navigation than others--and some have no issues at all. Load times for Blu-ray and HD DVD versions of the same movie appeared comparable on the handful of titles I timed: for example, 2001: A Space Odyssey required 44 seconds to be identified as a Blu-ray Disc, and another 19 seconds to get to the FBI warning; the HD DVD version required the same amount of time to be identified as an HD DVD, and another 21 seconds to reach the FBI warning.
Blu-ray Discs that were heavy with BD-Java (such as Cars and Ratatouille) seemed to suffer slight pauses more often than less complicated Blu-ray titles. And all HD DVDs I loaded had a sluggish response when accessing their advanced menus. This problem might be due to the player's HD DVD implementation: Although the BH200 does qualify for the HD DVD logo by fully supporting that spec, it does so by using its own, LG-written software for handling the advanced menus. By contrast, the Toshiba HD DVD players are using HDi, Microsoft's implementation of HD DVD's advanced menus.
Although the BH200 certainly breaks down the barriers between Blu-ray and HD DVD, LG is charging a high premium for the convenience of having both formats in one box. Personally, I think the premium is just too high, especially considering that you can buy a Blu-ray Disc player and an HD DVD player together for significantly less.