handhelds

With all these ultra-violent games everywhere, do you ever pine for the more innocent days of Frogger and Q-bert? OK, maybe not. But if you do have other favorites from an old Sega or Nintendo console, South Korea's Plezo says you can play them on the new PMG-250 handheld and its 2.5-inch color LCD.

This gadget may not have all the bells and whistles of its better-known counterparts, but it will let you pretend to be a real gamer as long as people can't see what you're playing. And it's an MP3 player too, so … Read more

Dell has stopped selling its Axim line of handhelds and is not planning a new product in the category.

"The Axim X51 family is no longer being offered, and we have no plans for a follow-on product at this time," Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden said in an e-mail. Camden noted that the company does sell handhelds from other makers on its Web site, including GPS devices and smart phones.

Dell introduced its first Axim Pocket PC in 2002, helping to bring lower prices to a market in which customers had grown used to spending several hundred dollars. Over … Read more

Hewlett-Packard is working on a gaming handheld that could let players use their surroundings as a backdrop for an immersive game.

The company unveiled a commercial for "Mscape," its gaming prototype, that featured a number of young hipster gamers roaming San Francisco while playing a game on Mscape that used cues from their environment as triggers to unlock new levels or bonuses. "We want to get kids off the couch," Rahul Sood, chief technology officer of HP's gaming division, said during a presentation in San Francisco.

Details were sketchy, but HP appears to be taking … Read more

Oqo has started to ship a new model of its handheld Windows computer. Now all the company needs is customers.

The new computer, officially model 02, is a full-fledged Windows XP computer that comes with optional broadband wireless from Verizon or Sprint. It costs $1,499 and is available here..

The trick is that it fits into a person's hand, similar to those devices from Samsung or Taiwan's Hi Tech Computer Corp. (Hi Tech announced a handheld Vista-based computer this week.). Sony has a few in Japan.

Oqo, however, can lay claim to being in the market the … Read more

A lot of us at Crave have small children, and at least some of us aren't ashamed to admit that we rely on portable DVD players in emergency situations (such as drives that last more than an hour). So we were pleased to find that a new handheld player had made its way to the market, MediaStreet's "eMotion."

On closer inspection, however, the player seemed to fall short compared with other models at least in the specs department. Its 3.5-inch screen is smaller than that of a comparable player from Hammacher Schlemmer, for example, which … Read more

How many times have you been in a foreign country--or even your local Chinatown--and wished you had an expert translator on hand? Travel dictionaries take too long to flip through; by the time you've figured out how to order those sweet-and-crispy fried plantains (what Cubans call platanos maduros and Puerto Ricans call amarillos), the waiter has drifted off to the next table.

Enter the next best thing to a brilliantly multilingual best friend: Franklin Electronic Publishers' Speaking Global Translator, a handheld gadget that packs in more than 450,000 words and 12,000 phrases in 12 languages: Mandarin, Dutch, … Read more

The nano-ization of gadgetry has often left printers behind--a frustration for those of us who can't seem to shake the pulp fix no matter how hard we try. Brother Japan tries to address that addiction with a super-thin "MPrint" MW-260, a hanheld printer that's less than three-quarters of an inch thick and weighs about 1.2 pounds.

Aside from its size, the printer is even more portable because it can work wirelessly via Bluetooth more than 30 feet away from laptops, smart phones, PDAs and other devices, according to Fareastgizmos. And you won't need to … Read more

Because of a few small details like trademark infringement and copyright violations, it's not often that you see a company boasting about its efficiency in reverse engineering. But that's one function that OhGizmo points out about this handheld 3D scanner from Z Corp.

"Reverse Engineering: Speed, accuracy and ease-of-use for aftermarket product design" is one of the company's bullet points about the ZScanner 700. Not that there's anything necessarily illegal about it. As the Web site points out, the scanner can be used for such worthy functions as medical education, digital archiving, and computer … Read more

When I was testing out the new PepperPad 3 at the DigitalLife trade show in New York City last week, it reminded me of something that might have appeared in 1980s science fiction about the 21st century. You see, by the '80s they kind of had an idea of where the whole "personal computer" thing was going, but they still seemed to have a penchant for flat, touch-screen machines that looked like blown-up Game Boys. (Ever read "Ender's Game"?)

Such is the Linux-based PepperPad 3, the latest offering from Pepper Computer. It's marketed as … Read more