Personal Communicators

OMG! POTUS keeps his BB. After facing down his top security advisors, President Obama won the right Thursday to be the BlackBerry user-in-chief. Under an arrangement with security aides, Obama will get a new BlackBerry loaded with software approved by U.S. intelligence officials that lets him communicate with friends, family and close associates without fear of hackers reading his e-mail.

More than a decade ago, Palm Inc. rose to prominence on the strength of its Palm Pilot, a small device that put computing power literally into customers' hands. In its stock's first day of trading nine years ago, the shares nearly tripled from their initial offering price. But the technology market bust, lowered demand and the rise of smart phones, where Palm's Treo was once a major player, took their toll.

The unusual case of the missing Sidekick data may be nearing its conclusion. Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that most or all users of its Sidekick mobile device might indeed see their lost data again. The announcement came after worries that users' contacts, notes, photos and other virtual property may have been lost for good when company servers failed. "We plan to begin restoring users' personal data as soon as possible," Roz Ho, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Premium Mobile Experiences, said in a statement, adding that the company now believes the outage affected a minority of Sidekick users.

The new, high-octane iPhone 3GS is loaded with features that could light up your life -- but its battery isn't one of them. Buyers are finding that the device, introduced two weeks ago, has trouble making it through a workday without a rest stop at the electrical outlet. It's proving to be something of an Achilles' heel on Apple Inc.'s flagship device, more than 1 million of which were sold in the first weekend.