Smart Phone

Before you go shopping for a nifty new smart phone this holiday season, keep this in mind: Verizon Wireless, the largest provider of mobile-phone services, has just doubled its early-termination fee for high-end handsets if you decide you'd rather go with a different carrier. It was bad enough when the company would slap you with a $175 charge for jumping ship after a 30-day trial period. Now that penalty is $350. The in-your-face fee applies to BlackBerrys, the much-touted new Droid phones and other smart phones capable of sending and receiving text messages and e-mails as well as accessing the Internet.

After nearly two decades of putting cutting-edge personal electronic devices in the hands of consumers, Palm Inc.'s grip on survival may finally be slipping. The smart phone maker's stock plunged nearly 30% on Friday after several Wall Street analysts offered grim assessments of the company's future. "They might be going bankrupt," said Vitali Savitski of Canaccord Adams, who urged investors Friday to sell the stock after making a highly unusual prediction that he expected the value of Palm shares to dwindle to zero.

The rule used to be that if you wanted a smart phone, you had to choose: work or play. BlackBerry was the workhorse. The models are sturdy, great for e-mail and digitally secure. Businesses love them. On the other end, Apple Inc.'s iPhone and the dozens of smart phones that use Google Inc.'s Android software were mostly good for posting Facebook pictures, playing games and downloading quirky apps. They weren't very efficient for office work. But Apple and Google have remedied most of the problems that made them outcasts from corporate IT departments.

"Is there an app for that?" When it comes to consumer healthcare applications for smart phones, the answer, increasingly, is yes. There are now close to 6,000 consumer health apps, according to a review published in March by mobihealthnews, which reports on the mobile health industry, and more are being added every day. Many are free, or cost $1 to $10 to download. Some physicians are concerned about the reliability of the medical information provided by many of these apps, which offer advice and information on a wide array of health topics, including how to find a doctor, first aid for an emergency and exercise instructions.

Microsoft Corp., which has struggled for years to capture the attention and dollars of smart-phone users, debuted handsets Monday that will run on its new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7. AT&T Inc. will be the first to offer the phones, starting with the Samsung Focus, arriving in stores Nov. 8. HTC Corp. and LG Corp. will each release a model "a few weeks later," Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said at an event in New York to introduce the phones. Each of the three AT&T handsets will sell for $199.

TrimbleOutdoors.com is an online mobile trip-planning tool for outdoors lovers. Never heard of the company? Trimble has been in the GPS business since 1978. What's hot: A massive network of hiking and bicycling recommendations. Use your GPS-enabled smart phone to find great trails, geo-cache or manage your workout performance. From the website, you can find detailed trips shared by other adventurers. Or you can create your own, whether you're up for a run, a hike or a day of mountain or road cycling.

Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to buy smart phone maker Palm Inc. — which helped spark the mobile digital revolution with its renowned PalmPilot device in the mid-1990s — in a cash deal for $1.2 billion. Palm had been struggling in recent years, however, under the weight of competition of the iPhone from Apple Inc. and BlackBerry from Research in Motion Ltd., and there had been widespread speculation that Palm would not survive on its own. The sale would give HP, whose own smart phones had not caught fire with consumers, a noted brand in the field and Palm's operating system, WebOS.

It's Black Friday insanity ? and the snarled lines and pushy shoppers that entails. No worries, the World Wide Web is here to help frazzled shoppers find deals. Got an Android smart phone or iPhone? Use it to access Dealmap, which has spent the last month laying out more than 165,000 deals across 52,000 retail locations nationwide for the shopping extravaganza the day after Thanksgiving. Local businesses can also submit deals to the application. Product inventory tracker Milo.

You can do a lot with a mobile phone these days besides make calls. You can play music, watch videos and even get driving directions. Gary Kelly sometimes uses his smart phone as his eyes. Kelly, 60, lost his vision at age 11 after a bout with glaucoma and detached retinas. Now he can see only very bright light, like those from a camera flashbulb. In adapting to life without sight Kelly devised ways to identify things and get around the house. But some things just couldn't be done.

After mulling over which smart phone to buy for months, Seth Chapman decided against jumping on the iPhone, BlackBerry or Droid X bandwagons and instead went with the HTC Evo 4G. He liked the Evo's built-in features, such as voice navigation, and he wanted to be among the first to use the superfast 4G network. The name of the company that made the phone — HTC Corp. — was incidental. "I have some friends who are Korean," Chapman said while shopping for Evo accessories at a Sprint store in downtown Los Angeles.