The mini-notebook market is heating up, with today bringing stats and shots of the Asus's latest Eee PC with its tiny screen and keys that might work with normal hands. Then later, we get news of a leak about Everex, Asus's competitor in this market, about its next Cloudbooks, including one with a 10.2-inch screen and 3G connectivity, and another with an 8.9-inch screen and WiMax.

No definite word on if they'll be using Intel's Atom processors or competitors from Via, or if they'll be XP or Linux machines, but the makers of the reference design, FIC, would confirm a screen resolution on the 10.2-inch model at 1024x600. It will also feature a 1.3-Megapixel camera, 2GB RAM, card reader, dual USB 2.0 and an express card slot.

Less details are known of the 8.9-inch model, though the specs should be similar, including resolution. The devices might be subsidized by 3G carriers like AT&T or Sprint—if they ever hit the US shores, which there's no promise of.

We liked the Cloudbooks we've seen so far, and we can't wait to see if a slightly larger model will actually be usable for those of us with big, bear-like hands. [PC Advisor, via Slashgear]

Xbox 360 Spring Update Improves VGA Image Quality [Daily Tech]

So for this week's Frankenreview, I've "borrowed" reviews from CNET, PCMag, PCWorld (technically a hands-on), and Mobile Review to find out if for the first time in the history of human existence, Sprint landed an awesome phone before the other carriers.

Displays
"The 65,000-color TFT display on the phone side also was a mixed bag. First off, it's tiny at just 1.4 inches diagonally (176x65 pixels). Normally we'd be up in arms about such a small screen, but we understand Samsung's motive—a bigger screen would have made for a bigger phone. It manages to cram in the date, the time, signal strength, battery life, and even photo caller ID, but the tiny dialing and message text may be too small for some users. (1)




The majority of [player side's] real estate is taken up by the large, 2.1-inch (176x220 pixels) TFT display. With support for 262,000 colors, it's bright, vivid, and easy on the eyes. It's perfect for browsing through the complete set of user-friendly menus and for taking photos (1)

Flip Sides
...this split-personality approach gets big points for innovation. It's also quite the looker and should evoke oohs and aahs from even the most jaded gadget enthusiasts. (1)

...every time you encounter something where you need to enter a letter or a number, you have to flip the phone over, enter the data on the keypad, and flip it back.... For instance, to enter a username and password on a Web form, here's what you do: Navigate to the entry box. Flip. Type in your username. Flip. Navigate. Flip. Type in your password. Flip. Navigate. (Are you getting dizzy yet?) (2)

I was a little confused the first time I encountered a text-input box on the music side, since no alphanumeric keys and no software keyboard appeared. But the device is smart enough to recognize the need to use the phone side, and I noticed that "Flip" had appeared on screen as a soft-key option.... When I used it and began entering text from the phone keypad (T9 text input mode is a welcome option here), "Save/Flip" also appeared as a soft-key option to return me seamlessly to the multimedia side. (4)

Controls
The four-way capacitive touchpad on the music side has a central, mechanical play button that took some getting used to. The excellent ...warns against trying to swipe it in a circle the way you would an iPod's control wheel, but the temptation is hard to resist. (4)

Compared with the iPod, the UpStage makes very poor use of the touchpad to move through long lists. A "sweep" of your finger down the whole touchpad skips only two options on a list. Holding your finger down at the end of the sweep steps through the list very slowly. Compared with, say, a quick twirl of the iPod click wheel, this makes moving to the end of 300 songs an ordeal. (2)

Music
In syncing mode, you can transfer music from a PC to a Micro-SD card.... Before syncing, however, you must install and run the included Sprint Music Manager desktop application and connect the phone to your PC using the included USB cable.... you simply drag and drop tunes (or albums) from the desktop app's left-hand pane to a lower-right pane.... You can create playlists on the phone itself. (4)

Sound quality through wired headphones...is very good. And the included adapter means that you can use standard music-player headphones. The built-in mono speaker is loud but tinny when playing music, and podcasts over the speaker are inaudible. (2)

Battery
...they left out a detachable battery—this thing is now literally built in the casing, not enabling the user to replace it on his/her own. (3)

We should note that this handset lasts for one day at 2-3 hours of music playback and radio, up to 1 hour of calls and few SMS. Should you be calling up the phone and music modes back and forth too often, the battery won't be happy with that either. Power users are likely to end up with less than one day of life time on their hands, while the rest of the audience should be aiming at one day of operation only. (3)

Another of the UpStage's innovative features: A stylish flip case with an embedded battery (Samsung calls the case a wallet).... The phone slides into the wallet and fits into a rigid cradle at the hinge. The included charging cable charges both the phone's battery and the wallet's battery. When stored in the wallet, the phone recharges itself from the wallet's battery. Sprint and Samsung's fact sheet says the phone's battery will support 2.5 hours of continuous talk time, which rises to 6.3 hours with the help of the battery wallet. (4)"

We didn't do a graph this week since only 2/4 of the reviews scored numerically (CNET 80, PCMag 60). But it sounds like if you aren't restricted to a DRM playlist and you can tolerate potentially excessive flipping, the UpStage is a decent music phone at a very reasonable $149 w/contract. – Mark Wilson

Spring Colors for Shuffles? [Josh Spear]

Hasbro's Spring Activated Force Action Lightsaber complete with sound effects pops up when you press the button, giving you an authentic experience that even tops the joy of hearing "oh my god the glass is in my eyes". – Jason Chen

Product Page [Entertainment Earth via Acquire Mag]

We won't call our Mom about these four Sprint phones, babbling excitedly about the feature sets and sexy styling. Instead, we will calmly write her a letter, informing her that she should lay off the sauce and consider getting the CDM-120 nee UTStarcom CDM-7025 with nothing in it, the SPH-A580 with monochrome display (!!), the multi-colored Sanyo SCP-3100, or LG LX350 with 1.3-megapixel camera. We'll tell her all of them are priced to move, with the LG offering topping out at $80 with contract. Then we'll fold the letter, place it an envelope, and then drop it on the pile near the door where it will stay, with all the other letters. Then we'll go make some ramen and watch Judge Judy.

Sprint PCS launches 4 new clamshell phones [PhoneArena via MobileMag]

Can you gift me now?

It's that time of year again when gadget lust can be easily justified simply as hankering to fill a holiday gift list. In case you've had any trouble coming up with any suitable suggestions from the mobile realm, or can't think of anything for that cell-crazed person in your life, I've got several suggestions.

Let's get the geek gift out of the way early: the Nokia 770 Internet tablet. It's not a phone; it's not a PDA; it's an "Internet tablet". You could call it a PDA if you wanted, just to annoy the Finns, but it's essentially a big touchscreen made for Web browsing and e-mail either via Wi-Fi or a mobile phone using Bluetooth. The kicker for the 1334 h4x0rs in your life is that it runs Linux, so it should be fairly hackable, and plenty of applications are being ported to it. Nokia's also said it will have an OS upgrade in the new year that will give the 770 VoIP and IM functionalities as well.

After the jump, one for the ladies, an EVDO pick, affordable mobile music and the ultimate accessory...

Next, for the ladies, or dudes that like pink, is the magenta Motorola RAZR, available from T-Mobile. It's the same RAZR everybody knows and loves, but in tasty metallic magenta (or pink if you don't have Crayola 64-color vision). These are supposedly in short supply, so if you can't find one (or you're cheap), go for a standard/pass silver version, then hop on over and pick up a Vaja leather case in pink for $55. Then, when pink isn't cool anymore, you can replace it with one of their 35 other colors.

Battling pink for status as the new black is, um, black. Sprint's got that one covered with the Samsung MM-A900 it's selling, a half-inch think lump of blackaliciousness. It's got a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, QVGA display, and it's also one of Sprint's "Power Vision" phones, meaning it uses their EV-DO network to access all kinds of content like streaming audio and video.

EV-DO on its own for a laptop is pretty cool: 400 to 700 kbps data speeds, and now wide coverage. Since it's a cellular service, though, the carriers want to tie a single account to a single device, to a single user. But for those times when you feel like sharing, you can grab a router that takes an EV-DO card and shares its connection via Wi-Fi to multiple users. The Junxion Box — bane of Verizon Wireless — has been out for a while, but at $500 to $700, those better be some pretty good friends you let use it. Kyocera, though, has got its KR1 Mobile Router that performs essentially the same functions for about $200. That doesn't include the EV-DO card to stick in or a handset to connect, though.

Mobile music is hot right now, or at least it's supposed to be. But if you're not into the $2.50 per song some phone companies wants to buy a track right from the phone, and just want to listen to your own damn music, Sony Ericsson's got you covered with its Walkman phones. There's the W600 that's currently available from Cingular, a cool little swivel phone with a megapixel camera, FM radio, landscape-mode gaming, 256 megs of memory and EDGE for (relatively) high-speed data. Its older brother, the W800, is only available directly from Sony Ericsson or from third-party dealers, and while it's got a more traditional candy bar design, it's got quite a few more features. It loses the EDGE functionality, but replaces it with a 2-megapixel camera (that's about the best currently available) and a Memory Stick Pro Duo slot that supports up to 1-gigabyte cards.

That leaves the ultimate gift. Well, the ultimate gift if you have a flip phone and are quite possibly the laziest person in the world: the cell phone opener. Because opening it yourself if so, you know, strenuous, and also because the Japanese have never found anything that couldn't better be done by a machine. On tap for Christmas 2006: the cell phone closer.

Carlo Longino is a writer and analyst that follows the mobile industry. He's co-editor of MobHappy, and also an analyst for Techdirt. He can be reached at carlo@mobhappy.com.

Read more Airtime. The column appears every Tuesday on Gizmodo.