You know, it’s not a requirement to have a smartphone to play movies and music — I just thought I’d mention that, since there’s such a mad rush to buy those phones nowadays. But cheaper options do exist, and they can be much cheaper and offer quality that’s as good as, or better than, their smartphone counterparts.

Case in point: the Archos 605 media player. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of an iPhone or Palm Pre for example, it does what it does very well, and with no monthly service contract. It’s not trying to be a phone: it knows what it is, and is comfortable with that. I like gadgets without an inferiority complex.

The Archos can be had for as little as $120.  For that you get a 4.3-inch TFT LCD screen with a resolution of 800×480. Compare that to the iPhone’s resolution of 480×320, and you can see that the Archos provides a better experience for viewing movies and videos.

The MP3 player plays all the standard music formats, and the Archos has a built-in external speaker. That helps if you don’t have headphones handy (although you probably don’t want to spend a lot of time listening to music or movies on that tiny speaker).

The Archos also includes wi-fi capability, and you can buy an Opera Web browser plug-in for the unit. That allows you to surf through the Archos portal for entertainment to download. One nice touch offered by the gadget is a fold-out kickstand, which allows you to sit the player upright for watching video. That’s a thoughtful addition, and something more media player manufacturers should do.

The Archos has been out for several years now, meaning it lacks that “Wow” factor that some folks just have to have. If you can live without that, and just need a good, basic media player, this may be your thing.

Palm, which made a big splash in the smartphone market with the recent release of the Pre, is far from done in the market.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a lower-priced smartphone, the Eos (codenamed Pixie) is coming as early as this Fall. The Eos could be priced as low as $99 with the standard two-year contract, initial stories are saying.

The Eos is the successor to the Centro, Palm’s final PalmOS phone.  Among the alleged features are a 2.6-inch touchscreen, physical keyboard, 2MB camera and 4GB internal memory, which puts below the level of the very first, lowest-level iPhone. Still, for the price, that’s not bad.

The Eos is obviously aimed at the bottom end of the smartphone market. The question is whether, in this economy, a significantly cheaper phone with more limited capabilities will appeal to buyers of the iPhone, Android G1, BlackBerry and big brother Pre. In my opinion, it’s always good to have more options and a range of prices. Bring it on, Palm!

If I’ve been writing about smartphones a lot lately, it’s because we’re entering kind of a “golden age” of them; it started with the iPhone, but has gone far beyond. They’re popping up like mad everywhere now. What’s more, they all seem to be fine gadgets in their own right. I’m married to my iPhone, but that doesn’t mean I won’t consider cheating from time to time with some of the other beauties.

Distinguishing one phone from another, and determining relative strengths and weaknesses of each, can take a lot time. That’s why this handy grid from Wired magazine can help tremendously. It compares four smartphones: the aforementioned iPhone 3G S; the Google G1 (with the Android operating system); the Palm Pre; and the BlackBerry Storm (at left). At a glance you can see the major differences, including price.

Including a two-year subscription plan, the Pre comes out ahead, being almost $700 cheaper than the nearest competition. The downside is that it has a paltry 30 apps available, compared to more than 50,000 for the iPhone. So the question is, is it worth the extra dough for the benefits of the iPhone? Those are the questions only you can answer.

Microsoft’s Zune MP3 player was made originally to compete head-to-head with Apple’s iPod. It hasn’t been especially successful in the market, although it’s a very good product.

Now Microsoft is trying to go mano-a-mano with Apple again, this time with the iPod Touch. The key upgrade to the new Zune, expected this fall, is a touchscreen. Details are sketchy at present, but it is known that the new player, called the “Zune HD”, will feature an HD Radio tuner, high-definition video playback, and an organic light emitting diode (OLED) screen, which should give the Zune very good battery life.

The Zune HD will also be the first-ever Zune player to include the Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser. The browser will have an onscreen keyboard, like the Touch.

HD Radio has better sound than standard radio (at least I’m told — I’ve never tried it). Zune HD also has wi-fi capabilities, which will offer live streaming from the Zune store, which Microsoft says has more than five million tracks available.

Microsoft didn’t give any more information at the announcement of the Zune HD, including pricing information, available colors and the like. As soon as we hear more, we’ll pass it along, of course.

Nokia is one of the few brands of cell phones I haven’t owned. Why, I’m not sure; I probably just liked other phones better. So, given that omission, I decided to dig into one of its newest smartphones, the N97. What I’ve found is both good and bad.

First, the good: this phone is loaded. It has a sleek, minimalist design without a lot of button clutter, and a 3.5″ touchscreen. Internal memory is up to 32 GB, and it has expandable memory up to an additional 16 GB. The camera is 5 megapixels, plenty for taking sharp pictures. The video camera, naturally, is the same megapixel rating, and can take up to 30 frames of video per second. That’s substantially better than the specs for the iPhone’s camera (and the video camera that’s part of the new iPhone 3G S).

The N97 also includes built-in GPS, synching with e-mail and a standard media player. But what I like best about it is the keyboard. It’s a slide-out model with a screen that tilts. In my opinion, this is the best type of keyboard. It’s laid out landscape-style, so the keys aren’t cramped at all, making typing a much more pleasurable experience. All in all, there’s a lot to like.

The major downside with the phone is the application store. It’s becoming pretty much a smartphone requirement these days to have third-party applications that can enhance the usability and fun of a phone. But, from initial reports, the Ovi Store, which is what Nokia calls its app store, is having serious problems.

To begin with, there were fewer than 1,000 apps available as of June 26. That’s a pittance compared to the many thousands (or tens of thousands) of apps available for the iPhone, Android phones and BlackBerries on the market. It means you’ll be much more limited in your choices, at least initially.

The bigger issue is that the Ovi Store, according to this story from TechCrunch, is a nightmare.  TechCrunch said that downloads were terribly slow, apps that were there previously would suddenly disappear, and that navigation was a complicated mess. Nokia followed up that most of the problems were caused by a heavy volume of downloads at the store’s opening. My response: well, what did you folks think was going to happen when you opened the store? Duh. If you, readers, have any new information on how the store is operating now, please pass it along.

Bottom line: the N97 is a fine smartphone, for the most part. If your main interest in a phone is the applications you can use on it, you might want to wait a bit until there are more available, and Nokia has straightened out the issues.

My oldest daughter is heading off to college this August, and this has raised a number of concerns. The foremost one, of course, is terror: how the heck will my wife and I pay for it? That’s still to be determined. A related cost issue: a computer. It’s pretty much a necessity these days. Well, Apple has found us a way to get her a computer and a great gadget for free.

Under this deal, Apple will provide a rebate for an iPod Touch if you buy a Mac now through Sept. 8. The catch is that you need to buy both the Mac and the Touch at the same time. You will need to submit your rebate request online by Oct. 8, then Apple will issue a check for the price of the Touch.

Now, I am not a big fan of online rebates. Apple should have provided some type of program that let you get the free Touch at the same time you buy your Mac, instead of having to buy them both and then get a rebate who-knows-when. Still, getting a free Touch is a good deal, and somewhat mitigates the cost of a Mac.

If this is going to be a college computer, I recommend getting a smaller Mac laptop; for instance the MacBook with the 13.3″ screen. That size display provides a good compromise between portability and screen real estate. Macs are wonderful computers, and will work well throughout your child’s education. They’re generally more reliable than Windows machines and easier to use (and I’m also a PC fan — no flame wars, please).

The Touch will be useful in a college setting, too. Since the Touch isn’t a cell phone, it only has wi-fi capability; since most colleges are wi-fi enabled, however, this shouldn’t present much of an obstacle toward getting online. And the apps, games and other functions of a Touch make it a useful addition on campus.

Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO and visionary most responsible for some of history’s greatest gadgets, including the iPod and iPhone,  recently received a liver transplant, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.

Jobs has been on leave from Apple since January. He’s expected to resume working later this month, on at least a part-time basis, the story reports.

Jobs’ health first made headlines in August 2004, when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Since then, the press has speculated a great deal about his health, a situation made worse by the secrecy for which Apple is famous.

Apple was struggling mightily in the mid-1990s when Steve Jobs, absent for a number of years from the company he helped found, came back on board (things got so bad for Apple, in fact, that the company needed a loan from Microsoft of all companies to help stay afloat). Soon after Jobs’ return, things began to turn around for Apple.

Now, of course, the company is hugely profitable and influential in the industry, and losing Jobs would be a  gigantic blow. To that end, we wish Jobs a speedy recovery and hope he has many years of health — and creating great gadgets — left in him.

As I mentioned before, I’m not much of a computer gamer, except for one title: Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS).  I’m also a private pilot, and there’s one thing about FS that really bugs me; in a landing pattern, you have to push buttons to see around you. What I mean is that to look left, you push a button and see a left view out of the cockpit, and so on. In real-world flying, you look around without pushing buttons, and still have your hands on the throttle and yoke or stick. In FS, you’re pushing buttons to get a view, and it’s terribly distracting, at least for me.

That’s why my next FS-related purchase  will be NaturalPoint’s TrackIR. TrackIR is a device that grabs on to the top of your monitor and tracks your head movements. It then sends that information to the game (it can be any kind of flying or driving computer game). That means when you turn your head right, the game will follow your head movements to the right.

It’s kind of difficult to explain, so it might be best to watch a YouTube video of TrackIR in action to get a better sense of what I’m talking about. For me, this will revolutionize my flight-simming. Takeoffs and landings, in particular, will become much more realistic, and therefore help my real-world flying. Even if you only fly virtually, the TrackIR shouild be at the top of your list of gadgets to enhance your gaming.

Anyone who follows this blog, or gadgets in general, or owns an iPhone (that should cover about 75 percent of the planet), knows that the new iPhone, 3G S, is out. Early reviews are glowing (except for the pricing snafu. More to come on that soon.)

For those who aren’t ready to shell out for a new iPhone already (my hand high in the air), there’s also good news; the software the powers the iPhone has also been enhanced. It’s the 3.0 upgrade, and while more evolutionary than revolutionary, it’s still something to get excited about.

The most important, most-requested, most-anticipated feature is cut-and-paste. Yea! Now you can actually do what’s been available on every other smartphone on the planet almost from the beginning.

The camera is also much improved. The resolution hasn’t been increased (that would take new hardware, like that found in oh, say, iPhone 3G S), but new  software has cut down markedly on picture bluriness, and it handles low-light conditions with much greater aplomb. That doesn’t mean it will replace a Canon Digital Rebel, but it’s much more useful in a pinch (still no video, however; that’s another 3G S perk).

Spotlight Search has been added to 3.0. It’s a universal search tool that can find stuff in e-mail, documents, contacts, applications and so on. Early reports indicate that it’s fast.

Another much-requested improvement is a Landscape mode for e-mail. Pre-3.0 software limited e-mail to Portrait (i.e. vertical) mode only. One significant limitation of that mode is that it makes the onscreen keyboard more cramped. Being able to turn the iPhone sideways should improve my texting speed by a good bit (that may not end up being an advantage, however!)

There are a number of other enhancements, but I saved the most-fun one for last. For an annual $99 fee, you can have access to MobileMe and “Find My iPhone.” This application tracks the location of your iPhone wherever it may be. If some cretin steals it, it will find the phone in minutes, allowing you to disable the phone and even wipe the data if you wish (MobileMe syncs your iPhone information, so you can easily re-install it on a new phone). If you leave it at the mall or a friend’s house, or under the cushions of your La-Z-Boy, you can send an alert to your phone which will beep, allowing you (or anyone nearby) to find it. Too cool.

I’m not saying this will salve the wound of not being able to get the iPhone 3G S immediately, but it will help tide the less fortunate among us over for awhile.

There’s a lot of unhappiness out there over the pricing of the new iPhone 3G S. The phone, which has some substantial upgrades over the 3G model introduced last year, is not available at the $299 price (for the 32GB phone) for current 3G owners. Instead, they will have to pay an extra $200 to get the new phone (which I reviewed earlier.)

The reason is subsidies and contracts. AT&T, the U.S. carrier for the iPhone, only makes money on it with a tw0-year contract. If AT&T sold the iPhone 3G S for the $299 price to current owners with a year to go left on their contracts, it would lose money on each phone it sold.

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong; I’m only explaining the rationale behind AT&T’s decision. There’s substantial anger over this policy in the iPhone community, especially since Apple changed the rules; original iPhone owners were allowed to upgrade as soon as the 3G came out, and still received the subsidy price. AT&T has made a business decision, and customers will just have to live with it — or switch. There are viable alternatives out there, like the Palm Pre and the Android.

It should be noted, however, that the older iPhones are being sold at significant discounts; so if you can live without video recording and 8GB of storage, you can get an iPhone 3G for as little at $99. That’s a great bargain for the gadget that I’ve called the greatest of all time.