Business travelers traveling overseas with a mobile phone that supports international roaming should be aware as to how some calls are billed. Many people assume, incorrectly, that if they allow a call to ring and then go to voicemail, they won’t be charged.  In actuality, such inaction might result in a billed call due to a phenomenon known as “tromboning,” a process where the call goes through an extra circuit to get to its destination (imagine a trombone player pulling out the slide, thereby creating an extended route from mouthpiece …

We go from the world’s thinnest laptop to one of the smallest smartphones with a full backlighted QWERTY keyboard, the Palm Centro.  The quad-band GSM Centro is only 2.1” w x 4.2” h x 0.7” d and weighs only 4.2 ounces with battery and is ideal for the business traveler.
It runs on Palm’s easy-to-use (if a little dated) Palm OS 5.4.9 and features a nicely-sized full-color 2.2” touch screen with 320 x 320 pixel resolution.
I found the five-way navigation button easy to use and the keypad made e-mail and texting …

It’s been said that the telephone is one of the most important business tools ever invented.  Today, given the popularity of the mobile phone, that statement is more true than ever.
Why is it then that many business travelers fall off the communications grid when they travel internationally?
Perhaps the greatest reason is the fact that the United States has multiple mobile telephone standards (the two most popular are CDMA and GSM, but there are others as well).  The rest of the world, with the exception of Japan and some parts of …

RESEARCH IN MOTION BLACKBERRY PEARL
Both T-Mobile and Cingular offer the BlackBerry Pearl by Research in Motion, although only T-Mobile has the new white Pearl.  The Pearl is an 88 gram quad-band device with a 240×260 color display.  It supports GSM/GPRS and EDGE (Enhanced Data for GSM Evolution) and includes a memory expansion slot for a MicroSD card.  It supports BlackBerry e-mail, public instant messaging via AOL, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo, corporate instant messaging (Lotus Sametime), an HTML browser, and uses RIM’s SureType keyboard technology.  Phone features include voice activated dialing, …