Now, there’s a new service called SugarSync that keeps your files replicated and synchronized across all your computers, whether they are Windows PCs or Macs. It even offers limited file synchronization on certain smart phones. The service is from a Silicon Valley company called Sharpcast and is available at sugarsync.com.

Not only does SugarSync place the latest version of every file you designate for syncing on all your chosen computers, but it also creates an archive of these files on a special, password-protected Web page. That way, you can access the latest version of any file even when you are at a public or borrowed computer that lacks the SugarSync software.

I have been testing SugarSync on five different computers — three Windows PCs and two Macs — as well as on a Treo smart phone. I tried syncing everything from Excel spreadsheets to Word documents, from photos to songs to PDF documents.

My verdict: While SugarSync isn’t free and has a few rough edges, it is by far the best solution I have tested to replicating and synchronizing your files across multiple computers. It really works.

Every time you change a file — say, by editing a Microsoft Word document or rotating a photo — the changes are replicated within seconds on every computer to which it has been synced and in the Web archive as well, as long as the computers are connected to the Internet.

For example, I set up SugarSync to synchronize a folder containing some Word documents. Then, I opened one of the documents on a Dell and added a sentence to it. A minute later, I opened the same file on a Mac, which was also connected to my SugarSync network. The file already had been updated on the Mac to include the change I had made on the Dell.

While SugarSync is primarily about file replication across computers, it also helps solve another nagging problem: backups. Because the files you care about most are now replicated on multiple machines in multiple places, and are stored as well in a Web archive, they are also backed up. So if one of your machines dies, you don’t lose your files. And, if you find yourself in need of a file that doesn’t exist on the computer in front of you, it can be downloaded.

SugarSync works by uploading your synchronized files to its servers, in encrypted form, and then sending them down to your computers when they change. There is a 45-day free trial that gives you 10 gigabytes of file storage. After that, you can keep the 10 gigabytes for $25 a year. There are five other storage plans, ranging from $50 a year for 30 gigabytes to $250 a year for 250 gigabytes.

The software that makes it all possible, called SugarSync Manager, is free and comes in Windows and Mac versions, as well as versions for Windows Mobile phones and certain BlackBerry models. An iPhone version is in the works, but for now, you can scan your online archive using a special SugarSync page available through the iPhone’s Web browser.

You install the manager software on any computer you wish to be part of the synchronized network. You can select different folders on different computers for syncing. All get uploaded to the Web archive, where they can be accessed at will.

You can choose which folders you wish to replicate fully on each machine. For instance, you might want your main documents folder to be replicated on every hard disk, available even when you’re offline. But, with a folder of lesser importance, you might be content to just fetch a file when you need it from the Web archive.

SugarSync creates two special folders. One, called Magic Briefcase, is always replicated on every machine’s hard disk, so you can quickly add a file to it even if you didn’t select the file’s original folder for synchronization. The other, called Web Archive, retains files in their original versions, never updating or changing them.

So, what are the rough edges I spoke about?

Well, the Mac version of SugarSync manager is still in beta, crashes occasionally and has various bugs. A final Mac version is promised later this spring. The cellphone versions can only view photos and whatever documents the phones allow, but changes you make on the phones in documents other than photos aren’t synced back to the computers or to the Web site.

In addition, SugarSync can’t synchronize Microsoft Outlook files and it can’t, say, replicate a new calendar entry or contact change across your computers. The company has shown off this capacity in public demonstrations and says it is working on adding it.

Still, SugarSync solves a real problem and does so well.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

This interface is generally called “multitouch,” and it involves using one or more fingers on a screen or touchpad to perform special gestures that manipulate lists or objects on a screen — without moving a mouse, pressing buttons, turning scroll wheels or striking keys.

The best-known example of the interface is on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch devices. It allows you, for example, to rapidly flip through photos, lists of emails or song titles by merely “flicking” a fingertip on its screen, or to resize a photo by “pinching” the image with two fingers. And, this month, Apple moved some of these multitouch features onto a laptop, its new MacBook Air, where fingertip actions are performed on an oversized touchpad rather than on a screen.

Apple didn’t invent the multitouch concept. Academic and commercial researchers, and small, obscure companies, have been working on it for years. Apple is adapting the concept, adding its own ideas and popularizing it — just as it did in the 1980s with the mouse and the graphical user interface, which had also been invented elsewhere.

Rival companies are scrambling to add multitouch features to laptops and other digital gadgets. Synaptics, a leading supplier of touchpads for laptop makers who compete with Apple, has announced that shortly it will incorporate several multitouch features into its touchpads. Microsoft is producing a coffee-table-size computer called the Surface, meant for hotels, casinos and retail stores, that uses multitouch finger gestures to move around digital objects such as photos, play games and browse through product options. Hewlett-Packard developed a prototype of a similar multitouch coffee-table computer for home use.

Rotating a photo on Apple’s MacBook Air

And, in the back rooms of this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, various cellphone makers, seeking to emulate the iPhone, were showing off their own unannounced efforts at multitouch. One prominent cellphone maker, Taiwan-based HTC, has already built a phone, called the Touch, which slaps a rudimentary multitouch interface on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system.

The basic touch screen, of course, is an old and familiar thing. People use them every day to get money from ATMs or to check into flights at airport kiosks. Microsoft’s Tablet computers and Palm’s Treo cellphones, among others, use touch screens that employ styluses or fingers to move cursors, select icons and other items, and even to write on the screen.

But multitouch interfaces are potentially much more versatile. They allow you to use your fingers to manipulate virtual objects on a screen as if they were real, sort of the way Tom Cruise’s character did in the 2002 Steven Spielberg science-fiction film, “Minority Report.” For example, Microsoft’s Surface allows users to rearrange groups of digital photos by just dragging them around on the table top as if they were actual paper prints.

Unlike the touch screens on, say, ATMs, multitouch devices are able to distinguish between the press of a single finger and the press of multiple fingers, and to interpret the motions or gestures you make. They take different actions depending on how many fingers they detect and which gestures a user performs.

On Apple’s MacBook Air, the touchpad still allows you to use one finger to move the cursor and click like a mouse can. But, optionally, it can do much more using multitouch gestures.

You can rotate photos by just touching two fingers to the touchpad and moving the images on the screen as you wish. You can quickly move back and forth through a series of Web pages or photos by “swiping,” or placing three fingers on the touchpad and moving them rapidly sideways. And you can shrink or expand a photo, or zoom in and out on a Web page, by pinching the image.

All recent Mac laptops, not just the new Air, have the optional ability to scroll through a screen without using any button or special zone on the touchpad. You just place two fingers, instead of one, anywhere on the touchpad and drag them across its surface.

In addition to pinching, the new Synaptics touchpads have a feature called “ChiralMotion,” which achieves rapid scrolling by moving two fingers in a circle anywhere on the touchpad. Another Synaptics feature, called Momentum, lets you emulate a trackball by flicking a single finger across the touchpad. This gesture can move an object on screen, like a virtual bowling ball in a game, with the illusion of inertia.

It’s too early to know if the new multitouch approach will ever be as big as the mouse-driven graphical user interface. But it’s already evident that it offers real advantages on devices where a mouse isn’t possible or convenient to use, or the decades-old interface of menus and folders is too cumbersome.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

A slew of new services using voice-recognition technology aim to eliminate the hassle of checking voice messages on wireless devices. These services transcribe recorded messages into text, which then is sent as email to email-equipped devices such as personal digital assistants and BlackBerrys, or as a short text message to phones that don’t have the email function. If in doubt about transcripts’ accuracy, you can always click on the attached audio files or dial in to hear the original voice mail.

To see how efficient these services are at transcription, I tested two voice-recognition applications: one from start-up SimulScribe, based in New York, and another from Atlanta-based SpinVox, a subsidiary of SpinVox Ltd. of the U.K.

Overall, both services work pretty well and are easy to use. I was able to read transcribed texts in a fraction of the time I would have spent dialing in to hear them. I was also able to sift through my messages and go directly to the ones I wanted to check, as opposed to having to listen to every single one sequentially. And the transcripts end the hassle of having to jot down names, numbers or addresses.

Another advantage is that the transcribed messages are sent immediately after the voice mails. When I was on a train and passing in and out of reception areas, I got my written messages faster than if I had tried voice mail only. Users can forward the messages to others or reply by calling back, sending an email or text messaging.

Signing up with SimulScribe.com took just minutes. After setting up an online account naming a cellphone carrier, I got a confirmation email with instructions on how to activate the service on my phone. SimulScribe, launched this past September, costs $9.95 a month for 40 transcribed messages plus 25 cents for each additional message. The service is compatible with all wireless carriers.

Currently, SimulScribe transcribes English voice mails only. A voice mail left on my phone in Spanish wasn’t transcribed at all. The company says it’s testing a Spanish system to add to the service in a couple of weeks.

Activating SpinVox’s Spin-my-Vmail on the phone was easy, too. After signing up on spinvox.com, the company sends subscribers a guide to using the service on the phone. I was able to activate “call forwarding busy/no answer” to divert messages to my SpinVox voice mail just by changing a setting in my T-Mobile’s cellphone settings menu.

I received an email in my mailbox whenever someone left me a voice mail. Each had the number of the caller, the transcript, date and time the message was received, plus a message code I could type into the keypad after accessing my voice mail to hear the original audio.

U.S. customers can get a free one-year trial by sending an email to gamma@spinvox.com, during which time the company expects to launch the service in the U.S. first through Cincinnati Bell and later through other carriers. Bloggers can also test Spin-my-Blog, which lets users speak a posting to their blogs from any phone. Sign-up for that is also at spinvox.com.

SpinVox, first launched in the U.K. in May 2005, transcribes in English, French, Spanish and German. Unlike SimulScribe, messages left to me in Spanish were successfully transcribed.

One friend who left me a voice mail on both services said she was pleased to be reminded by SimulScribe that her message would be transcribed so she should speak slowly and clearly.

Users of SimulScribe get unlimited inbox storage so they don’t have to delete old mail. Both services work better with hand-held email devices such as Treos or BlackBerrys than with the cellphones that don’t have the email capability. The number of characters that can be transcribed into SMS text is limited.

With SimulScribe, long messages delivered by SMS are parsed over multiple text messages. The same happens when customers use SpinVox on CDMA cellphones. Customers using SpinVox on GSM phones like those from Cingular or T-Mobile fit three-minute calls on one text.

Sometimes, the transcriptions contain misspellings, missing words or unnecessary punctuation marks. A friend left me a voice mail on my cellphone with SpinVox’s Spin-my-Vmail service. She ended it by asking me if I was sick of Thai food, but the transcribed note, amusingly, turned it into: “Hi Sarmad, it’s Kain(?). I’m calling at 4:09(?). I just wanted to see what the plans were for tonight. Are you interest in dinner, are you up for Lasagna(?).”

Words — mostly names — spelled phonetically, some numbers and undecipherable words are usually followed by a question mark.

Aside from sporadic imprecision, I liked SimulScribe more, mostly because it eliminates the need to dial in any passwords to get a voice version of transcribed messages. But it’s hard to beat the free trial of SpinVox and its multiple-language transcription capability. Both services are a nice addition to hand-held devices if you can overlook a few nuisances.

• Email me at sarmad.ali@wsj.com. Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Some devices, like Treos and full-size BlackBerrys, opt for the larger size and the keyboard, while others assume you’ll peck out email or Web addresses on a phone keypad.

I’ve been testing a new $295 smart phone from Helio, an upstart company based in Los Angeles, that provides an elegant solution to this design problem. It’s called the Helio Ocean and it can look like either a standard voice phone or a keyboard-equipped email and Web device, depending on which way you open its unusual two-way sliding mechanism.

The Ocean also has some very nice software touches to complement this clever hardware design.

It isn’t as slender as some of its competitors and it has a few downsides, but the Ocean is an innovative, thoughtfully designed smart phone that advances the state of the art. It goes on sale over the next week or so at helio.com and in some retail stores later this month.

Helio not only designed the Ocean, but the phone works on Helio’s own cellphone service, which runs on Sprint’s network at broadband speeds. It lacks Wi-Fi wireless networking.

Plans with unlimited data access range from $65 to $135 a month, depending on the number of voice minutes. For $145 a month, you can get unlimited data and minutes.

When closed, the Ocean is just a roomy screen with some buttons at the top and bottom of a black rectangular body with rounded corners. If you hold it vertically with the screen in portrait mode and slide the screen up, a standard phone keypad is revealed that you can hold to your ear when making calls, just as on a standard voice phone.

If you turn the Ocean horizontally so its screen is in landscape mode and slide it up, a full typing keyboard is revealed that puts you in a comfortable position to compose messages and surf the Web. All the main functions are available in both modes and you can use a headset in either mode.

The software is smart, too. When you physically switch the Ocean from one orientation to the other, the screen display switches between portrait and landscape modes automatically. If you answer the phone while in horizontal landscape mode and you aren’t using a headset, the call automatically is placed in speakerphone mode, because it would be clumsy to hold the Ocean to your ear in that configuration. If you slide the keyboard closed and switch to vertical mode, the call continues and the speakerphone is automatically turned off.

When closed, the Ocean looks a bit stubby but it’s actually slightly smaller in every dimension than a Treo 700 — although it gets larger when the keyboard is exposed.

Voice calls were clear and crisp, and the speakerphone function worked well. It was easy to add numbers to the address book.

From the main screen, you can just start typing anything and the Ocean will either search your address book for the characters you type or initiate a Web search. Web-search results are presented in multiple search engines, including Google and Yahoo, Amazon and Wikipedia, which are arrayed in tabs.

I found the keyboard easy to use and was able to attain good accuracy on it while typing with my thumbs. However, the space between the top row of keys and the bottom edge of the screen is a bit cramped; it took some adjustment to thumb-type well on that row of keys.

The Ocean comes preconfigured for all the major consumer email services, including Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Gmail. You can manually add others. The Ocean also supports Microsoft Exchange email.

Unlike a Treo or a Windows Mobile phone, the Ocean doesn’t allow editing of Microsoft Office documents. You can only view them as text files and, in my tests, even that didn’t work. Helio plans new software that would allow the documents to display properly.

Similarly, the Ocean works out of the box with a variety of instant messaging services, including AIM, Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger. It also has multiple media functions. It sports a two-megapixel camera with flash and decent built-in software for displaying photos, and playing music and videos. It also accepts memory cards for expanded storage.

You can simply plug the Ocean into a Windows or Macintosh computer and drag photos, songs and videos onto its internal memory or memory card, if they are in a supported format. But in my tests of this, some photos wouldn’t display properly and none of the album art showed up in my MP3 songs. Helio says the album art will show up if you use synchronization software on Windows, instead of simply dragging the files over.

Despite some limitations, the Helio Ocean is an impressive device that’s fun to use.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Partisans of these platforms can argue all day about which is better. But the competitors have some things in common. Windows computers and Apple Macintoshes can both display the same photos and office documents, and play the same MP3 songs and YouTube videos. BlackBerrys and Treos can receive the same emails and call the same phone numbers.

It isn’t perfect. There are some files that don’t play well across platforms. But most common content does.

Yet there’s another technology competition that doesn’t share content well and offers few, if any, benefits to consumers. It’s the fight among two groups of technology companies and movie studios to sell a successor to the DVD. Each has developed a new type of disc that has the ability to show movies in high definition. To my eye, the pictures they deliver are identical.

Neither of these competing new discs, called Blu-ray and HD-DVD, works in current DVD players. They require very expensive new players, and the new players can’t handle both new disc formats, only one or the other.

Adding to the annoyance: Some movie studios release movies only in one of the two formats. Paramount and Warner Brothers support both formats, but Universal supports only HD-DVD, and Disney, Fox and Sony only Blu-ray.

So, in order to be sure you can play any movie released as a high-definition disc, you would have to replace your old DVD player with two new, much costlier players. It would be like having to buy separate TV sets to watch different networks’ programs.

Now, however, one gutsy company, LG Electronics, of Korea, a longtime member of the Blu-ray camp, has broken ranks and introduced a new combo player that can handle three formats: Blu-ray, HD-DVD, and regular old DVDs. It’s called the BH100 Super Multi Blue.

I’ve tested this combo player and found that it plays both new formats, as well as regular DVDs, just fine. But it’s more expensive than most single-format players and has some serious limitations when navigating through the menus on HD-DVD titles. For now, I can only recommend it for serious videophiles with deep pockets, but I’m hoping it’s the start of a trend that will end the foolish war.

The BH100 costs $1,200. That’s vastly more expensive than the newest DVD players, which, for less than $100, can take a regular DVD and “upscale” it so it looks better on a high-definition set. But that $1,200 isn’t so outrageous if you compare it with the price of buying two separate Blu-ray and HD-DVD players, which can reach or exceed $1,000 total. And the new LG takes up only one input on your TV, occupies less space on your component shelf and requires just one remote control.

I tested the LG combo player on my high-definition TV with this year’s Oscar-winning best picture, “The Departed,” and with “Superman Returns,” each of which is available in both of the new formats, as well as on DVD.

All played perfectly. The picture looked great in both formats and was noticeably better than an upscaled DVD image, which the LG unit also can produce. The LG outputs both new formats in a high, but grossly overhyped, resolution called “1080p.”

But the BH100 did a much better job with the Blu-ray discs than with the HD-DVD titles. That’s because while the combo player can play HD-DVD movies perfectly, it can’t display the HD-DVD discs’ menus for selecting scenes or accessing special features.

These menus usually offer the title and a photo to identify a scene, and the title and/or a description of the special feature. But on the LG BH100, the HD-DVD menus have no pictures, titles, or descriptions and look nothing like the original. They only identify scenes by number and duration. That makes it hard to find, say, the deleted scenes from “The Departed,” or the documentaries on the Superman disc.

The BH100 was based on a Blu-ray-only player and lacks the special chips HD-DVD players use to display the menus properly. LG had to concoct its own rudimentary replacements for those menus. The company says a future combo model could include the chips and thus display the HD-DVD menus as well as it does the Blu-ray menus, but it hasn’t decided whether to make such a product.

One reason for that decision may be the competing approach to solving the stupid disc war. Warner Brothers is working on a combo disc, instead of a combo player. This disc would hold both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD versions of a movie, so you could pop it into whichever type of player you own.

Until the electronics and movie companies support universal high-definition players and/or universal high-definition discs, I don’t recommend that most people invest in either technology. Why prolong a war that’s bad for consumers?

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. See video versions of my reviews at wsj.com/mossbergvideo.

I attended the iPhone launch event, and was able to use one for a little while. That’s too brief an encounter to allow me to write a proper review. But I can say that it has the largest and most beautiful screen I’ve ever seen on a cellphone, even though it’s incredibly thin. It felt great in my hand. It has a brilliant new user interface; the handsomest email program and Web browser I’ve ever seen on a phone; a full-blown iPod music and video player built in; and even a cool new voicemail system.

The iPhone has some potential downsides — it doesn’t use a physical keyboard, instead relying on a virtual keyboard on the screen, which may put off heavy email users. It runs on the relatively slow EDGE cellular data network, though that flaw is partly offset by the fact that it can also use speedy Wi-Fi wireless networking. And, with a $499 base price, it’s expensive.

Still, the iPhone made my relatively new Treo 700p seem primitive in many respects when I compared them side by side. And the Apple product isn’t Palm’s only problem.

Palm’s position as the design leader in smart phones has been under assault for months. Major phone makers like Motorola and Nokia have introduced models that have most of the Treo’s capabilities but are thinner, sleeker and lighter — and much less expensive.

The Treo maker is starting to respond, but haltingly. It has brought out a couple of slightly smaller new models, but they’re no match in sleekness or style for competitors like the Motorola Q. They also aren’t as cheap. They do, though, have some advantages in software and functionality that, for some users, will make them preferable.

I’ve been testing the latest skinny contender, the Samsung BlackJack, along with Palm’s newest Treo, the slimmed-down Treo 750. Both of these phones — like the Apple phone — run on the Cingular Wireless network. Both also use Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software.

The new Treo 750 is slimmed down a bit from the familiar Treo 700 and 650 models. The 750 is also a little shorter, because it does away with the protruding antenna. In addition, it’s a hair thinner and about 16% lighter.

But next to the new Samsung BlackJack, the Treo 750 looks bulky. The BlackJack is a striking, all-black model in the slim tradition of the Motorola Q. It manages to cram a full keyboard, like the Treo’s, into a body that is much sleeker and better looking. The BlackJack is 35% lighter — and 36% smaller overall — than the Treo 750. It has a physically smaller screen, but that screen has a third better resolution than the Treo’s. (Of course, both screens look tiny and grainy compared with the display on the new Apple phone.)

Also, the BlackJack claims 38% better battery life than the Treo, and it runs on a faster data network than the Treo. (Neither phone includes Wi-Fi.) And, to top it all off, the BlackJack is half the price — $199, compared with $399 for the Treo 750.

One of the Treo’s biggest advantages has been its Palm software, which I consider to be better designed for email and phone calls than the Windows Mobile software from Microsoft. But the new 750 model can’t claim that advantage because, while it has Palm hardware, it uses the Microsoft software.

The Treo does have a small software advantage over the BlackJack. It uses a fuller version of Windows Mobile that has more features than the stripped-down version used on the BlackJack and the Motorola Q. And, because it has a touch screen, the Treo is easier to navigate than the BlackJack, which must be controlled with buttons and a scroll wheel on the side.

Also, the Treo’s control pad felt better to me than the BlackJack’s, which was cramped. I kept hitting other buttons on the BlackJack while trying to scroll or select icons.

In my tests, both the Palm and the Samsung sent and received voice calls well. Both also exhibited the clumsiness that is inherent in Windows Mobile — multiple key presses were needed to do simple tasks. Both have basic cameras with resolutions of 1.3 megapixels. (The Apple iPhone’s camera will be two megapixels.)

The BlackJack runs on Cingular’s new broadband data network, called “3G” or HSDPA, while the Treo 750 uses a slower network called UMTS. Oddly, however, in my tests, the Treo was generally as fast or even faster at retrieving Web pages than the BlackJack.

Of these two phones, I prefer the BlackJack. But if you’re in the market for a smart phone and can afford $499, you might want to wait until June for the Apple iPhone. The Apple entry is so full of promise that anyone buying a smart phone in 2007 should at least wait for the full reviews and a chance to try it out.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

But there are problems with going cord-free. In the case of cellphone wireless headsets, loud street and crowd noises make it hard to hear. And the wireless iPod headphones have been big, bulky units of unremarkable audio quality.

Now, some wireless earphones address those problems. For cellphones, a new wireless headset called Jawbone promises to filter out all that background noise. For iPods, new wireless earphones called Ety8 promise to bring small size and great sound quality to the wireless category. Both products use Bluetooth wireless technology to transmit audio from the device to the ear.

I’ve been testing these two new products and have found that each lives up to its claims. Both are advances that have real advantages over the more standard cord-free competitors. But each also has some drawbacks that might deter some folks from using them.

The wireless Jawbone is a sleek, futuristic-looking gadget made by a small San Francisco company called Aliph. It will be sold, starting Dec. 21, for $120 by Cingular Wireless. The earphone will work with any Bluetooth cellphone, not just those on Cingular’s network. Aliph will also sell the new Jawbone on its Web site, www.jawbone.com. The Cingular model will be silver colored. Aliph will offer it in red and black, too.

What makes jawbone special is its noise-cancellation feature, called Noise Shield. You can stand in front of a blaring boom box or a weed whacker with a Jawbone, and its technology, derived from military research, will almost entirely obliterate that background noise. You can also hear the other party better.

This effect is achieved through multiple small, built-in microphones, including one that rests against your cheek, detecting the vibration of your voice through the bones in your face. The gadget uses that reading to help identify and cancel all other sound that isn’t your voice.

In my tests, on a Palm Treo from Verizon and a Samsung Blackjack from Cingular, the Jawbone worked well. On a downtown street, it silenced the sound of traffic and crowd noise. In an office, it blocked out loud music only a few inches away. The noise cancellation is far better than on any other cellphone headset I’ve tried. Battery life is up to a decent six hours.

But there are two downsides to the new Jawbone. First, it can’t defeat wind. Even a mild breeze made Jawbone calls noisy. Second, it has some user-interface problems. The same button that turns the Noise Shield on and off also raises and lowers the volume, and the beeps of the two are hard to distinguish. I also found it hard to get a comfortable fit, though the unit comes with multiple behind-the-ear loops and rubber earbuds.

If you’re an iPod lover, the Ety8 wireless earphones may be just the thing to replace those trademark white earbud cords. Unlike other cordless iPod earphones, the Ety8s aren’t large, over-the-ear headphones. They’re light, in-ear earbuds. They’re made by Etymotic Research of Elk Grove Village, Ill., a high-end audio company whose wired earphones are highly praised.

The Ety8 earphones cost $300 from the company’s site, www.etymotic.com. That includes the headphones and a small adapter that plugs into the iPod to give it wireless capability. You can also use the earphones with other devices with wireless capability built in. For that, you can buy earphones without the adapter for $200.

Like some other high-end earphones, from Etymotic and from competitors like Shure, the Ety8s are meant to go deep into the ear, and come with rubber and foam tips for a snug fit.

The Ety8 also has tiny buttons on the right earpiece to wirelessly control the iPod. You can adjust the volume, play or pause music, or skip ahead or back — all without touching the iPod, which can be 20 or 30 feet away.

They work with the current full-size iPods, the previous generation of full-size iPods, and iPod Nano and Mini models. Battery life is six to nine hours. The adapter draws power from the iPod’s battery, so it will also reduce the battery life of the iPod itself.

In my tests, the Ety8 earphones worked great, both on a new full-size iPod and on an older iPod Mini. They produced excellent sound and were comfortable to wear, once I got used to a cloth-wrapped cord that connects the two earpieces and is meant to be draped behind your neck.

The big downside of the Ety8 is this: They are ugly. They are relatively large, black rectangles that look like matchbooks pasted onto your ears. If you can get over that, the Ety8 wireless earphones for the iPod are great.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

The slender Motorola Q, despite software that is markedly inferior to that of the Treo 700p, is wooing some users because it is much slimmer and now can be had for just $99, versus $299 for the Treo. The Nokia E62 is about the size of the Q and also costs just $99 these days. The tiny BlackBerry Pearl is just $199. And Samsung has introduced the skinny BlackJack for $199, too.

So, this month, Palm is striking back with a lighter, thinner, cheaper model of its own, the Treo 680, which is being offered by Cingular Wireless at $199.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile has introduced a new slim, light competitor called the Dash. It has built-in Wi-Fi wireless networking to supplement the slower cellphone data network. And it costs just $149.

I’ve been testing the new Treo and the Dash. Both are OK, but neither is as good as it could be. The new Treo still has great software, but it makes some compromises and still fails to match the new competitors in slimness, lightness or price. The Dash has very nice hardware, but is hampered by lousy software.

The Treo 680 is shorter than the Treo 700, because it doesn’t have the 700’s protruding antenna. It’s about 11% thinner and 14% lighter. But it’s still much larger than the new class of Q-type competitors. The Dash is slightly wider than the new Treo and about the same length. But it’s much thinner and lighter. The Dash feels great in your hand because it has rubberized paint.

This new Treo works just like the 700p. It uses the same Palm operating-system software, which is much easier and faster than the Windows Mobile software used by the Dash and the Q. As I have noted in the past, simple operations like deleting an email or displaying your calendar are usually one-click processes on the Palm OS devices, while they often take two or more clicks, or involve opening menus, on the Windows devices.

Also, the Treo 680, like the costlier 700p, comes with better functionality for handling Microsoft Office documents than the Dash does, even though the latter uses Microsoft software. The 680 has the same large, high-resolution screen as the 700p. By contrast, the screen on the Dash, while bright and vivid, is lower resolution.

But the new 680 is less capable than the 700 series Treos. First, it runs on a much slower cellphone network, called EDGE. This EDGE technology isn’t broadband speed, and is only about one-seventh as fast as the networks from Verizon Wireless and Sprint that the Treo 700 uses. Cingular does have a new network with speeds comparable to Verizon’s and Sprint’s, but the Treo 680 can’t take advantage of it.

Second, the Treo 680 is a big step backward in terms of its camera. The camera’s resolution is only about a third of a megapixel, while the camera on the Treo 700 — and the Dash — is 1.3 megapixels. Finally, the stylus on the Treo 680 is cheap and just plain awful. It actually bends when you use it.

The Dash is also stuck on the slow EDGE network technology because that’s the best data network T-Mobile currently offers. It makes up for it with built-in Wi-Fi, which is much faster than EDGE, and potentially much faster than the Verizon and Sprint cellphone data networks.

In my tests, I was able to use the Dash for email and Web browsing via Wi-Fi in my office, my home and a couple of coffee shops. The Wi-Fi setup and connection process was fairly easy, and T-Mobile has added software to the Dash that guides you through setting up access at Wi-Fi hot spots it operates in airports, Starbucks shops and other locations.

In fact, T-Mobile offers a data plan for $30 a month that includes both cellphone Internet service and access to its Wi-Fi hot spots. This is on top of the cost of a voice plan.

There are some downsides. The Dash doesn’t automatically switch on Wi-Fi. You have to do it manually. And, in my tests, it was much slower using Wi-Fi than a laptop was. For instance, in my home, on my very fast Wi-Fi connection, the Dash got just under one megabit per second, while a Mac laptop inches away got over 14 mbps. On a slower network in my office, the Dash got around half a megabit per second, while a computer inches away got 1.3 mbps.

I also found the keyboard on the Dash to be more cramped and harder to use than the one on the Treo. And the touch strip it uses to control volume didn’t work well.

If you have always wanted a Treo, but couldn’t handle the price tag, the 680 may be for you. Just be prepared for its slower speed and inferior camera. If you yearn for Wi-Fi in a slender smart phone, and can put up with a clumsy software interface, go with the Dash.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

But that image will change radically next week when the BlackBerry’s maker, Research in Motion, introduces a sleek but powerful model called simply the Pearl. It’s not only the smallest BlackBerry ever made. It’s also the smallest smart phone from any maker with a keyboard for typing emails and other text.

All shiny black and silver, the slender Pearl looks more like a fashion phone than a keyboard-equipped smart phone. It is shorter, narrower and lighter than the much-admired Motorola Q, though a bit thicker. And, like the Q, the Pearl, which is being launched next Tuesday by T-Mobile, costs $199 with a two-year contract. The Pearl is squarely aimed at consumers who need powerful email capabilities, but also want style and bells and whistles.

When it comes to email, the Pearl is a true BlackBerry. The email interface is essentially the same as on larger BlackBerrys. It can be used with a traditional corporate BlackBerry email system, and, for consumers, it works with the BlackBerry Internet Service offered by T-Mobile.

Still, for hard-core BlackBerry addicts, the Pearl is a shocking departure. The iconic side scroll wheel has been replaced by a tiny, light-up trackball beneath the large, bright color screen. It’s the first BlackBerry with a camera, the first with a memory card slot (though no card is included) and the first to play songs and videos.

And then there’s the keyboard, where the slim new design has required a major compromise. As on the older and bulkier BlackBerry 7100 series, the full keyboard has been replaced by a smaller version that squeezes two letters onto most keys. To avoid repetition and error, the Pearl uses smart software called SureType that has the uncanny ability to guess the word you meant to type in almost all cases. But it doesn’t work if you’re entering a new Web address or a person’s name that the phone hasn’t memorized.

To find out if RIM can actually be cool, I’ve been toting around a Pearl, testing all its functions. In general, I like it, and can recommend it to anyone who wants real BlackBerry email capabilities in a great-looking multimedia phone. Voice quality was excellent and the interface for making phone calls, once a big problem on BlackBerrys, is now decent. There’s even a Treo-like universal silencer button, and the speaker phone function turns on and off with a single key press.

Setting up an email account with the BlackBerry Internet Service is easily done, either on the phone or via a T-Mobile Web page. This service replaces a corporate email server with a Web-based email system that pushes messages to the phone from an existing email account or from a new one. T-Mobile plans to charge $19.99 a month for unlimited email and Web browsing on top of the price of an existing voice plan.

The Pearl pushed my normal email to the phone perfectly, and, in that respect, it acted just like every other BlackBerry I’ve used. Because of the different keyboard, some of the keyboard shortcuts for navigating in email and other applications differ from those on older models. If you change a couple of settings, you can delete an email with one click, and whole batches of emails can be deleted with two clicks.

Popular email attachment types, including Microsoft Word and Excel files, can be opened and read, but not edited. I was able to easily synchronize calendar and contact entries with Microsoft Outlook on a Windows PC, and to easily transfer songs, pictures and videos to the Pearl using RIM’s desktop software.

The Pearl’s music software correctly read the artist, album and song information on every track I loaded into the phone, and even displayed the album covers. The speaker on the Pearl sounds good, and music sounds even better with stereo headphones.

Photos also displayed well, and the Pearl can zoom in on them or show them as slideshows. Any song can be turned into your ring tone, and any picture can be used as your desktop wallpaper.

The Pearl really shone when playing video. Unfortunately, it accepts only a limited number of video file types, and even many of those I tested didn’t work. Some videos sucked up so much of the phone’s power that other functions, even pausing the playback, were very slow.

The Web browser is OK, but it’s hampered by what I consider the biggest drawback to the Pearl: the network on which it runs. T-Mobile uses a network technology called EDGE, which is much, much slower than the fastest networks offered by Verizon, Sprint and Cingular.

There’s another reason I’m not trading my Palm Treo 700p for a Pearl: the user interface. While RIM has jazzed up the hardware and feature set, there’s still way too much multiple clicking and menu opening for my taste.

But the Pearl is a beautiful piece of work, a very nice combination of hard-core email capability and fun features.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.