One of the most important capabilities that smartphones now have is knowing where they are. More than desktops, laptops, personal navigation devices or even tablets, which are harder to take with you, a smartphone can combine its location with many other pieces of data to make new services available.

gPad remote touchpad/keyboard

Apple has made some significant progress breaking down corporate walls and establishing iOS mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, and even Mac OS X as viable business platforms. One Apple device that isn't generally thought of as a business tool at all, though, is the iPod. But, with a few tweaks the iPod Nano could be a much more capable device.

Rest easy, America: Congress has decided against killing the next generation of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The quest for smaller and smaller computing devices usually involves a tradeoff between processor power, battery life, communications features, memory and storage. While the product I'm looking at is in some respects the result of the intersection of a vision with compromises, the WiMM One from WiMM Labs is one of the slickest miniature computing devices I've seen to date.

Broadcom is working on a Bluetooth chipset that will give wireless keyboards a battery life of up to 10 years, the company said on Tuesday.

The Zaggfolio for iPad 2 is a well-designed case that includes a removable Bluetooth mobile keyboard. As a result, it can be used as just a case (by removing the keyboard), as just a keyboard (by pulling the keyboard out of the case and slipping your iPad into a groove just above the top row of keys) or as a combined case/keyboard.

I have written several times about my ongoing love affair with the iPad and, surprise, a wave of iPad-related products has been appearing in the Gibbs Universal Secret Underground Bunker.

Home is where the network is: That's the mantra of networking vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas this week.

Retailers use various marketing and technical terms to describe the smartphones they sell. Some of those terms represent meaningful phone characteristics, while others are mostly hype. To help smartphone shoppers understand what they're looking at, we offer definitions of the most commonly used specifications, and explain why they are important.

We've worked long and hard to come up with the best tips and tricks for your PCs, smartphones, cameras, game controllers, music players, and the Web. Let's start with PC, laptop, and networking tips.