Many songs are missing the correct album titles and cover art—or just show up in Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iTunes with mysterious names like “Track04.” Over the years I’ve used several programs to import and buy music, resulting in wild inconsistencies in my collection. I’ve got songs by Beyoncé (with accent), Beyonce (without accent), Beyoncé Knowles (with accent) and Beyonce Knowles (without accent).

Several companies have developed programs that tap into vast databases of songs to tame music collections. I’ve been testing one by San Francisco startup TuneUp Media that’s available to download online and buy in Apple’s stores. While I was reluctant to pay $19.95 for a year’s subscription to a service I reckon should be in iTunes for free, TuneUp has largely delivered on its promise to scrub my music collection with minimal effort, making sure tracks were properly titled and adding extras like album cover art.

TuneUp’s greatest asset is that it works seamlessly with iTunes (for Mac and PC). With TuneUp hooked on to the right side of the iTunes program, you drag “dirty,” or mislabeled, songs into a box identified by a spray bottle of cleaner. The software identifies songs by taking clues from information you’ve embedded in your music, as well as sampling the song’s digital fingerprint. TuneUp looks for a match to those clues in a database of songs maintained by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Gracenote.

Some matches are a slam dunk, but almost half of my collection proved to be problematic. Of the 500 most-played songs in my pop-oriented collection, TuneUp found “matches” for songs across 79 albums and “likely matches” for songs across 209 albums. It couldn’t identify 10 songs. The company says it counts matches as a 90% or higher chance of a match, and “likely” as at least 75% chance of a match. Songs with a likelihood under 75% are labeled “not found.”

TuneUp gives you the chance to review each of the matches before it adjusts your catalog. (It comes with an undo button.) Accepting all of the sure matches is easy enough, but slogging through the likely matches is troublesome. TuneUp gives you only the option to accept or reject its one recommendation after listening to the file, if you want.I worried that I might be inadvertently mislabeling a song, but haven’t yet found evidence of errors in my collection. The company says it cut out alternative matches to simplify the cleaning process, but is working on adding them to future releases of the software.

Once a song has been cleaned by TuneUp, it is given a consistent name, track number, album cover and other helpful information, such as the year it was released. Now I’ve got songs by just Beyoncé (with accent) and almost all of my songs feature the album cover art that looks so nifty on iPhone screens. The software assigns your songs genre identifications, which can be handy for matching music to your mood. Most of the classifications aren’t terms I would have come up with: Beyoncé is dubbed “urban crossover,” while Michael Jackson is either “disco” or “other pop” depending on the era—but at least they’re consistent. You also can tell TuneUp not to change any specific part of a song’s existing catalog listing, including genre.

TuneUp takes a few seconds, depending on your computer and Internet speed, to identify and re-classify each song. Attempting to scrub a whole collection—mine has more than 10,000 songs—can be a lengthy affair. The company suggests cleaning 500 songs at a time, but you can do many more than that if you leave it running over night.

I tried out a free competitor to TuneUp called MusicBrainz Picard, which matches songs based on a database collected by a swarm of Internet users, rather than one particular company. TuneUp and MusicBrainz, which is run by a nonprofit, are as different as Britannica and Wikipedia in their approaches to cataloging information.

The MusicBrainz approach to building a user-generated database is powerful and has been tapped by companies such as the BBC and Amazon.com (AMZN) to improve the way they keep track of music on their sites. Some of my songs that TuneUp couldn’t identify, such as the song “This Way” by hip hop group Dilated Peoples, were a breeze for MusicBrainz. To date, MusicBrainz has about 700,000 “releases” (such as whole albums) and 8,000,000 individual “tracks” in its database.

But MusicBrainz’s database has limitations, such as the inability to catalog album-cover images or song lyrics, both of which are copyrighted material. The free Picard program lets you tap the MusicBrainz database from your own computer. Serious music fans will be attracted to Picard because it is more precise than TuneUp; Picard guides you to choose from a variety of options when it isn’t certain of a match. But the software is rudimentary and requires concentration and time to use. Picard also doesn’t connect directly into iTunes’ catalog. To use it with iTunes, you have to first clean up all of your music files with Picard and then re-import your songs into iTunes.

I recommend TuneUp for the average music fan who might view cleaning up a music collection as the sort of task that shouldn’t take much longer than one rainy Sunday afternoon. Picard is better for people for whom maintaining an orderly music collection is a never-ending project.

TuneUp comes with a feature called “Tuniverse,” which fills the right side of the screen with information related to whatever song iTunes is playing at the time. That information includes YouTube videos, biographical details from Wikipedia, Google (GOOG) News, music recommendations from Amazon and tickets from StubHub to coming concerts in your area. While I initially worried Tuniverse would feel like added advertising on the screen, I’ve come to enjoy the extra information. And once again, I was left wondering why Apple hasn’t built these capabilities directly into iTunes. I, for one, learned from Tuniverse that Beyoncé has a concert in San Francisco next week, and I just might buy a ticket.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at Geoffrey.Fowler@wsj.com

Enter RealPlayer SP beta (realplayer.com), the latest in RealNetworks Inc.’s (RNWK) long line of media players that the company has churned out since 1995. RealPlayer SP—the SP stands for social and portable—is a free download that, once installed, grabs videos from the Web, converts them to the right format and transfers them to over a dozen portable devices. While other software programs perform two or just one of these tasks, the RealPlayer SP’s trio of talent makes it like a digital Swiss army knife.

After using the RealPlayer for moving several videos of all kinds to an iPhone, BlackBerry Curve 8900 and Palm Pre, I felt like I had more control over my portable devices and the media they held. And the freedom of knowing that this player is compatible with almost anything—including Apple (AAPL) and Palm (PALM) devices, Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerrys, T-Mobile’s G1 and Sidekick, Nokia’s (NOK) N97 and certain basic cellphones—is a major plus.

Behavior Problem

My biggest problem with using the RealPlayer SP has to do with my own behavior. Most of the videos I watch online and share with friends are less than five minutes long. This means that grabbing, converting and transferring videos to a portable device using the RealPlayer SP—albeit a relatively quick process—could easily take more time than the length of the video, itself. And many of the longer videos that I would want to move to a BlackBerry or iPhone are copyright-protected and thus can’t be downloaded by the RealPlayer SP.

Another factor is that more devices now have their own built-in app stores for downloading content to the device, without plugging into a computer for transfers like with the RealPlayer SP. The iPod touch, for example, can now download movies, music videos and TV shows over Wi-Fi thanks to a recent $10 software upgrade.

Mac Version Coming Soon

The RealPlayer SP works only on Windows PCs right now; a Mac version is due out by the end of this year. Likewise, it doesn’t work on Apple’s Safari browser but does work on Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google’s (GOOG) Chrome browser; I used all three with success.

If you’re not interested in using the RealPlayer SP for transferring videos to portable devices, you can still use it for downloading videos, saving them onto your computer and sharing them with friends via Twitter, Facebook or email. Tiny icons representing each of these sharing options appear in-line beside freshly downloaded videos. I shared videos of last week’s Congressional Luau at the White House via Facebook and Twitter, but the icon to share videos via Twitter doesn’t automatically shrink URLs to fit into a tweet. I shrunk the URLs myself, but this took an extra step¹.

And though I’ve mostly focused on the RealPlayer SP’s ability to grab, convert and transfer (RealNetworks calls these tools the Downloader feature in the player), it also works as its own media player or helps you discover new content.

RealPlayer SP Beta downloads, converts and transfers videos from the Web to a variety of portable devices.

A premium version called RealPlayer Plus SP is available for $40. Premium features include DVD burning, DVD playback (if your computer can’t play DVDs) and video conversion to a special format called h.264—though the free version performs these conversions for videos being moved to Apple devices.

I jumped around the Web visiting sites and playing videos, which prompted the RealPlayer SP to display a small “Download This Video” message above videos that aren’t copyright-protected. Downloading videos worked on most sites, including AllThingsD.com, Slate, YouTube, Salon and CNET. As expected, I wasn’t so lucky with videos from the New York Times, BBC and Hulu, which hosts loads of TV shows and music videos. That’s because videos from these sites were copyright-protected and didn’t allow for downloading.

A Glitch

In one instance with a WSJ.com video, only the short ad that played before the video was downloaded, even though the download prompt indicated that the WSJ video was obtainable using RealPlayer SP. RealNetworks says this is a glitch it knows about and plans to correct.

The RealPlayer SP’s ability to download videos and transfer them to devices, rather than just copying them onto computers, forced me to be choosier about the videos that I downloaded due to the limited memory of the devices. Because of this, I wished the RealPlayer SP Downloader had a better built-in way to discover downloadable content. Currently, a link to something called the RealGuide pulls up suggestions, but I had a hard time finding clips there that I wanted to download. RealNetworks says it plans to improve the video-discovery process in the future, including adding things like YouTube keyword searches built right into the Downloader.

The Downloader Window

When I did find videos I liked, I clicked on the prompt to download the clip, found the clip in a tiny Downloader window, and chose to move the clip to a device (there’s a list of all available devices) or share it via Twitter, Facebook or email. Transfer times depend on the length of the video.

RealNetworks provides simple instructions on making sure your device is set to transfer when plugged in. For example, BlackBerrys must be set to mass-storage mode, Palm Pres should be set to USB mode and Apple devices synchronize with the iTunes library, where RealPlayer’s converted videos are sent for transferring to iPhones and iPods.

RealPlayer SP can be a real help when it comes to putting the content that you want on your portable device. Its ability to assist from start to finish—finding videos, converting and transferring them—saves time and avoids confusion. To succeed, RealPlayer SP needs to do a better job of helping people find worthwhile videos to transfer, or they’ll stop using it after just a few tries.

Corrections and Amplifications

¹ Real Networks says its RealPlayer SP Beta’s Twitter video sharing capability has an automatic URL-shortening tool built in. This week’s Mossberg Solution product said the product lacked such a feature, because it never activated itself in our tests.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

In your review of the new iPhone 3GS, you said that AT&T had changed its upgrade policy so some buyers of the previous model could get the new-customer price earlier than planned. Can you explain this in more detail?

Almost all cellphones in the U.S. are subsidized by the carriers to bring down prices. Typically, existing customers—who have already benefited from a subsidy—can’t upgrade at the lower new-customer price (in this case $199) until they reach a point in their contracts where this subsidy has been recovered. These dates vary, based on a formula that takes into account things like the customer’s monthly spending rate.

When some early adopters of the 2008 iPhone model, the 3G, discovered they wouldn’t immediately qualify for this $199 “standard upgrade” price—the same as the new-customer price—they got angry. So AT&T made a concession, but only a partial one. It declared that any customer who had been told he or she couldn’t get the $199 price until sometime in July, August or September of 2009 would in fact now be able to qualify for that lower price starting on the first day of availability.

This concession doesn’t apply at all to owners of the original 2007 iPhone, or even every owner of the 2008 3G model. And it isn’t based on when you bought your 3G, but when the system told you that you could buy the new model at the “standard” upgrade price of $199. You can check the price AT&T or Apple will charge you for an upgrade by going to www.att.com/iPhone and clicking on “Check upgrade eligibility.”

I’ve recently heard that the new Palm Pre smart phone is unable to import data from the old Palm Desktop program. In other words, if you have Palm Desktop filled with data from a previous Palm model, you’ll be unable to get that data into your new Palm Pre. Is this true?

No. While the Pre isn’t designed to repeatedly sync with the old Palm Desktop software, Palm does offer a program, for Windows and Mac, that will perform a one-time import of your old data from Palm Desktop. It can also do a one-time import of data from certain other desktop programs as well, including Microsoft Outlook on Windows, and iCal and Address Book on the Mac. This program will help you move your data to one of the online services, such as Google, with which the Pre is designed to sync continuously. The software is called the Palm Data Transfer Assistant and is free at http://bit.ly/3lIaZ.

I am contemplating purchasing the 17” MacBook Pro rather than the 13” or 15” models because the antiglare matte screen is offered only with the 17”. How bad is the glare on the smaller screens and how cumbersome do you find the larger 17” MacBook Pro?

For a laptop of its size, the 17” MacBook Pro is remarkably thin and light. But I did find it cumbersome to use in coach seats on airplanes and to cram into small briefcases. As for the glossy screens, which are now the most common option on many laptops, they bothered me at first, but I don’t notice the glare now. However, both of these are personal issues. So my suggestion is to go to a store and see for yourself.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

But there’s a dirty little secret about removable-battery laptops owned by average consumers: Hardly anybody buys extra batteries. Research firm NPD estimates that fewer than 5% of consumers buy a spare. So, a small trend has begun in the industry: More electronic products are being designed with their rechargeable batteries sealed inside. For instance, Dell’s (DELL) new high-end laptop, the Adamo, has a sealed battery, as does the excellent Flip pocket video camera.

The leading proponent of this idea is Apple (AAPL), which has often led the industry in introducing or removing components from computers. This month, Apple unveiled two revised MacBook Pro laptops with higher-capacity, sealed-in batteries. In fact, Apple’s entire line of laptops now uses sealed batteries, except for one low-end MacBook model from last year’s series.

Apple says this makes sense because sealing in the batteries lets the company make them larger, without adding heft to the laptops. Apple says the two models are the same size and weight as their predecessors, yet their battery capacity has grown by 33% and 46%, respectively.

And, Apple asserts, it has come up with some software technology that allows these sealed batteries to last up to five years in typical use. The company claims that is almost triple the industry average for removable batteries and is longer than the typical time consumers keep the computer, thus making it far less likely you’ll need to replace a dead battery. Apple says it is able to seal in bigger batteries without making the machines larger because the company can compensate by shedding the casings, internal housings and other components needed by replaceable power packs.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro

I’ve been testing these two new Apple laptops, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the 15-inch MacBook Pro, using my own harsh battery test, which I apply to all laptops I review. The results were excellent. These two new Apple laptops scored among the highest battery lives between charges of any laptop I have ever tested with a battery that fits entirely inside the machine’s dimensions, without sticking out of the back or bottom and adding weight.

The smaller of the two machines lasted a few minutes shy of five hours in my test. And the larger one lasted five hours and 21 minutes. I estimate that, in a more normal usage scenario, both machines would come close to Apple’s claim of around seven hours between charges—essentially a full workday of unplugged use. Those numbers are likely to obviate the need for spare batteries for the majority of average consumers.

There are some important caveats. I was unable to verify Apple’s claim that these sealed batteries can be fully recharged up to 1,000 times, and thus, last around five years. Second, if and when the sealed batteries do become unable to hold an adequate charge, the entire computer must be returned to Apple for a new battery. The company says that, if you do this at an Apple store, it’s a same-day process and, at least on the 13-inch model, the price of a new battery is the same as what Apple formerly charged for a new removable battery. But it’s still more of a hassle.

Also, there are users—like people who work on very long flights—for whom replaceable batteries will always be a necessity. These users will want the option, unavailable on the new Macs, to pop in an extra-strength battery.

Finally, while Apple has cut the prices of these two new laptops, they are still pricey compared with similar-sized models from other companies. The 13-inch model starts at $1,199, and the 15-inch model starts at $1,699. Like all Macs, these computers have, in my opinion, a better operating system, better built-in software and better security than their Windows competitors. But you can get competing machines for hundreds of dollars less.

In my battery test, I turn off all power-saving features, leave the Wi-Fi network on, crank up the screen to 100% brightness, and play a continuous loop of music. That maximizes some of the biggest power hogs on a laptop. In normal use, a typical owner would likely use the power-saving features, turn the screen down a bit, have Wi-Fi off some of the time, and wouldn’t be running the hard disk constantly.

Neither of my test machines used the energy-saving, but costly, solid-state drives that are slowly replacing mechanical hard disks. And my test models both used integrated graphics chips, which suck less power than the more potent discrete graphics offered on the 15-inch model.

Still, I believe that these new MacBook Pros prove that sealed batteries can result in a very good experience for average users.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email mossberg@wsj.com.

This week, I tested thisMoment.com—a content-sharing Web site that doesn’t mind if you use multiple sharing sites. It acknowledges your accounts on other sites and the fact that you have probably loaded a bunch of photos or videos onto those sites. It even recognizes that you likely still want to remain connected to those services. In fact, thisMoment is made better by your relationships with these other sites. And the service also makes it easy to incorporate into your account material created by others—even strangers.

Anyone can use thisMoment.com the old-fashioned way, by uploading personal content and building “moments” (collections of related content) to share with friends. But thanks to thisMoment’s ties to other sharing sites, users may opt to add others’ publicly shared materials like videos, photos and articles to a moment, making it richer and more interesting. This content can come from sources like Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Facebook—even Life Magazine photos and MTV videos can be interspersed throughout a moment. The Moment Maker tool quickly scans sites for relevant content to add to the moment.

This week, the service introduced an iPhone app for making moments on the go and a Facebook app for creating moments within Facebook. I tried both, in addition to using the thisMoment.com site, and found that resulting moments looked like they took a lot more time and effort to make than they actually did.

ThisMoment’s secret sauce is in its elegant displays. It takes all sorts of content—text, photos, videos—from various sources and meshes it into a handsome slideshow that flows from one visual to the next. Black backgrounds dramatically frame photos and videos, and captions stand out in brightly colored text. Maps from Google (GOOG) pinpoint exactly where the moment took place and a list names other people who were in the moment.

And when you’re all done creating your moment, thisMoment doesn’t mind sharing your final project with others using still more social-networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and some 45 Web publishing sites—if your privacy settings are set for sharing.

For some people, the idea of integrating other online content into their personal moments could be a turn-off. I wasn’t initially sure I would want someone else’s content mixed in with photos and videos I took, or vice versa. And I still wish thisMoment provided a clearer way of differentiating between someone’s personal content and that which was pulled from the Web. (Currently, small print below each item tells where it came from.)

But there’s so much content online that it makes sense to tap these resources. And users can opt to make moments without external content.

ThisMoment artistically assembles digital moments using content from the Web or personal photos and videos.

Rather than just slapping photos on to a Web site where people can see them, thisMoment asks its users to check off descriptive words—or enter their own—to explain how the moment made them feel. Though I originally scoffed at these add-your-own emotions, I later grew to like them when I looked back at my moments and those created by other people. They give these online creations a personal touch that isn’t conveyed in other photo-sharing software programs or Web sites.

Another thisMoment differentiator is its sense of time. You can create moments for things that happen in the past, present or future, like an upcoming wedding or birth, and a timeline at the top of the Web site shows where these moments fit in, according to their dates. If you share a moment with someone who is labeled as being in that moment, she can “seize” the moment, adding it to her own timeline. ThisMoment also encourages you to rate your moments on a scale of small to big according to how much they matter to you, though I often forgot to do this, and to label your moments so they can be organized into different categories.

I soon got the hang of how to use thisMoment to supplement my moments when I didn’t have enough content to create something worth sharing. When I attended a folk rock concert at the Embassy of the Czech Republic here in Washington, D.C., I only captured a few so-so photographs and wouldn’t have otherwise shared any visual memories from the evening with friends. But I used the Moment Maker to troll the Web for content related to Czechomor, the band I saw, and found live concert videos, as well as professional photographs, an online biography of the band and a link to where the group’s album was sold on Amazon.com (AMZN). I used this content and one of my own photos, and made a simple moment in a few minutes. (Check out my moment.)

Likewise, friends of mine recently hosted a murder-mystery dinner, but we were so busy staying in character that we took only one photo of the entire evening. I used that photo of me and my costumed friends as the inspiration for creating a moment filled with photos and videos of murder-mystery dinners from all over. This content came from sites like Photobucket, Picasa, Flickr and YouTube, and I laughed at the number of people who wore stick-on moustaches in these photos.

ThisMoment allows anyone with whom you share a moment to see that moment without signing up for the service. If that person is included in the moment, meaning the creator labeled him or her as a person who participated in the moment, then that person can add his or her own content to the moment—as long as that person signs up as a member of the site.

A variety of privacy options let you restrict who can see your moments—just you, friends, family, people in the moment or everyone. If a moment is set so everyone can see it, they can also use your content in their moments.

You may not always want to use thisMoment to incorporate content from other services and Web sites. But even without outside influences, this service’s stunning visual displays will give your moments a polished look that makes you proud to share.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

I live in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, for six winter months. I would love to have a Kindle. Can I download additional books in Mexico or must I download all I think I’ll want to read before I go?

Yes, you can, but it’s a bit of a convoluted process. Amazon says that, if you are a U.S. customer temporarily outside the U.S., where the Kindle’s wireless downloading capability won’t work, you can “sideload” books over the Kindle’s USB cable — normally used for transferring audiobooks or photos — from your PC or Mac.

According to Amazon, here’s how you do this. First, order a Kindle book on the Amazon Web site from your computer and tell it to send it wirelessly to your Kindle. This will fail. But you can then go to the “Manage Your Kindle” page on the Amazon site, which lists all the Kindle books you’ve bought under the heading “Your Orders.” Select the one you want, and click on the drop-down list at the far right labeled “Download/Send to…”. Select “computer” as your destination, and the book will be downloaded to your PC or Mac as a file with the suffix “azw.” From there, you can manually drag this file into your Kindle using the USB cable.

My husband wants to buy a laptop, but I said not to get one with Vista and to wait for Windows 7. Am I right?

I agree that, if he can do so, he should wait for Windows 7. While it isn’t officially released, my experience with its pre-release version has convinced me that Windows 7 is much faster, less annoying, and more compatible with third-party hardware than Vista is. You can read my first impressions of Windows 7 at: http://bit.ly/r9xEP.

• You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

But the iPhone is drawing increasing competition from entrenched smart-phone makers anxious to emulate the upstart. The most significant of these is Palm’s (PALM) impressive new Pre, which is off to a good start with an estimated 100,000 or so units sold since it launched on June 6.

So, like a shark, Apple (AAPL) must keep moving. This week, it is introducing two new products designed to consolidate and increase its position as the leader in this new generation of hand-held computers. I’ve been testing both and I like them a lot, with some minor caveats.

One of the new products is a refreshed model of the iPhone itself, called the iPhone 3G S. It looks the same, but offers more speed, more memory, more battery life, and a few new features, including video recording and a better camera for still photos.

The second is OS 3.0, the third version of the iPhone’s operating system, which comes on the 3G S and also can be installed on all prior iPhones and Touches. It includes a much longer list of added features, some innovative and some long overdue catch-ups to other phones. These include such widely requested capabilities as cut, copy and paste; systemwide searching; a wider virtual keyboard; and a feature called MMS that allows users to send photos and videos directly to other phones without using email.

Apple last week also made a bold business move to complement these new products. It decided to keep making the current model, the iPhone 3G, and to slash its price by 50%, to $99. That’s an unheard-of price tag for a pocket computer of this power and versatility, and gives millions of additional consumers a reason to choose the iPhone instead of a competitor.

In my tests, both the new phone and the new operating system performed well, with a few small exceptions. I believe the two strengthen the iPhone platform, make it likely the iPhone will continue to attract scads of apps, and are good for consumers.

But I also regard these changes as more evolutionary than revolutionary, and I don’t think this latest iPhone is as compelling an upgrade for the average user as the 3G model was last year for owners of the original 2007 iPhone.

Current iPhone owners can get an improved product by merely sticking with their existing phones and upgrading to the feature-laden new operating system, which is free (it costs $10 for iPod Touch owners), rather than shelling out at least $199 for the new iPhone 3G S. And many new iPhone buyers can opt for the $99 3G model, which is not only cheaper, but also greatly improved by the new OS 3.0.

On the other hand, power users will crave the new model’s much-better performance, battery life, storage and other features. And some will want the new model because, unlike the current model, it’s capable of handling a new cellular network feature that, in the next few years, will offer double the current data speeds.

The new, free operating system is available for download starting June 17. The iPhone 3G S will go on sale June 19 for $199 for a version with 16 gigabytes of memory, and $299 for 32 gigabytes of memory. Those memory capacities are double the amounts offered on the previous model last year at the same prices, and far exceed the built-in memory on most competing smart phones.

These prices are for new U.S. customers on the AT&T network, plus current owners who are eligible for what AT&T (T) calls a “standard” upgrade. If you already own an older iPhone, you could pay $200 more to upgrade, depending on how far along you are in your two-year service contract and how much you spend monthly. But AT&T, stung by criticism in recent days, has just decided to offer the lower, new-customer prices at launch to iPhone 3G owners eligible for upgrades at any time up to Sept. 30 of this year, even if they were originally told they’d have to pay the $200 premium.

Before I detail the new features and how they worked in my tests, let me state up-front what the new iPhone and its new operating system don’t deliver. The iPhone still lacks a physical keyboard. It still can’t run more than one third-party app at a time, as the Pre does. Its otherwise excellent Web browser still can’t play videos created in Adobe’s Flash software, which is widely used on the Web. And it still isn’t available on any U.S. carrier besides AT&T.

Also, AT&T won’t enable MMS until late this summer, even though dozens of other iPhone carriers in other countries are doing so immediately. And AT&T hasn’t set a date by which it will offer tethering, a new iPhone feature that allows the device to be used as a modem for a laptop. Other carriers in other countries are allowing this right away.

Here’s a rundown of the most important new features of both the new hardware and software, and how they performed in my tests.

The iPhone 3G S

Speed: To me, this is the most important feature of the new iPhone 3G S. In fact, the “S” in the name stands for speed. During my week of testing, the new model proved dramatically snappier in every way than my iPhone 3G. Its processor is 50% faster than in the prior model, and it sports a new graphics chip.

Applications opened much more quickly. Web pages loaded far faster. The camera was ready to use almost instantly. And I never once saw the occasional, annoying iPhone behavior where you strike a key while typing and it sits there, seemingly stuck, before you can continue.

Cellular-data speeds were about the same, but in repeated testing on different Wi-Fi networks, the 3G S racked up speeds 30% to 50% faster than on the 3G running at the same time on the same networks.

Battery Life: On my 3G iPhone, I usually could make it through the day, but it was often a close call, with the battery indicator winding up in the red. By contrast, the new model did much better, never hitting the red zone and rarely requiring interim charging at the office or in the car, even though, because I was testing it, I was pounding it much harder than usual, making more voice calls, playing lots of videos and music, trying numerous apps, constantly downloading email from two accounts, and syncing two calendars over the air.

Apple claims about the same talk time for the new model as on the old, and about the same Web-surfing time over the cellular network. But it says the 3G S gets about 50% more battery life when playing videos or surfing the Internet over Wi-Fi and 25% more time — an astounding 30 hours — for continuous music playback.

Memory: With the new 32-gigabyte model, I was able to store over 3,000 songs, more than 1,600 photos, 74 videos, 67 applications, 400 emails, nearly 1,000 contacts, months of calendar data, and dozens of documents, and still have 5 gigabytes left over—more than most phones offer out of the box.

Camera: The new model’s camera has a 3 megapixel resolution, up from 2 megapixels, and has autofocus and a feature that lets you tap the screen to change the focus to an object or person in the background of a shot. It still lacks zoom or a flash, though it does better in low light. It also has a macro feature for close-up shots. In my tests, all of this worked, but I didn’t think the pictures it took were dramatically better than those on the old model, and it can’t compete with phones like Nokia’s (NOK) new $700 N97, which has a 5-megapixel camera with zoom.

Video: The new video recorder worked well, even in low light, and lets you post videos directly to YouTube, among other places. You can also trim your videos right on the phone. This all worked well, but the videos aren’t high definition, and pale in comparison to those on the latest HD model of the popular $229 Flip pocket camcorder.

Voice Control: By simply holding down the new iPhone’s home button, you can dial contacts and control music playback by uttering voice commands. The phone will even tell you which song is playing. Like most voice-recognition systems, this one isn’t perfect. But it worked most of the time.

Compass: I don’t consider this important for most users, but it did work when I was walking or driving. It can orient maps in the direction you’re heading.

Small Touches: You can optionally turn on a new battery indicator that shows a precise percentage of battery life left. The screen has a new coating that resists oil and grease from fingerprints.

Downsides: The new phone crashed on me twice during my tests. Once, the voice-control feature killed the sound on the built-in iPod, requiring a reboot. But I couldn’t replicate this problem. Another time, the phone froze while downloading a TV show. Apple blamed this on a prerelease server issue, and it didn’t happen again.

iPhone Operating System 3.0

Copy, Cut and Paste: Apple is late with this common feature, but it’s the best implementation I’ve seen on a phone. In a text page, you just double tap on a word, and it is selected with little handles around it that let you expand or contract the selected area. Then, you just click on a copy icon that pops up over the selection. To paste, you tap elsewhere in the page, or even in another app, and a paste icon pops up. Click that icon, and the selected text is pasted in. It worked well in all my tests.

The feature works a bit differently for some Web pages, where you hold down your finger over an area and it selects a whole block of text, like a paragraph, but still has the handles that allow adjusting the selection. It also allows copying and pasting photos. You can also just select a word or a section or a whole page of text and delete it. And if you want to undo a paste, just shake the phone.

Some Web pages and third-party apps don’t yet support this feature, but most do.

Search: Before, you could search only in the Contacts app. Now, there are search features in Mail, Calendar, the built-in iPod and Notes. And there is a way to search the whole phone at once. You just hit the home button, slowly, twice, and a special search screen appears. Type in any phrase, and it brings up every instance in multiple apps.

This is another catch-up feature, but it works well. For instance, when I searched for the word “Phil,” it brought up songs by Phil Collins, a note about Philadelphia, calendar items mentioning people named Phil or Phillips, emails to or from people with those names, and contacts for people named Phil or Phillips.

In email, the search function will even find messages that aren’t on your phone but that are stored on the servers of certain email services. For instance, I was able to almost instantly find emails from two years ago stored on Google’s (GOOG) Gmail.

One downside — in email, search looks for words only in email headers, not in the body of the messages.

Landscape Keyboard: In older iPods, the only built-in program that supported a wider, landscape keyboard, which is better for thumb typing, was the Web browser. Now, you can turn the phone horizontally and use a landscape keyboard in the Mail, Messages and Notes programs as well.

Find My iPhone: If you belong to Apple’s $99 a year MobileMe service, you can now locate a lost iPhone on a map on any computer, send the iPhone a message saying how to return it to you, and cause it to emit a beep, even if the sound is turned off. I tested this and it worked well. You can even remotely wipe all your data off the phone.

Voice Memos: The OS includes a Voice Memo app that lets you dictate reminders or other messages, and then edit and email them. I found it worked well.

Navigation: Another catch-up feature, turn-by-turn navigation with voice prompts, is also now supported. I tested this with a third-party app called Gokivo, and it did OK, though the developer admits to a prerelease bug I encountered.

Auto-Authentication: In the new OS, the iPhone can remember your log-in credentials for commercial Wi-Fi hotspot services, so you don’t have to enter them again and again. Unfortunately, in my tests with the AT&T Wi-Fi service, this failed repeatedly in several Starbucks (SBUX) shops. Apple blames a glitch in my prerelease phone’s SIM card.

Push Notification: To make up for its lack of multitasking, the new iPhone OS has a feature where third-party apps can notify you of new events, like a sports score, or a new invitation to an online game. I tried this with a game called TapTap Revenge, and it worked fine.

Stocks: The built-in stock application now has much more detailed data, including market cap, news headlines and price/earnings ratio for each stock.

MMS and Tethering: I couldn’t test these useful features because my tests were all done on AT&T, which hasn’t rolled them out.

Minor Touches: You can now move an icon among screens with one continuous motion, instead of stopping at each screen. And there are two more screens to house icons. You can finally synchronize Notes with your PC or Mac. You also can now maintain both calendars and contacts synced wirelessly with online services and those synced via cable with your computer. And you can play games and transfer files wirelessly over Bluetooth with other iPods or Touches that are nearby.

Bottom Line: Both the new iPhone and iPhone OS are packed with features that make a great product even better. But, for many users, the software may be enough of a boost to keep them from buying the new model.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

This week, I tested a new videoconferencing-software program designed to help these people. It’s made especially for non-techies who simply want to use their Webcams to see someone while they’re talking to them. These people don’t want to conference several people into a call. And they especially don’t want to have to sign up for a confusing, intimidating videoconferencing service.

I used Logitech Vid by downloading it from www.logitech.com/vid. This program comes from Logitech Inc. and makes use of technology from SightSpeed, the videoconferencing-software company that Logitech acquired last fall. Vid works with Macs and Windows PCs that have built-in Webcams or those that use Webcams that plug into a computer’s USB port; it can even work if only one person has a Webcam so the person without one still sees video and hears audio from the other person.

Expiration Date for Some

If this was a free download for all, Logitech Vid would be a slam dunk for the consumer. But as of now, it is free only for people who use Logitech Webcams or the people they invite, and for people who are registered on SightSpeed or Dell Video Chat, Dell’s version of the SightSpeed service, regardless of their Webcam brand.

For everyone else, the software expires after 30 days, with no option to pay for continued use. This means Logitech misses out on the growing number of people whose laptops and desktops have built-in Webcams, but who don’t want to buy a Logitech camera just to use Vid (and shouldn’t have to). Logitech says it intends to add a payment plan for Vid.

I tested Vid with my parents, who recently bought a netbook for the kitchen but — before this column — didn’t quite know how to use its Webcam. I also tried it with tech-savvy friends who have video-chatted with me on programs like Skype, Apple’s iChat and Google Chat. Everyone had the same reaction: They liked Logitech Vid’s refreshingly clean interface and simple setup. My Mom appreciated Vid’s easy instructions, which are written in plain terms that anyone can understand.

Vid worked while I was video-chatting from one Mac to another; from a Mac to a Windows PC and vice versa; and from one Windows PC to another.

Invitations to Chat

I ran into trouble one night when Vid invitations that I sent to friends and family didn’t go through until after several attempts. Logitech says Vid was undergoing some behind-the-scenes server maintenance, which caused the glitches. (People who have trouble sending invitations like I did can alternatively direct friends to Logitech’s Web site to download the software.) And Vid didn’t work properly when I tried using it on my company-issued PC, which runs on a corporate network protected by firewalls. Logitech says Vid is targeted for consumer use, and not for sophisticated corporate environments.

Logitech Vid arranges photos of friends, along with their availability, in a visually pleasing carousel display.

People who are used to more advanced videoconferencing programs may find Vid unsatisfying. It doesn’t let friends instant message or share photos with one another, nor does it pull in buddy lists from outside videoconferencing programs. Vid isn’t designed to record conversations, host multiparty calls or take still photos during chats. Like other videoconferencing programs, slow Internet connections can occasionally cause video and audio to stutter.

But for simple video chats, Vid was a pleasure to use. If not for its 30-day expiration, I would definitely see myself chatting with my parents through this program on a regular basis. I used it to hold up three colors of dresses for my Mom so she could help me decide whether tea rose, azalea or peppermint was the best shade for my sister’s wedding (we’re leaning toward tea rose). My Dad and I had a face-to-face talk about my latest job news, and I saw a New Orleans friend and her dog, Boudreaux, appear on my computer screen almost as if they were in my house.

Smile for the Camera

Vid users invite others to chat by entering the other person’s email address. For invitees to accept an invitation, they must download the Vid software, which could be a deterrent for some. Those who do download the software and start their own Vid accounts (by just entering an email and password) appear to the original inviter in a carousel-like display of their contacts’ photographed faces.

These images are taken by the Webcam when someone sets up a Vid account, rather than allowing one to select his or her own photo from elsewhere on the computer. This is one example of Vid’s nod to simplicity and fewer choices. Likewise, the carousel of friends is organized in left-to-right alphabetical order showing those who are online followed by those offline. A simple status line below each person’s face identifies them as Unavailable, Available or Busy (already in a videoconference).

Clicking on a Pic

I called someone by clicking on their photo. The video-chat screen has four buttons that change its size, hide a small-image view of yourself, pause your video feed or end the conversation.

In a few instances, I heard a steady, high-pitched chirp and so did the person on the call with me. And we occasionally heard the echo of our own voices. Logitech said this sometimes happens when both users have open-air microphones and speakers turned up at the same time. Turning the speakers down usually solves the problem.

By August, all of Logitech’s standalone Webcams will come loaded with Vid software that starts up when the Webcam is plugged in. Now, the software is only downloadable from the Web.

Logitech Vid isn’t fancy, but it works well and presents its users with a satisfying experience so they can concentrate on enjoying their conversations. But it is a shame that Logitech doesn’t offer a payment plan for people who don’t use Logitech Webcams. If it did, Vid could help many people appreciate the Webcams they might never have otherwise used.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

This alternative Kindle, called the DX, is a super-size version of the popular Kindle 2, which arrived earlier this year. It sports a 9.7-inch screen, some 2.5 times as big as the surface area of the Kindle 2’s 6-inch display. It also sports a higher price tag — $489, versus $359 for its smaller sibling, which remains on the market.

Amazon’s Kindle DX

Like previous models, the Kindle DX allows you to shop for, and wirelessly download, any e-book in Amazon’s (AMZN) growing catalog — now about 275,000 titles. It uses the same easy-on-the-eyes screen technology as the smaller model but at a higher resolution. It still lacks color, and renders images only in gray scale. But the new DX adds a new capability: auto-rotation, which allows you to read in landscape mode.

This new, larger model isn’t primarily aimed at readers of standard books. It is targeted at three markets: textbooks, newspapers and other periodicals, and business documents in either Microsoft’s (MSFT) Word format or Adobe’s (ADBE) PDF format.

Unfortunately, I’ve been testing the Kindle DX and I didn’t like it nearly as much as the Kindle 2, which I own and enjoy using daily. While it performs its promised tasks adequately, I found that its size and weight made it awkward and tiring to hold for long periods of reading. It’s still fairly thin and light, but it’s 85% larger and heavier than the standard Kindle.

In addition, Amazon has degraded the user interface. To prevent the device from being even larger, the company had to remove the left-side page-turning buttons, confining all the controls to a vertical strip on the right. The keyboard at the bottom is also more vertically cramped.

If you’re left-handed, you have to spin the device around and rotate the screen to get buttons on the left, where they appear with their labels upside-down.

Similarly, if you choose to read in landscape mode, all the navigation controls, including the joystick for moving the cursor, will be awkwardly placed at either the top or bottom, far from where your hands are holding the device, and the keyboard essentially will be unusable.

In my view, the Kindle DX would have been a better product with on-screen touch controls that could instantly adapt to its size and orientation.

In reading standard books on the DX, I also encountered instances where the text on a page varied in shade from light gray to black.

I had mixed results with business documents. As with previous Kindles, you can either email personal documents to your device, for a fee, or drag them onto the Kindle via a cable, for free. But, unlike the smaller models, the new DX has PDF display capability built in, so it renders PDF files much more accurately than the older Kindles. That is a big improvement. It also allows you to view Excel and PowerPoint files if you save them in PDF format before sending them to your Kindle DX.

The Kindle DX, right, is a large-screen version of the popular Kindle e-reader, left.

I tried a variety of documents, and in many cases the results were great. The text was crisp, and the tables and graphics looked like they should. But I found that on some of these PDF documents, the text was too small to read. Yet, the Kindle lacks the ability to zoom in on PDF documents. You often can make the type larger by rotating to landscape mode, but this splits the PDFs into multiple pages, sometimes breaking them awkwardly.

Also, Amazon has raised its fees for converting and delivering business documents via email to all Kindles. The charge was formerly 10 cents a document. Now, it’s 15 cents per megabyte, which can add up if you load up your Kindle with lots of large documents. Most of my test documents, which were fairly small, cost over $1 each.

Newspapers looked about the same on the DX as they do on the smaller Kindles. Despite the larger screen, they don’t use traditional print or Web layouts, but a special Kindle layout that some users like a lot, but which I find annoying because it makes it harder to quickly scan multiple headlines.

The Kindle DX does have some nice touches. For the extra money, you not only get a larger screen, but also about twice the storage capacity. Also, because the screen is wider, you can adjust the margins on the DX, to obtain a line length that’s comfortable for your eyes and optimal for reading speed.

Amazon claims the same multiday battery life for the DX as for the Kindle 2. In my tests, I was able to go for several days of moderate reading without recharging, and much more if I turned off the wireless capability.

Although I wasn’t able to test college textbooks, I suspect they may be the killer app for this product. Many already are so expensive and heavy they could make the weight and price of the Kindle DX seem trivial in comparison.

But for standard books, I’d stick with the smaller, more comfortable Kindle 2.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Here are a few questions about computers I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

I am a longtime Palm user and am wondering if the new Palm Pre smart phone can run all the Palm OS programs I have become used to on my Treo.

The Pre is a clean break with Palm’s former operating system and previous hardware, and was designed as a platform for a new generation of software programs, or apps. It uses a new operating system called webOS, which wasn’t built to run old Palm OS programs.

However, there is a $30 program called “Classic” by a company called MotionApps (motionapps.com) that emulates the old platform and makes your sleek new Pre look and work like an old Palm device. It is intended to allow older programs to run on the Pre inside this virtual environment created by Classic. I haven’t tested it with older third-party programs and so I can’t say how well they work in this emulation mode.

But there are some caveats to this method. First, not all old Palm programs will run inside the Classic environment, or at least run well. The company lists those certified to work well on its Web site. Second, the old apps can’t activate certain features of the Pre, such as the camera. Third, Classic’s maker says it hasn’t yet figured out how to sync the old apps with a computer using Palm’s old, familiar HotSync process.

Can the Palm Pre be used as a modem for my laptop?

Sprint, the carrier that is launching the Pre, says the answer to this question is no. The company says its data plans for the Pre don’t permit that scenario.

I use Time Machine for my Mac, but I would also like the belt & suspenders security of manually backing up my invaluable iCal data on an external hard drive. How would I do that?

It’s easy. Just go into iCal’s File menu, select “Back up iCal…” and you can save a copy of your calendar to any drive connected to your computer, or even to any computer or external drive on a network, or over the Internet, that your Mac can access. To restore your calendar, just go to the same menu, but this time select “Restore iCal…” and then select your backup file.

• You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Why not bring your own Wi-Fi? I’m not talking about stuffing a cumbersome router and cables into a backpack with hopes of setting up shop wherever you go. I’m referring to a new product called MiFi. It is what it sounds like: a private Wi-Fi network for you. It’s a one-button gadget that measures about the surface size of an Altoids tin, only thinner and lighter.

Verizon’s unassuming MiFi weighs just over two ounces.

This week, while I was traveling, I used Verizon Wireless’s MiFi 2200, made for the phone carrier by Novatel Wireless. The MiFi brings in the Internet using Verizon’s 3G network and creates a Wi-Fi zone that can be reached from up to 50 feet away, even through thick hotel walls. Its connection can be used by up to five devices at once. At one point, I had a Lenovo ThinkPad, Apple MacBook, iPhone, Palm Pre and iPod Touch simultaneously using the Web via the MiFi’s connection. Although video playback stuttered under these busy conditions, other tasks did well. And with just three devices using the connection at once, the connection worked normally.

The luxury of MiFi doesn’t come cheap. The device itself costs $100 with a two-year service agreement and after a $50 rebate. Two monthly plan options are available: $40 buys 250 megabytes with a charge of 10 cents per megabyte over that allotment; and $60 buys five gigabytes with a five-cent charge per megabyte of overage. Users who don’t want to mess with the monthly service plan can buy the device at its full retail price of $400 and pay $15 per 24-hour access period, which is called a Verizon Wireless Mobile Broadband DayPass.

Of course, you already can get online over cellphone networks for similar monthly fees and at similar speeds, with external or internal laptop cards that usually cost less upfront. So why would anyone want or need MiFi? The answer is that it serves multiple devices at once, without requiring you to buy multiple cards or pay a separate fee for each.

I can imagine plenty of scenarios where the MiFi would come in handy, including colleagues traveling together, college students studying together with laptops on a campus lawn and families riding in a car with multiple laptops and/or portable game devices. In my trip alone, I used my MiFi and avoided paying for wireless Internet fees in the airport and four days of my hotel’s expensive in-room Internet charges. As long as there’s a Verizon network in the area, the MiFi will work.

MiFi is so small it could easily fit in your pocket.

Last week, Sprint Nextel entered the MiFi fray by offering its own MiFi 2200, also from Novatel Wireless. Like Verizon’s MiFi, Sprint’s costs $100 after a rebate and with a two-year contract. While Verizon offers all-data plans, Sprint offers a monthly plan of broadband-only for $60 as well as a $150 monthly Simply Everything Plan + Mobile Broadband for data and phone use. Both of these plans include five gigabytes a month with a five-cents-a-megabyte charge for overage. Sprint’s device isn’t available with pay-as-you-go options, like Verizon’s MiFi. Unlike Verizon’s MiFi, the Sprint device has built-in GPS.

The Verizon MiFi looks unassuming. It weighs just over two ounces, so it really could be held unnoticed in a pocket. In fact, it’s so small, you could easily misplace it. Its glossy black exterior is interrupted only by a Verizon Wireless logo and a power button, which changes colors to indicate different things, like red for low battery and blue for when it’s on. A separate indicator light blinks green when the MiFi is transmitting or receiving data. The MiFi runs on a rechargeable lithium-ion battery; spare batteries cost $40. Its battery charges when MiFi plugs into a Windows PC or Mac using a USB cable or plugs into a wall adapter.

After the initial registration of the MiFi device, which happens the first time you plug it into a Mac or Windows PC and takes just five minutes, the device is set to work without any wires simply by pressing its power button on. The personal Wi-Fi network shows up in a list of available networks on your device and requires a password, which is written on the back of each MiFi. Users can change this password to something more memorable by adjusting wireless security settings in a browser menu.

Verizon estimates that if just one device is tapped into a fully charged MiFi, the tiny gadget’s battery will last for about four hours, and this was the case in my tests. The battery is designed to last 40 hours in standby, a plus for busy travelers who might not think to charge the MiFi each night.

Even when two laptops and a Palm Pre were connected to the MiFi, speed tests showed positive results of about 1.4 megabytes per second for downloads and roughly 500 kilobits per second for uploads. Verizon says its device uses something called NovaSpeed, which enhances upload and download performance.

The MiFi offers reliable Web access for you and the four lucky souls who are sitting near you, if you’re feeling generous. Its ease of use — take out, turn on, start surfing the Web — means there aren’t any excuses for not hopping online from anywhere at any time. And it comes just in time for those summer vacations that were meant to let you get away from it all.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

But on June 6, Apple will get a powerful competitor in this category. It’s a beautiful, innovative and versatile hand-held computer that’s fully in the iPhone’s class. It’s called the Pre, and it comes from Palm, the company that pioneered the hand-held computer in the 1990s.

I’ve been testing the Pre for a couple of weeks, and I like it a lot, despite some important drawbacks that will have to be remedied.

Pre sports an all-new operating system called webOS. Like the iPhone, Google’s new Android phone operating system, and the modern BlackBerry models from Research in Motion, the Pre is meant to do much more than make phone calls, send and receive messages, and browse the Web. It’s a platform, like a PC, that’s designed to run a wide variety of sophisticated third-party programs, or apps, from social-networking gateways to games to business tools. Palm plans to build a whole line of devices based on webOS.

The Pre is launching on the Sprint network in the U.S., though it will be offered by other carriers later. It includes Wi-Fi connectivity. Like the iPhone, it costs $200 — but there’s a catch. At most stores, you get that price only after a $100 mail-in rebate. And there’s another catch. Production of the Pre will be limited at first, so they’ll be hard to come by for a while.

I consider the Pre to be potentially the strongest rival to the iPhone to date, provided it attracts lots of third-party apps, which it sorely lacks at launch. Its design is much better than that of the two other main iPhone-class competitors: the T-Mobile G1, which uses Android, and RIM’s touch-screen BlackBerry Storm.

Whether the Pre is better than the iPhone depends on your personal preferences, though I’d note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations.

The Pre’s biggest advantage over the iPhone is that, in addition to sporting an elegant touch-screen interface that matches or exceeds Apple’s, the new Palm device has a real physical keyboard that slides out from its curved body. While I like the iPhone’s virtual on-screen keyboard, others hate it, and yearn for a device with both a great touch interface and a physical keyboard. The Pre delivers.

Many other iPhone wannabes have physical keyboards, including the G1. But none combine that keyboard with the stylish software of the Pre and its beautiful industrial design, which makes the new Palm feel great in the hand. The phone is relatively small — though pretty thick — and has a gently curved back.

The Pre also features an elegant new take on the multitouch user interface. It uses a card metaphor. Each program, or window, appears in virtual cards on the screen, and you can flip through them and zoom in to use one, or quickly dismiss one by flicking it up and off the screen. An individual email, or contact, can occupy its own card. And, unlike on the iPhone, the Pre can simultaneously run any programs you choose.

Also, some gestures — like a quick sideways swipe to go to the previous screen — are performed in a black area below the display, which also has a button that zooms in and out of card view.

The other big, new idea in this phone is called Synergy. It automatically can merge similar contacts from disparate sources, like Google and Facebook, and can display multiple calendars from different sources as well.

Palm stresses wireless capability. It automatically syncs over the air with Google’s calendar and contacts, and with Microsoft Exchange. This worked pretty well in my tests, though syncing some items wasn’t instant. It also can connect with numerous email services and performs BlackBerry-style push email.

Going further, the Pre features a wireless backup service that automatically stores a copy of your data — email, contacts and calendar — on remote servers, so you can recover your stuff if need be.

For syncing big files, like photos, videos and music, Palm has taken an audacious approach: It simply uses its rival’s software, Apple’s iTunes. The Pre team, headed by a former top engineer at Apple, figured how to make iTunes think a Pre is an iPhone or iPod, and the software acts accordingly. Of course, Apple can alter iTunes to block this, but in my tests, it worked perfectly.

The Pre’s biggest disadvantage is its app store, the App Catalog. At launch, it has only about a dozen apps, compared with over 40,000 for the iPhone, and thousands each for the G1 and the modern BlackBerry models. Even worse, the Pre App Catalog isn’t finished. It’s immature, it’s labeled a beta, and Palm has yet to release the tools for making Pre apps available to more than a small group of developers.

In fact, during my testing, one of my downloads from the App Catalog caused my Pre to crash disastrously — all my email, contacts and other data were wiped out, and the phone was unable to connect to the Sprint network or Wi-Fi. Palm conceded the catastrophe was due to problems it still has getting the App Catalog to work with the phone’s internal memory, and explained that this is one reason it hasn’t widely distributed the developer tools.

The good news is that the Pre’s impressive backup system allowed me to quickly and easily get back almost all my data and to restore the phone’s connectivity.

Sprint has loaded the Pre with some of its own apps, including its turn-by-turn navigation and mobile TV services. But whether the Pre will be a powerful platform for third-party apps remains an open question.

The Palm Pre is a short and thick, black plastic device that easily fits in a pants pocket or small purse when the keyboard isn’t exposed. The screen, while smaller than the iPhone’s, is still vibrant and very readable. The keyboard has a slightly sticky feel, but worked pretty well for me, and has dedicated keys for typing periods and the @ symbol used so often online.

There are only a handful of buttons, and my only real criticism of the industrial design is that these were rubbery and protruded too little from the body, making them hard to press unseen. The power button is clumsy to use when the keyboard is open.

The Pre’s 3 megapixel camera has a flash and took decent pictures, but it can’t record video. The device has 8 gigabytes of built-in memory, but no slot for adding more.

In my tests in San Diego and Washington, phone calls on the Pre were clear on both ends, and conference calls worked fine. Calls even worked over Bluetooth in my car, though my address book failed to transfer to the car’s dashboard display.

The Pre was about as fast as my iPhone when using Wi-Fi, but, at least in the cities where I did my testing, its data speeds on Sprint’s network handily topped AT&T’s data speeds on the iPhone.

The Pre has some other nice advantages over the iPhone, at least for now. It includes MMS — the ability to send photos directly to other phones — copy and paste, and a universal search function that looks up terms not only on the phone, but also online, even in Twitter. In certain screens, you can just start typing and the search begins. Oddly, though, it can’t search email, though it does search the built-in Google Maps program.

Unfortunately for Palm, Apple has both a new iPhone operating system and new iPhone hardware coming, likely available within a month, that could obviate many of these advantages.

Apple already has announced it’s adding MMS, universal search, and copy and paste. And, although Apple hasn’t announced any new hardware features, I expect to see an iPhone with up to 32 gigabytes of memory, video recording, a higher-resolution camera, a compass, and greater operating speed. Plus, there are persistent rumors that Apple will announce at least one iPhone at a drastically lower price than $199.

However, Apple isn’t likely to match two of the Pre’s big advantages: multitasking and a physical keyboard.

The Pre has two more nice features. One is its monthly calling plan from Sprint. While its minimum cost, with voice and data, is the same $70 as AT&T’s plan for the iPhone, Sprint includes unlimited text messaging, while AT&T charges extra for texting.

The other is Palm will offer a $70 Pre accessory, Touchstone, that charges the phone when you simply lay the Pre on top of it, and automatically puts the Pre into speakerphone mode when a call comes in during charging.

But the Pre has a few other important downsides. Battery life between charges is relatively weak. While it’s in line with competitors with a claimed five hours of talk time, and matches the iPhone’s claimed five hours of Web surfing time, it offers only half the iPhone’s 24 hours of continuous music playback and claims just five hours of video playback, versus seven for the iPhone.

In my testing, the Pre mostly made it through the day without running out of juice. But on at least one day, it died in midafternoon, even though I was using Wi-Fi most of that day and not the power-hungry cellphone network. Unlike the iPhone, the Pre does include a removable battery. Extras cost about $50.

Another downside: the Pre’s autocorrect system, for instantly fixing mistyped words, is puny. Even with a physical keyboard, people make typos, and Palm only fixes about 2,500 common words, like “the.” By contrast, both the BlackBerry and iPhone have tens of thousands of autocorrections built in, including fixes for long, complex words.

There are several smaller problems, too. There’s no easy way to get to the top of a long list or to quickly delete a large group of emails, no keyboard shortcuts, no voice control and no Facebook app. Palm says it plans to add most of these, and notes that the Pre was designed to be updated over the air, without requiring users to plug it into a PC.

All in all, I believe the Pre is a smart, sophisticated product that will have particular appeal for those who want a physical keyboard. It is thoughtfully designed, works well and could give the iPhone and BlackBerry strong competition — but only if it fixes its app store and can attract third-party developers.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Here are a few questions about computers I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

A friend’s Windows XP PC is having troubles. He wants to copy its contents onto a separate backup drive. Will he encounter problems if he tries to transfer this material to a Windows 7 unit he plans to buy when available?

He should have no problem at all with the data files, such as Office documents, music or photos. However, it may not be possible to transfer the programs and settings without reinstalling them from the original disks or downloaded installation files. And he may also have to re-install any patches or updates to these programs. Microsoft plans some sort of system to make this process simpler than it might be, but I don’t yet know how it will work.

I am not a super techie but would like to view Internet videos from my computer, attached to my TV. What do you recommend? Is there a system or a product that would be best for my needs?

You very likely don’t need any special product, other than the right cables and, if need be, adapters, to connect your computer and your TV. This choice depends on the details of your computer’s graphics capabilities and output ports, and the input ports and capabilities of your TV. All of this is much easier if the PC and TV are relatively modern — say, two years old or less. But, whatever their age, you should visit a competent electronics store that sells cables, provide the staff with the details of the two products, and seek their specific advice.

With the rising popularity of the netbook, do you know, or expect, that Apple will come out with a netbook? I would be very interested in getting one.

I know of no such plans. In fact, Apple officials have said they have no interest in producing a netbook, which is a small, inexpensive laptop, and have disparaged the category. However, Apple is quite secretive, and sometimes enters categories it had previously laughed off. Also, there are persistent rumors that Apple is working on a flat, tablet-style computer — perhaps a much larger version of its iPod Touch pocket-size device. If these rumors prove true, such a tablet might compete with netbooks.

Our daughter has asked for nothing but a Nintendo DS game system for more than a year now. Her birthday’s in two weeks. She says she’d be happy with the cheaper DS Lite, but is it worth going with the new DSi for $40 more? Do you think the DS Lite will become obsolete, in terms of new games for it?

Obviously, this depends on your budget, and I don’t think there’ll never be another new game for the DS Lite. But if the $40 price difference isn’t an obstacle, I’d go with the DSi, because I assume that, over time, more and more games and other software will emerge that will run only on the higher-end model.

• You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Last week, Microsoft announced Bing as the name of its new search engine. The company describes Bing as delivering more answers to your search queries directly on the search-results page, so you don’t have to keep hunting around for what you want to find. And, like Google, Bing can be used as a verb.

I’ve been using Bing for more than two weeks now, and this search engine really did retrieve on-target, useful information on the first try. But what I like best about it is that it does so in a user-friendly manner that looks and feels more inviting than Google.

A feature called Hover displays a brief summary of each Web page when your cursor is hovering over the right edge of a link, and this can save you from visiting a useless page. As another time-saving feature, to further save searchers from clicking to another page, Bing answers medical queries by featuring information from the Mayo Clinic at the top of the results page. Videos on Bing start playing when you move your cursor over a thumbnail still image from the video, without requiring you to press play or go to a new page; the videos stop when you mouse elsewhere. A query about a company usually returns its customer-service phone number at the top of the results page. Shopping, restaurant reviews and travel are also significantly enhanced by Bing.

Google isn’t going away. Both search engines stick to plain, white backgrounds and proudly proclaim the total number of results at the top of the page, a competition that Google almost always wins. Google also is steadily delivering more of its own useful data right in the results, but those efforts feel minimal compared with Bing.

A technology called Bing Travel predicts whether an airfare will go up or down in the future.

It’s a given that many people will try Bing once, get frustrated by the unfamiliar environment and switch back to Google. Others will use whatever their Web browser’s search box is set to (Google, for many people) because they don’t know how to change their options or they’re too lazy to do so. Microsoft’s Live Search engine has been replaced by Bing.com.

You can bring up Bing the old-fashioned way by going to Bing.com. This Web page is a perfect example of the search engine’s engaging, attractive style. Bing.com evokes the cover of a glossy magazine with a stunning photo that takes over the page. This photo, usually slightly off-beat and somewhat alluring, changes every day. If you move your cursor across the photo, blurbs filled with interesting text and Web links materialize on-screen to teach you something related to the photo. It’s a shame that many people will never see the Web page because they search using the box built into their browser.

From this home page, you can dive directly into searching videos, like TV shows, news and sports videos, or browsing music by watching music videos arranged by artist, genre and popularity. I browsed through episodes of “The Office” and watched the “People Are Crazy” music video by country singer, Billy Currington.

The Bing results page has a left-side panel called the Explore Pane, which includes suggestions of terms and categories to select. A search for Abraham Lincoln, for example, showed links to speeches, childhood and library — among others. The Explore Pane includes related searches of terms that people searching for the same thing as you also looked up.

The related searches were sometimes helpful, like “Paul McCartney Tour Dates” when I Binged the famed musician. But the related searches also could be confusing, like when I searched for my own name and found “Jan D’Esopo” listed as the top related search suggestion. (D’Esopo is a painter and sculptor who is active in Puerto Rico, according to Wikipedia.)

In a Web search for tennis player Roger Federer, Microsoft’s Bing showed photos and related search terms on the same page.

I tried comparing Bing with Google in side-by-side searches for tennis player Roger Federer. Bing showed me six colorful images of Federer atop its results page, along with an Explore Pane full of links to his biography, posters, quotes, blog and more. The third listed related-search term, “Roger Federer Shirtless,” made me laugh.

Google didn’t automatically embed images of the tennis great on its results page (for that, of course, you have to go to its Image search page), but it did display Federer’s winning score for that day’s French Open match — information that was extremely useful to me.

Bing presents photos in a more eye-pleasing way than Google. The Roger Federer image search on Bing filled the page with images only — none of the messy text descriptions that appear in the same Google search results. By selecting visuals in the top right of the Bing results page, I changed the size of the photos to small, medium, large or detailed. As I moved my cursor over an image, the image popped forward in a larger version with text details.

Microsoft wants people to use Bing for shopping, and the search engine brings product reviews right to the results page, making it look a bit like Amazon, complete with images, ratings and links to online stores. Bing Cashback, a money-rewards program that works with certain items, is less complicated than its confusing predecessor, but it isn’t as clear as it should be.

For people looking up airline flights, Microsoft integrates a technology called Bing Travel into the search. This tool predicts whether a fare will go up or down in the future based on data aggregation and analysis. A built-in tool works similarly with hotels, analyzing data to tell if you’re getting a good deal.

After I got over my initial resistance to Bing’s unfamiliarity, I really enjoyed using it and found that searching with it was less of a chore and more of an interactive experience. Microsoft gives users a true service by bringing rich content directly to the search-results page.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

Linux on netbooks isn’t going away though. In fact, software and hardware companies have been making big investments to improve Linux netbooks. For the past week, I’ve been using several flavors of Linux running on netbooks — Ubuntu, Hewlett-Packard’s Mi (which is based on Ubuntu) and Moblin, created largely by Intel and not yet available commercially. In all cases, the Linux netbooks failed at some basic functions that any laptop, no matter how tiny and inexpensive, should be able to handle, like working with printers. At the same time, Mi and Moblin have impressive graphical user interfaces well-suited to the habits of typical netbook users, like checking email and accessing social-networking sites, as well as the small screens and low horsepower of tiny laptops. In addition to Linux, all of the computers shared the standard features, or lack thereof, common among netbooks, including compact keyboards and no DVD drives.

H-P’s Mini 110 Mi Edition

The most polished of the products was H-P’s Mini 110 Mi Edition, a new model with a 10.1-inch screen that H-P will begin selling on its Web site for $279.99 on June 10. That’s nearly $50 less than what H-P will charge for the Mini 110 running Windows XP, which will come with a 160-gigabyte hard drive instead of the 8-gigabyte solid-state drive that will come with the Mi edition.

The striking thing about this netbook is the slick graphical user interface created by H-P that runs on top of Ubuntu and first began appearing on H-P netbooks early this year. Instead of a traditional desktop like that found in Windows and the Mac, Mi (pronounced “me”) arranges commonly used applications and content on a screen called the “dashboard,” which looks like a personalized Web page and lists recently received emails, fresh thumbnail images of favorite Web sites, and a Web-search toolbar.

The Mi home screen is a clever way to make the computer seem alive with on- and off-line content, which is fitting since netbooks are designed for on-the-go Internet activities. It’s also tailor-made for the small screen size of netbooks.

A more eye-catching iteration of Linux is Moblin, which I tried out in test form on an Acer netbook; it is expected to ship on netbooks by the end of the year. Moblin has a menu of icons at the top of the screen, the most interesting of which leads to the M-Zone, a home screen that displays calendar appointments and favorite applications alongside snapshots of recently visited sites and a continuous feed from the user’s Twitter network.

An icon called “People” leads to a list of instant-messaging buddies, while another, called “Zones,” let me organize all the applications I had launched into different virtual workspaces, which is useful for hopping between various tasks on a small-screen device like a netbook.

The look and feel of the standard Ubuntu system, without the Mi interface, is more commonplace. I tried out a Dell Mini 10 with a 10.1-inch display and 160-gigabyte hard drive that sells for $349 on Dell’s Web site. The Mini 10 ships with version 8.04 of Ubuntu, which resembles Windows XP, with its desktop, taskbar and pop-up menu system. Ubuntu, in some cases, seemed to overestimate the size of the Dell Mini’s display: A window for configuring wireless-networking capabilities was so large it bled off the screen, and I couldn’t access all the buttons on it. I also installed on the Dell a new version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which works better on small screens. Since a Windows XP version of the Dell Mini 10 sells for the same price as the Ubuntu, I can’t see a compelling reason to choose the Ubuntu option.

All the netbooks I tried had compatibility problems with other external devices. The netbooks couldn’t load the software drivers to let me print to my Canon and Dell printers. I couldn’t load pictures over a USB cable from my Canon PowerShot SD750 digital camera. I was able to get my pictures on the machines by plugging a storage card from my camera directly into the netbooks.

Canonical, the London company that oversees development work on Ubuntu, says it is improving the system’s compatibility with various devices. Intel says it is unfair to judge Moblin until it is commercially available.

Some key applications currently don’t run on Linux, like Apple’s iTunes, which makes it difficult to load music files onto iPods from the netbooks. While the Linux laptops didn’t run Microsoft Office, they came with OpenOffice, a free package of word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications that allowed me to open and modify basic Word and Excel files.

The companies behind Linux netbooks have made great strides in improving user interfaces, but until they can achieve similar breakthroughs in how the machines work with other devices, Windows netbooks are still a better deal.

• Emailnick.wingfield@wsj.com. Walter S. Mossberg is away and will return next Thursday.

While these location-sharing services have some interesting possibilities, they also raise some disturbing implications for privacy — or maybe it just seems that way if, like me, you’re over 35 years old. Lately I’ve been testing a cellphone location-sharing service that I found simple, useful and non-creepy enough that I can imagine people thirtysomething and older using it.

Send a ‘Glympse’ to share your location

The free service is called Glympse, from a company of the same name that has designed it to share your location with friends and colleagues in small increments of time — glimpses, as the name implies, of your whereabouts. Glympse just released a test version of the service as an application for the G1, a phone offered by T-Mobile that runs Google’s (GOOG) Android operating system.

The company will release versions of Glympse for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Nokia (NOK) phones in the coming weeks. Users can download the Glympse software onto G1 phones through Android Market, the online clearinghouse for applications for Android phones.

I used Glympse on an iPhone and a G1 and, for comparison, tried out a couple of other location-sharing applications, Google Latitude and Loopt. When you start the Glympse application, it identifies where you are on a map using a combination of location technologies in cellphones, including GPS satellites, Wi-Fi hot spots and phone towers.

Your location isn’t shared with others until you “send a Glympse” to someone. The software allowed me to send a Glympse with my location for selected chunks of time lasting anywhere from zero minutes to four hours. Picking zero minutes shared only my location at the moment of sending, while selecting four hours meant the recipients of my Glympse could track me for that period of time, wherever I went.

The sender of a Glympse can address it by entering a recipient’s email address, or a mobile-phone number for a text message. Recipients get a message with a link to a map on a Web page. A nice thing about the service is that it doesn’t require recipients to have the Glympse software, though the experience is richer when they do.

Sending a Glympse can be helpful anytime a friend, family member or colleague is expecting you. You can send a Glympse that lets a friend know you’re stuck in heavy traffic (although it’s wise to do that before you’re on the road to stay safe and, in some states, to avoid breaking the law). Parents can insist that teens send a Glympse when they go out for the evening.

Bryan Trussel, the CEO of Glympse, sent me several Glympses with short messages like “late lunch meeting” and “headed home” to explain where he was going. On the G1, I could see an icon representing Mr. Trussel moving around a map as he drove through the streets of Redmond, Wash., including his speed. I was also able to see traffic conditions, which would have been helpful if he had been running late. Glympse gave me a similar view of his location through a Web browser running on my PC. On the iPhone, the experience was more static, forcing me to reload a Web page to get a fresh view of Mr. Trussel’s whereabouts. Glympse says it will fix this so users of the iPhone can watch someone’s location in real time.

I encountered a bug with the service when I sent a couple Glympses to my own cellphone and that of a colleague — both BlackBerrys and neither of which had Glympse software. Both Glympses linked to high-level maps suggesting I was somewhere in North America, which wasn’t very helpful, even if it was technically accurate. The company couldn’t figure out what the problem was, and it eventually stopped happening for me too.

Once a Glympse expires, the service no longer tracks the sender’s location. It will show the sender’s last known location for 48 hours after the Glympse expires. Glympse may some day use your location information to target advertising to you, but the company isn’t doing that for now.

I’m far more comfortable with this form of finite location-sharing than the approach used by other services. Google Latitude lets you share your location to only a list of friends. It gives you the option of turning location sharing off or, through a “city level” option, it reveals only your general whereabouts. Loopt similarly allows you to set options to show, or hide your location from all or some online friends. A feature called Loopt Mix lists strangers you can send messages to in your general vicinity — many of whom seemed to be looking for romantic partners in my area.

Despite these controls, I easily forgot I was sharing my location with these two services. This might be fine for someone who enjoys being tracked down by friends during a night out on the town or is diligent about changing privacy settings when they want to go stealth.

I’m too lazy to manage my privacy so closely though. I don’t mind giving friends a look at my location, but only if I know the invitation isn’t open-ended.

• Email nick.wingfield@wsj.com.

For a while, some wireless carriers in Europe and in Asia have been selling tiny laptops, called netbooks, equipped with built-in cellular modems, at low, subsidized prices, just as they do with mobile phones. And, just as with a subsidized phone or a plug-in laptop data card, there’s a catch: To get the low upfront price, the customer must agree to a contract and pay a monthly data fee.

Starting May 17, Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, will try the same thing on these shores, selling a netbook model made by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) at $200, after a $50 mail-in rebate — less than half its usual price of $520. To get this price, the customer must sign a two-year contract and pay either $40 or $60 a month, depending on the amount of data to be consumed.

I’ve been testing this netbook, the H-P Mini 1151NR, a version of H-P’s Mini 1000 series with a cellular modem built-in. This model sports a 10.1-inch screen, and yet is very compact and easy to tote. It weighs just 2.45 pounds, is about an inch thick, and is only about 10 inches long and 6.5 inches deep. It has an Intel (INTC) Atom processor, common in netbooks; runs Windows XP; and includes one gigabyte of memory, a built-in Webcam and an 80-gigabyte hard disk. Like most netbooks, it includes Wi-Fi, but lacks a DVD drive.

My verdict: This netbook is an adequate light-duty computer, and $200 is a low price for a PC with a hard disk running Windows XP. But Verizon’s charge for Internet service is high if you intend to rely on that service as your main online connection, because the data levels covered by the carrier’s plans aren’t unlimited, and cost extra after you exceed a certain amount. It makes much more sense if you travel a lot, stay within the data limits each month, and want to avoid hotel and airport Wi-Fi fees.

But the Verizon (VZ) service is slower than many Wi-Fi connections, and it can be obtained for almost any laptop by buying a plug-in card that carries the same monthly fees. In my tests, at a typical Marriott (MAR) hotel, the Verizon cellular service achieved download speeds of around 1.6 megabits per second, while the Wi-Fi modem in the same PC got over five mbps.

The H-P Mini 1151NR

Also, even for a netbook, the computer itself is underequipped. Its 80-gigabyte hard disk is cramped by today’s netbook standards, and it has only a small three-cell battery that doesn’t last long. In my tough battery test, where I left the cellular Internet connection on, disabled all power-saving features, and played music continuously, the H-P Mini 1151NR lasted a pathetic one hour and 55 minutes. That suggests that, in normal use, you might get around 2.5 hours of use.

A bigger six-cell battery is available for $130 from Verizon, but that’s a huge price premium on a $200 PC, plus it makes the netbook 75% thicker and 30% heavier. Verizon doesn’t offer a larger internal hard disk.

By comparison, you can buy an Acer One Windows XP netbook with the same size screen as the Verizon netbook, and twice the hard disk and battery capacity, for $340. The Acer lacks the built-in cellular modem, but you can buy that from Verizon in plug-in form for $30, with the same monthly fees. Total upfront price: $370, versus $330 for the Verizon model with the bigger battery.

You could also pay much less at a RadioShack (RSH) store, which is selling a subsidized netbook with a built-in cellular modem and required contract (with AT&T) (T) at $60 a month. This model, also an Acer running XP, has a smaller 8.9-inch screen, but most other specs are similar to those on the Verizon model. Yet there’s one enormous difference: It costs only $50, plus a $36 activation fee.

In my tests, the Verizon/H-P netbook handled all common tasks well, if not at blazing speeds. It lacks Microsoft Office, but includes the lesser Microsoft Works productivity suite. I was able to download and run common third-party programs like Firefox and iTunes. The built-in Verizon software for managing the cellular and Wi-Fi connections worked very well, and can be upgraded to a new version with added features.

The hardware has some notable downsides. The keyboard feels too flexible, and some symbols on the function keys are hard to read. The mouse buttons are awkwardly arrayed on the sides of the touch pad, not below it. And the speaker, while loud, is tinny. Also, the machine has a bunch of craplets, mostly links to H-P Web sites or to companies like eBay (EBAY) and Pandora.

Still, if you travel a lot and like using a cellular modem, the machine’s $200 price is compelling, so long as you can handle the wimpy battery and small hard disk.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Here are a few questions about computers I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

I have a PC with Windows XP, which I bought because my computer guru said to stay away from Vista. I read your column saying upgrading from XP to the new Windows 7 will be much more cumbersome than doing so from Windows Vista. So, what should I do now? Upgrade to Vista for a while so I can then move more smoothly to 7? Or wait, buy a separate Windows 7 computer in the fall, and just transfer my files and applications from the XP computer?

Putting budget considerations aside, I think the latter course would make more sense. The new machine with Windows 7 preloaded will probably give you smoother performance than one you upgraded twice to new operating systems in a matter of months. But, bear in mind that you will have to reinstall all your applications on the new Windows 7 computer, and that, depending on the terms of the applications’ licenses, you might even have to buy new copies. On the other hand, if you do the chain of upgrades, and don’t buy a new machine, you may be able to avoid this application problem, or at least much of it.

I appreciated your review of the Clickfree automatic backup drive. Does the backup it creates include the various folders and subfolders for data such as photos, or does it just create a huge single list?

The Clickfree software is primarily designed to back up, display and restore your files by their types — photos, music, text, email, spreadsheets, etc. Once it has performed a backup it lets you view and restore your files by these types. However, it will display the tree of all your folders and allow you to specify where it should search for these files. It also allows you to back up and restore entire folders, such as your My Documents folder, regardless of their contents. Detailed information, including a downloadable user manual, is available in the Support section of clickfree.com.

I am planning to buy one of the products you recently reviewed — a Western Digital My Book — and attach it directly to a port on my Internet router. Can I install antispyware and antivirus programs on the drive? If not, how will the data on this drive be protected?

Nothing is perfectly secure. The bad guys are clever, and you never say never. However, since this product isn’t an actual PC running Windows, viruses and spyware programs can’t likely run directly on it. Still, if one of your computers contains malicious software, and it can see the contents of the network drive, then the data on the drive could be endangered. I know of no way to install or run security programs on the drive. But the security software on your PC may protect the drive, if it is able to handle external drives across a network. Also, the firewall built into your network router will help. The product has some security measures built in, such as encrypting files when you use the optional feature that allows you to access the drive’s contents across the Internet.

• You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

This week I tested a solution that might have made my quest for boots a little simpler. Snipi, which became available as a free download from Snipi.com on Monday, helps you organize your online-shopping results by gathering, or “snipping,” product information from Web pages and saving the information to lists.

These lists are stored on your personalized Snipi page, where you can access them later. Snipi also can save photos and videos to lists. And it has a coordinating iPhone app that shows up-to-date versions of the lists created on the computer, so you can have them with you on the go.

The Snipi Toolbar collects and displays the user’s online research.

To do all this, you use the Snipi Toolbar, a horizontal window that pops up within your browser so you never have to navigate away from the site where you’re shopping. If you see an item you like, simply drag and drop an image of it into the toolbar, where details about the item — including its title, price and image — are automatically filled in. If the item was previously snipped by another Snipi user, a description box will be filled with whatever that person wrote or pasted in from the product page; you can fill in the box yourself, too.

Snipi has a partnership with Shopzilla Inc., so the Snipi Toolbar also has comparison shopping built in: It displays links to Web sites where your snipped product, or products like it, can be found at lower prices.

One of the big drawbacks to Snipi is that it currently works only as a browser plug-in with Mozilla’s Firefox, not Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer or Apple’s (AAPL) Safari. Snipi says it plans to introduce versions of its toolbar — though less functional ones — for IE and Safari by early to mid-June. Even so, downloading and installing a browser plug-in isn’t yet a routine thing for most people. And often, people who use plug-ins forget to keep them up-to-date.

Another downside to Snipi is that its comparison-pricing feature failed with apparel. The feature only really worked when used with “hard goods” like electronics, which are sold at retailers that participate in price-comparison networks. Yet Snipi still makes pricing suggestions for clothing and shoes, however irrelevant. For example, when I snipped a $150 Banana Republic dress, a link to $16 eye shadow sold at Sephora.com appeared in the Price Compare column. To reduce confusion, Snipi shouldn’t make such suggestions for apparel.

A handy feature built into the Snipi Toolbar lets you immediately share items via email or post them on Facebook, Twitter or Wordpress blogs. This would have been useful while I was shopping online for boots because I could have more quickly shared my finds with friends, rather than copying and pasting URLs into emails.

While browsing on BestBuy.com (BBY), I found a Sony (SNE) Cybershot DSC-W220 with 12 megapixels and a 4x zoom lens for $199. Selecting a small icon in the Firefox browser’s bottom right corner, I opened the Snipi Toolbar and created a “Digicams” list, including the Sony. Snipi suggested alternative prices for this camera, including $159 for the same thing on Amazon.com (AMZN).

I got an early start on bathing-suit shopping by browsing Web sites for J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s. As expected, the price-comparison suggestions didn’t make sense. For one $58 Victoria’s Secret bathing suit, Snipi suggested a list of alternatives, including a $170 Kohler shower door, $203 Giorgio Armani glasses and an $82 corded telephone. I assure you that the bathing suit looked nothing like any of those items.

Confusing alternatives aside, I liked using the Snipi Toolbar as a place to gather my online research. It displayed images of items neatly lined up in a row, and when I selected an item, the description appeared. Someone like my sister, who is planning a wedding, might enjoy using the Snipi Toolbar for saving photos of various locations in a list she could call “Wedding Venues.” She could then share the entire list with me in one step. Or she could go visit some of the places and bring an iPhone with the Snipi app to see her list.

I tried the iPhone app, and it was a cinch to tap My Lists to see the online research I’d gathered. Here, as on the browser toolbar, visuals make it easy to glance through many products.

The toolbar can save various lists that you name and categorize into Shop, Photos or Videos, and these can be kept private, shared with friends or made public. Public lists are seen by all other users on Snipi.com, which is also a social-networking site. I wouldn’t use it as such, because I already rely on other social-networking outlets, but some people might.

Snipi, which uses a guessing algorithm to fill in details like a product’s price, says its toolbar will improve as more people use it. If you do a lot of research or online shopping or you simply want an online tool for saving images and videos from the Web, Snipi will work well for you. Its price-comparison suggestions need some improvement, but I felt more organized after using the Snipi Toolbar for a week’s worth of browsing.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

Devotees of older smart phones, tired of iPhone hype, will be quick to note this is no innovation. Devices like Windows Mobile phones, Palm (PALM) Treos and BlackBerrys have made these abilities available for years. But, for the 37 million iPhone and iPod Touch owners, it’s potentially a major step forward, closing a hole in a hand-held computing platform that is otherwise more elegant and versatile than any other.

This new app, called Quickoffice, has some nice features. Its cut, copy and paste function is very well designed. It can save files locally on the phone. It has a built-in email function for sending files to others, and it can upload or download files to and from a PC or Mac, or to and from online storage.

But there’s a catch. While Quickoffice, which is also available on other platforms, did work OK in my tests, it has some major drawbacks that keep me from recommending it right now. The product’s maker, Quickoffice Inc., acknowledges these and is working to fix them by summer. But, especially because Quickoffice costs $19.99, a Rolls-Royce price in the iPhone’s app store, you might want to hold off on buying it until the fixes are in place.

In particular, Quickoffice can’t simply load and edit any Word or Excel file you receive as an email attachment. The company claims this is a built-in iPhone limitation, but it’s still a big problem for users. Instead, to get files into Quickoffice for editing, you have to transfer them using a Wi-Fi network from your PC or Mac, or from the iDisk online storage feature of Apple’s MobileMe Web service, which costs $99 a year.

Also, amazingly, Quickoffice shipped without any automatic typo-correcting function or spell checker. For various technical reasons, it couldn’t even use the one built into the iPhone. So, you have to do a lot of correcting of typos once the file gets onto a computer. For instance, the first words of this column, as originally created in Quickoffice, read: “I am typing these words in a full-feledged word pricessor … ” I had to clean them up in Word on my laptop.

The Quickword app on iPhone

And, while you can view a text or spreadsheet file in landscape mode, you can do only limited editing of text documents in this mode, and no editing at all of spreadsheet documents viewed in landscape.

Quickoffice for the iPhone consists of three modules. One is Quickword, the word processor. The second is Quicksheet, the spreadsheet program. These two, also separately available from the app store at $12.99 each, can handle standard Microsoft (MSFT) .doc and . xls files, but not Microsoft’s newer .docx and .xlsx formats. The third module, called Quickoffice Files, merely transfers and displays files, but doesn’t allow editing or creating them. It handles a much wider variety of file types, and is sold separately for $1.99.

Cut, copy and paste is implemented nicely. You simply double-tap to select a word or triple-tap to select a paragraph. Small dots appear at either end of the selection, allowing you to expand or contract the selected section of text. Once your selection is done, you can then cut it or copy it, or change its formatting. To cut or copy your selection, you just choose cut or copy from a popup menu. To paste, you tap once elsewhere in the document, and then select Paste from a popup menu. You can paste text copied or cut from one Quickword document into another, but not into any other app on the iPhone. (Apple will add that ability this summer.)

Quickword is the better of the two main modules. It has an impressive suite of features, including the ability to bold or italicize characters, change fonts and colors, create bullet points, and undo or redo changes. All of this formatting was retained correctly when I transferred the files to a computer, and vice versa. Quickword doesn’t have every feature of Word on a computer, but its feature set is strong.

Quicksheet has 125 functions. It also does formatting of cells well, and has undo and redo. Again, it isn’t as powerful as Excel, but its capabilities are decent. Unfortunately, unlike in the word processor, I found some problems in Quicksheet. In one simple spreadsheet I imported, it failed to properly display text that stretched across multiple cells, and failed to do a simple recalculation that worked perfectly in Excel. Also, it lacks cut, copy and paste.

Getting documents into the app is a pain. Unless you have a MobileMe account, on either Windows or Mac, you have to type a geeky numerical address into a Web browser and then choose a file from your computer using the browser page that comes up.

Quickoffice is an OK start, but it needs a lot of work.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.