AT&T and Nokia said today that they're officially putting the Nokia N75, AT&T's first 3G Nokia phone, on sale tomorrow for $199.99, with a two-year contract and $50 mail-in rebate.

To call the N75 long-awaited would be an understatement. It was first announced last September , scheduled for a release in the "fourth quarter of 2006" as the top-tier phone in Cingular's new music initiative. Sadly, though, it's been hiding in Cingular's labs ever since.

The N75 is not only the first Nokia phone on Cingular's 3G UMTS network, it's also the first 3G smart phone available in the US to use the Symbian operating system, and the first Symbian flip phone available through a major carrier. Symbian, while tremendously popular abroad, has never caught on in the US because it's closely tied to Nokia, which has had trouble getting high-end phones to US carriers. That's frustrating because literally thousands of Symbian applications are available through online stores like Handango.

The N75 is a chunky flip phone with a big, color external screen and an utterly gorgeous, bright, glossy 320-by-240 internal screen. The keys are large and easy to press, and there's a 2MP camera on the back. The phone syncs with Windows Media Player, playing both purchased and subscribed content, and also plays MP3 and AAC files in its onboard music player, through wired or wireless headphones.

Since it's also a smartphone running Symbian Series 60 version 3, the N75 has PDF and Microsoft Office readers built in, plus IM and e-mail applications, and an excellent Web browser. Other onboard applications include RealPlayer, a Flash player, and an FM radio.

As a UMTS phone, the N75 will be able to download data from the Internet at speeds up to 384 kbps/sec and won't cause the dreaded "GSM buzz" in nearby speakers, but will get much shorter battery life than older GSM phones.

AvantGo has been around for quite some time, dating back to early Palm PDA handhelds when it was nothing but an off-line Web browser. Today it has a lot more features, with a robust selection of thousands of custom "channels" to choose from. It's a nifty way to browse the Web on the go, despite some intrusive ad placement.

Available on all major smartphone platforms, AvantGo comes in versions for Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian UIQ, and Symbian S60. For this review I decided to give the new beta AvantGo for BlackBerry client a whirl. I tested it on a Sprint BlackBerry 8703e, arguably the best of the older-school BlackBerry devices. It has a 320- by 240-pixel screen and high-speed EV-DO data access, making it perfect to test out AvantGo's custom browsing features. Unfortunately, the "high speed" part never really came into play.

What makes AvantGo unique is its ability to download big gulps of content and then read it even in places when you don't have a cell-phone signal such as airplanes, subways, or department-store basements. Once you have a signal again, click the Synchronization button and AvantGo will go grab a batch of new stories from your channel list.

To download the beta, head over to m.avantgo.com from your BlackBerry's browser. Be warned, though: The installation process is a bit irritating, as it includes an application install and a multiple-question survey that won't let you skip any answers. These surveys aren't fun on a desktop browser to begin with, so imagine the joy you'll experience choosing boxes and entering answers on your BlackBerry. Fortunately, there aren't that many questions to field.

After you complete the sign-up process, start AvantGo by choosing its icon from the BlackBerry's main menu. AvantGo starts you off with six channels. When I clicked on "The New York Times" and "Latest News," I saw a list of seven stories that included the title, author, and a three- or four-line deck describing each one. I could then click on each one and read the entire story. Other options included "Business News" and "Technology News," but that was it for the choices. The Reuters channel had a lot more content to choose from, and it also lets you add additional sections from within the channel. Later I found you could do the same thing with the New York Times channel, but you had to accomplish this via the Browse Channels feature (see below).

I was less than pleased with the huge ads plastered throughout the application, such as on the channel-selection screen, on many of the channel screens, and in the stories themselves. They're much larger than the ads on most mobile WAP pages.

To add new channels, you select the Settings tab (which shows a wrench icon) at the top of the screen. This lets you browse AvantGo channels, remove others from your current list, and check out some of AvantGo's recommendations. Browsing is fun, as information is broken up into large categories, each with many choices. I added a large group of new channels, though before I could see them, I had to select Synchronize from the menu. The problem is that this task took a surprisingly long time, about eight minutes—an eternity in the mobile world, especially over EV-DO.

Besides the provided news channels, AvantGo also syncs up with your travel itineraries from airlines and gives you access to travel guides, city guides, and local weather and maps. It also has a mobile RSS reader, a nice plus. You can choose from five color themes, though for some reason you have to perform another full synchronization before you can see the changes.

Much of this sounds like what Handmark offers with Pocket Express. Pocket Express costs money ($6.95 to $9.95 per month), whereas AvantGo is free. But Handmark pulls information together in a neater, more usable format than AvantGo. AvantGo's spotty channel selection also troubled me. The application's Web site advertises thousands of channels to choose from, but that must apply to the other versions, because the BlackBerry version seemed to have only a few hundred.

You can also get much of the same content just by surfing to mobile WAP sites using the BlackBerry's built-in Web browser. Of course, the latter method is not as simple, as you have to learn all the mobile URLs for the sites you want to read, and each one has a different design (just like the real Web). AvantGo condenses all the content and puts it in the same interface. That alone has an undeniable appeal, given the rudimentary (or non-working) state of many of the WAP sites out there.

PalmSource Inc. looks to have the open-source community in its corner as it comes out swinging at established contenders for a share of the growing mobile handset market. But analysts were unclear on how PalmSource's Linux move will shake out for the operating system and for its customers, including sibling palmOne Inc.

PalmSource on Wednesday said it had acquired China MobileSoft Ltd., a developer of mobile phone software based in Nanjing, China. In addition to a variety of applications for smart phones, the company offers mLinux, a compact version of Linux for smart phones, and mFone, a software platform for less-expensive phones.

The company hopes to attract phone vendors with an established mobile applications platform, new media frameworks and, of course, its tested interface. It now can leverage the distributed support for chip sets and drivers available from the open-source community.

Customers leaning toward Linux "will get the help they need with applications and layers, and still get all the community aspects that Linux brings to bear," he said.

According to Dunphy, the company will migrate its Cobalt 6.1 APIs to the Palm OS for Linux, while continuing support for Cobalt 6.0 and Palm OS 5, or Garnet. While keeping its upper-level application frameworks proprietary, such as those for multimedia and security, the foundation work will be released under an "appropriate open-source license," he said.

Read a closer view of PalmSource's strategy for Linux handsets from the editors of LinuxDevices.com.

However, analysts weren't altogether upbeat on PalmSource's plan to use a Linux-based OS for Palm devices. The move has implications for the Palm brand, for developers and for end-users.

"As for PalmSource, it's a move they had to make. OS shipments have been declining steadily, and there has been little interest in Palm OS Cobalt," said Todd Kort, principal analyst at Gartner Inc., of Stamford, Conn.

ut a number of Cobalt-based smart phones are in the process of entering the market, David Limp, senior vice president of corporate and business development at PalmSource, told eWEEK.com. He said some of the forthcoming models will be based on Cobalt 6.0, which shipped to licensees at the end of last year.

"Porting Palm applications to Linux will take at least a year, and in the transition period, both palmOne and PalmSource are likely to experience some difficulties in the market—whether they want to continue to support the other platforms as they have before," Gartner's Kort said.

"They will still have to maintain efforts with the Garnet and Cobalt OSes, but that means juggling more balls, and it's more likely that something will be dropped."

Some analyst reports point to gains by Microsoft in the mobile market. Contributing editor Guy Kewney recently took a close look at the progress of Microsoft, Palm and Symbian in the fight over the mobile operating system. here.

In addition, PalmSource might face more difficulties using Linux than expected, Kort said. While the perception of the open-source platform is that it's a free-spirited being that can be used by anyone with the desire, he warned that that is not necessarily the case.

"The problem with Linux is that it has no master. Every vendor has their own version of Linux. It's a myth that it [Linux] runs everywhere," he said. "Given that [PalmSoft's new partner] China MobileSoft is a small company, it's going to take a lot of resources to promote that as a major flavor of Linux."

Kort also chided the software company's announcement for its affect on palmOne. "It's very bad for PalmOne because it's in the middle of the Christmas selling season, and its sister company has thrown lots of fear and uncertainty into the market."

On the other hand, analyst Carl Zetie with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. took a more positive stance on the switchover. He said the Linux kernel will allow PalmSource and its OEM customers to create high-end devices and also to find entry into the lower-end, high-volume part of the market, such as ordinary cell phones.

"It's also good news for palmOne and their relationship with PalmSource," Zetie said. "Some people have been speculating for a long time that PalmOne would abandon Palm OS and PalmSource for Linux—that would have been disastrous. Now we can stop worrying about that."

Kort agreed that the new move means PalmSource has the potential to hit it big in the wider mobile phone sector.