I've had my T-Mobile MDA (aka MDA Vario) for a few months now, and as I told Sascha, I like it mostly as a data device.  For me the phone functions run a close second, I use the phone for voice about 35 percent of the time. 

Today T-Mobile released an update for the MDA, which is now up to version 2.26.10.2.  The new version adds a few tweaks, features and most importantly updates the GSM radio in the MDA.  Hopefully I will drop less calls now.

One nice feature is the fact that the built-in programs take much less room: before I flashed my MDA I had less than 8MB available in storage due to program bloat.  Now I have over 35MB free. 

Want a taste of Helio, the new cell-phone carrier? They've got a neat deal running - they've eliminated contracts and early termination fees for MySpace users, which basically means everybody, because it's free to sign up for MySpace.

You do have to buy the phone, which will set you back $275 for the Helio model I recommend (the Hero), but if you don't like it, you can always re-sell it on eBay. Killing off the shackles of contracts and those dire termination fees is exactly the kind of fresh thinking I was looking for from Helio, and it will probably attract a lot of people to their service. It's hard to try something new if you have to commit to it for two years. It's easy if you're going month-to-month, so bravo, Helio.

If you want to breathe in some Helio with no hangover, click here.

Our beloved intern, Errol Pierre-Louis, will be with us for only a couple more weeks; he insists on going back to college for his senior year, though we've tried to convince him he'd be better off staying here and working for us for no money. Ah, youth. At any rate, he decided to pore over some historical and recent Gearlog entries and pick out the ones he thought were the oddest, dumbest, and most far-fetched: No easy task, I assure you. Here they are, in no particular order. Thanks, Errol!--CM

A Yo-Yo For Clumsies

This isn't so much a dumb gadget as it is a gadget for dummies too lazy to figure out how to work a real yo-yo. A.K.A. me. The Power Brain XP's smart switch makes your yo-yo automatic.  It's sort of like learning to ride a bike with someone else working the pedals and holding it steady for you.

Twitching Robot Tree
I've seen "Evil Dead" too many times to NOT be creeped out by a tree that lurches toward anyone that walks by. The Breeze is a robotic tree that waves its individual branches in eerie, jerky movements.  I'd never buy one, but feel free to get it for your kids. It'll take their minds off the boogeymen under the bed.

Microscopic Earphones

Students in China were using these microscopic earphones for hi-tech cheating. The problem was that the earphones pierced through eardrums or exploded and blew bloody holes in users' abdomens.  Know what, give me an "F." I'd rather keep my hearing and abdomen intact, thank you very much.

Wal-Mart Tries To Be MySpace and Friendster

The Hub is Wal-Marts' own social networking site for kids and teens… that doesn't let you send e-mails or communicate with other users in any way, and screens all content, then reports everything you do to your parents. Somewhere there's a high-school kid wearing rainbow suspenders over a Christmas sweater tucked into his high-water slacks with an Alfalfa haircut looking at the Wal-mart Hub Web site and saying, "Man, that's lame."

TP and Tunes for Your Bunghole

This post is about toilet-paper word puzzles and a music-playing toilet-tissue dispenser… Yep, no punchline needed.

The SpyPhone: Keep Sneaky Tabs on Friends and Loved Ones

I like this company's "you can use our products for shifty purposes and we're proud of it" attitude, but the Spyphone requires two things to work: A) a person warped enough to think nothing of spending $1,832 to eavesdrop on conversations B) a person willing to accept the phone from person A and use it to replace they're main cell phone. If your victim's that dumb, couldn't you just have easily duped them with a pair of novelty glasses and a fake moustache?

The Neck Fan: Thank You, Kmart

It's been over two months since Gearlog posted about this neck/ventilation accessory, and the makers of the iFan haven't been sued over their blatant iPod design rip off so far, that we know of.  Jeremy thought it was dumb because, well, there's just not that many sweaty necks to need one.  I think it's one of those functional fashion atrocities, the sort of thing you'd find in the fanny pack and sneaker-phone aisle of your nearest department store.

Got the Time? Sure, on my Digital Clock T-Shirt

Ironic t-shirt logos are bad enough. Now THIS? Not only is a clock t-shirt you'd have to take off to actually look at the time pretty useless, but this shirt would be really annoying for girls to wear.  Last thing you want to do is give skeevy guys an excuse to stare: "What? I was just checking the time. For every second of the last 30 minutes..."

That's ADMIRAL Geek To You

How do you get over a failed relationship and $170,000 in credit card debt? Turn your apartment into the Starship Enterprise! Why fight tears when you could be pretending to fight the Borg instead.

Hum Along to Your Favorite Songs

This post is less Gearlog than it is Penthouse Forum: the OhMiBod is an iPod-compatible personal vibrator. My journalistic integrity prevents me from resorting to cheesy puns loaded with distasteful sexual innuendo, so I'll let the makers of the OhMiBod do it for me: "Listening to your favorite sexy music and actually feeling the corresponding vibes quickly transports you to a place where music, mind and body truly 'come' together."

I've been pretty harsh on Helio recently. My most recent description of their Kickflip phone launch as "embarrassing" garnered me a call from Helio founder Sky Dayton, who wanted to set the record straight about what his shiny new cell-phone carrier intended to do. After talking to him, I thought I'd list up what Helio's been getting right - and a few things that their competitors would do well to copy.

5. The Hero is a solid piece of kit. Helio has two phones; I called the Kickflip's launch "embarrassing" because when it first came out, it was hideously buggy. (Helio says they've fixed the bugs on new phones.) The Hero (at left), on the other hand, has good sound quality, a sharp screen and a 2-megapixel camera that works. It's a good-looking, powerful phone, and one I've recommended since it first came out.

4. Their marketing team is terrific. Their TV commercials are fun, and marketing through hipster events and MySpace is a good tactic if you're trying to reach a fashion-oriented, 18-25 crowd. Their "trade-up" plan of giving you discounts for sending in your non-Helio phone is a fun way of attracting people and defraying the high cost of their handsets.

3. They're in for the long haul. Dayton et al are hitting the learning curve of being in the wireless industry, and it's steep. But SK Telecom and Earthlink are committed. They have the time and the money to learn from early mistakes, and to evolve. Dayton has strong ideas about user-generated content that I'd like to see develop into genuinely new features for the wireless industry.

2. The user interface is gorgeous. It was designed by the same guys who did the Sidekick user interface, and it's both beautiful and relatively easy to use. It's probably the best feature-phone interface on the market right now.

1. All-in plans are a great idea. Helio's billing system is their best feature, a marvel of simplicity, and I'm surprised other carriers aren't rushing to copy it. With most carriers, your bill is a patchwork of added fees; Helio bundles together unlimited messaging and unlimited data with their minutes, at a comprehensible price.

As always, I'm looking to see what's next from Helio. Their Apple-esque levels of secrecy can be a bit frustrating, but if they build on their strengths, they could be a unique option for wireless consumers.

Franklin Electronic Publishers has been mighty busy lately. Just a few weeks ago, we reviewed the Franklin USB Dictionary & Thesaurus. But I suppose Franklin decided that MP3s and a dictionary go together like peas and carrots.

Today, the company announced the Merriam-Webster Dictionary & MP3 Player (MWD-480), just in time for back to school. The unit includes "over 274,000 definitions and a built-in audio player and features Phonetic Spell Correction, Confusables function that distinguishes commonly confused words, Crossword Puzzle Solver, and five Games and a local/world clock." It measures 2.83" x 4.13" x 0.72" and weighs 2.33 ounces. 

In addition, the MWD-480 also includes a memory expansion slot for SD cards and a USB cable to transfer songs, audiobooks or podcasts from a PC up to 119 MB.

The Franklin Merriam-Webster Dictionary & MP3 Player sells for $80 at Office Max and Franklin.com. Requires 2 AAA batteries.

The company doesn't say if it includes earbuds though, and what audio formats are supported. C'mon folks, this is important stuff!

Update: Listen to Dan defend his position on Gearlog Radio.

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced last May that he was enforcing a total ban on cell phones for students in city public schools, I knew it was a dumb idea and said so here on Gearlog. But after talking to a friend of mine, Tim Johnson, I decided to lay off the rhetoric. Tim is Chair of the Chancellor's Parent Advisory Council and knows the players in the city pretty well; he told me not to worry, that there was a pretty big outcry, and that he was sure some sort of compromise would be worked out. That was three months and many frustrating meetings ago. Now Tim and the Council are suing the city to overturn the ban.

An outright ban just doesn't make sense. Of course, no one wants kids talking on phones or text messaging during classes. Then again, we don't want kids passing notes or drawing cartoons in class either, but we still let them carry pencils. (By the way, pencils can be quite dangerous when wielded in anger.) There are plenty of clever workarounds, from installing lockboxes for students to "check" their phones during the day to coating classrooms with paint that blocks cell phone signals. That's all great. But really, every cell phone has an Off button.

This is a fundamental safety issue, which every parent I know understands, whether they live in a big city or small suburb. Kids know that if they take calls during class, teachers will take the phones away. This is about setting reasonable limits. (After all, if we don't start now, when our kids get older they'll be taking calls in restaurants and text messaging while driving. And we don't want that, do we?)

I'm surprised some hip, youth-focused MVNO like Amp'd or Helio hasn't come out and publicly sided with kids (and their credit-card-wielding parents), perhaps by posting an indignant open letter to the mayor, explaining how cell phones are primarily communication and safety devices, not contraband. Not only would they pick up a ton of press, but they'd get a slew of new subscribers.

It's been a while since the mayor has had to worry about how his kids got home from school, but let me share how it works with my family. My stepson Emmet  is 12 years old, and he has been riding the city bus to school for the last year. He doesn't leave the house without his cell; we even put a Post-It on the front door to remind him. Emmet calls when school lets out. If traffic is backed up at the Holland Tunnel and making him late, he calls. When he is home safe in the apartment, he calls again. Why would anyone want to prevent that?

Dan Costa is a senior editor at PC Magazine; check back every Thursday for his take on the world of consumer electronics.

I agree wholeheartedly with the guys at Engadget: the fax machine must die. Preferably now. Please. I really, really don't understand why some people still insist on documents being faxed to them. It's not just about signatures, which is at least somewhat comprehensible (though why can't I paste a TIFF of my signature onto a PDF file and send that through e-mail?) I had to deal with a medical insurance debacle recently where the parties involved insisted I print out Web pages and fax them. No additions, no annotations, just print the Web pages and fax them to the appropriate numbers. Why, for the love of ... why?

Meanwhile, computers have had fax modems in them since about 1988, but there are only three people in America who actually know how to use them, and they all work on the Software team here at PC Magazine. The fax modem is the blinking 12:00 of the geek world. It could, in theory, be useful if anyone had any clue how to set up and configure one, and get it working, without crashing Windows.

I guess I could go with eFax type services, but of course, they don't deal with the signature issue - the idiotic ongoing requirement that you send back all sorts of documents freshly signed "by hand" in blue ink, as if that's any harder to forge than an e-mail. Is anyone out there a lawyer who can explain the basis behind why some unintelligible scrawl which can be easily forged by my wife, is more legally binding than an e-mail header which cannot?

Meanwhile, I think I'm going to get in the new Sharp BroadbandFax and see if it can help assassinate our fax machines. If I'm reading the press release right, the BroadbandFax, which looks and acts like a fax machine, also works as a two-way fax-to-email gateway, so you can receive faxes into e-mail and send faxes from e-mail without using subscription services. And it's affordable like a normal fax machine at $159.

How can I eliminate the horror of the fax from my life? Commenters, have at it.

(Thanks, Ryan at Engadget)