A Blackberry , Palm Treo, or other PDA is useful for a lot more than e-mail.

**Nab a hotel room at the last minute Orbitz's mobile service lists hotels in 20 US cities that have vacancies for that every night. You can't book through the PDA, but you can call up Orbitz's phone number by pressing one button. mobile.orbitz.com

**Get Directions The download Google Maps is almost identical to what you have on your computer. Point-to-point directions are easy to follow and there's even a featurethat reveals real-time traffic info. google.com/gmm, free.

**Translate Languages Beiks is the leader in foreign-language tools for mobile devices, seeling downloadable dictionaries and phrase books for 26 languages. Some of he programs from Beiks will even pronounce words and phrases for you. beiks.com, from $8.

**Check the Weather Forecast There are dozens of ways to get the weather forecast with your PDA, but the Weather Channel's service is the quickest and easiest. it gives extended forecasts for 98,000 locations around the globe and pulls up storm systems on radar maps that look as good as they would on a computer or TV news. weather.com/mobile, free.

**Tranform from PDA to GPS To get the GPS capabilit on your PDA to work, you have to pay for a service such as TeleNav. The monthly fee may be worth it. A satellite pinpoints your location, and when you plyg in the address of where you want to go, turn-by-turn directions come from the PDA's speaker. The Biz Finder steers you to gas stations - it'll even search the cheapest option, if you like - as well as to restaurants, hotels, and attractions. telenav.com, from $10 per month.
(excerpted from an article by Michael Rose)

Site of the Day: wikipedia PDA