Today's daily electronics deals, courtesy of The Consumerist:

• Lenovo: Lenovo ThinkPad T500 15.4-inch Laptop $701 + free shipping
• Dell Home: Dell Mini 10 Netbook w/ NEW Pine Trail Intel Atom N450 CPU $249 Free Shipping
• Newegg : Samsung 2TB External Hard Drive w/ Encryption for $169 w/ Coupon EMCYNZN57 w/ Free Shipping
• Sixth Avenue : Viore 24" LCD 1080p HDTV for $243.46 w/ Coupon BONUSBUY w/ Free Shipping
• Amazon: Creative Labs Vado HD 4GB Pocket Camcorder (2nd Gen) $79.99 + free shipping
• Newegg : Olympus 12MP Digital Camera w/ 2.7” LCD for $59.99 w/ Free Shipping
• Newegg: Sony PSP Go Handheld System - Pearl White for $199.99 w/ Free Shipping

• Amazon : Call of Duty 4 Xbox 360 Game of the Year Edition for $26.99 w/ Free Shipping
• Dell : Xbox 360 Arcade Console + $50 Dell Gift Card for $199.99 w/ Free Shipping
• Amazon: Save up to 60% off Award Winning DVDs & Blu-ray Discs
• Amazon: X-Men Trilogy + X-Men Origins: Wolverine [Blu-ray] $50.99 + free shipping

Related: TV Ratings and buying tips; Computer Ratings and buying tips; DVD & Blu-ray player Ratings and buying tips; Video game console buying tips and video: "Choosing a video game system"; Pocket camcorder guide.

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and recommended, in our Ratings of retailers for computers and other major electronics (both available to subscribers). Price shouldn't be your only criterion. Be wary of lower-priced deals that seem too good to be true, and check return policies for restocking fees and other gotchas.

For general buying advice for many of the products on sale above, check out our free Buying Guides.

Here’s a few things I’ve been tweaking since the Olympics began Friday night thanks to comments from users on the Triangle avsforum:

Lip Sync was ahead and behind the video for the Opening Ceremonies. Re-booting the receivers appears to have  fixed the issue.

Re-shuffled the bit rates between HD and Universal Sports. The video is a bit soft on US, so I took 1 Mbps from it to bring the HD up to 16 Mbps to help with high detail and motion shots.

A few Time-Warner cable customers report issues with 8300 boxes rebooting every 10-15 minutes only on NBC 17. A new software download should have resolved that issue, but if your box is still rebooting, call TWC Customer Care to have the new software installed, or replace your box. A certain version of software was known to cause reboots from closed captions in the stream. Weird issue, but it was resolved and you should not still have that problem on TWC.

Found an HD encoder delay setting for audio causing a slight delay in audio. Changed it to match the Dolby encoder delay to bring lip sync dead on.

All crawls and time/temp bugs for newscasts have been converted to full HD for several weeks now. All our school closings were run in HD over all programming during the previous weekend snow events. The bugs look much sharper, and the crawls are actually legible!

The Windows Phone 7 Series "People Hub"
Photo: Microsoft

Microsoft chose to go offshore—to the 2010 Mobile World Congress trade show that opened yesterday in Barcelona—to offer its most-detailed glimpse of the new Windows Phone 7 System.

The new OS, scheduled to be on phones by "holiday 2010," looks promising. Indeed, hopes are high for the system since recent versions of the Windows Mobile OS have become so overstuffed with disparate applications, a navigation challenge.

Windows Phone 7 Series, thankfully, appears far more refined. It borrows heavily from the Microsoft's innovative Zune HD multimedia player, replacing the static icons found on current Windows Mobile phones with more dynamic widgets called "live tiles." These show real-time data, such as the latest picture from a friend’s social account, or the album cover of the song currently playing.

Phones running Windows 7 will have access to X-Box Live for playing against others on the network. The phones will also have one-button access to Bing, Microsoft's Internet search engine, which will also allow users to search for content and other data on the phone.

Core phone functions will organized around six "hubs":

• People. Provides quick social networking sites such as Facebook and Windows Live.
• Pictures. Organize your photos, both on the phone and on remote servers.
• Games. Play Xbox LIVE games and Spotlight feed.
• Music + Video. An interface nearly identical to that of Zune HD's, including the ability to share music with other people on the Zune Social network..
• Marketplace. The source for downloading applications and games.
• Office. Where you'll find Office applications.

We'll have more details on thedr new Windows Mobile 7 phones in the months ahead. In the meantime, here's a link to the Windows Mobile 7 site, which contains demos of the new OS.

For the most part, the products unveiled at Mobile World Congress are global, and less focused on the U.S. market than those I expect to see at the annual CTIA (Cellular Telephone Industries Association) show in Las Vegas in March, which has a more-domestic focus. However, MWC does offer an important first look at the cell phones and related products we'll be seeing this year. And some announcements are important to the U.S., including the Microsoft one, of course.

—Mike Gikas

If you've made a number of charitable donations in the past year, you might want to consider an online tool to help you value them for tax season.  Consumer Reports has finished testing two such tools: TurboTax ItsDeductible and H&R Block DeductionPro, both free until you file.

Which one was easier to use and estimated higher values? Check out the Consumer Reports Money Blog to find out.