When freshmen at the College of Mount St. Joseph arrive on campus this fall, they'll be given a new handheld PC Pro to surf the Web and check their email, as well as do more scholarly tasks like take notes and write papers.

Officials at the small, Roman Catholic college in Cincinnati chose the handheld devices -- which are slightly smaller and lighter than laptops -- as an alternative to computer labs. Building more labs, they determined, would be costly and gobble up precious classroom space.

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