04:58 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Linksys offers welcome news to Pocket PC owners: the WCF54G Wireless Compact Flash Card, as the name implies, brings 54 Mbps 802.11g performance to Pocket PC PDAs and smartphones.

The WCF54G is compatible with Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2002 or later. In addition to supporting 802.11g, the card is also backward-compatible with the 11 Mbps 802.11b standard.

According to Linksys, the card roams seamlessly among multiple 802.11g/b wireless network access points or wireless routers, it also operates in ad hoc mode (without an access point) to download data from wireless PCs without a cradle or network connection, and can share data directly with other wireless PDAs.

The card will be available for an estimated street price of US $99.

02:28 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

We're almost stifling a yawn this time around, but there is another interview featured in ZDNET UK with palmOne president Ed Colligan where he talks about the potential future of his company.

Colligan's key points:
- Treo 650 rolls out in the US, in Asia and Europe early next year
- Treo alone makes 50% of palmOne's revenues
- estimated y-y growth for Treo is 36%
- biggest Treo rival in Asia: Samsung (not Sony or Nokia)
- HP's wireless PDAs no true competitors because they're "big devices"
- there are tradeoffs to be made when designing a smartphone
- Palm OS alternatives possible in future; would be communicated early
- written $40m-commitment with PalmSource expires in 2006; no plans for extending commitment
- China market is supposedly working well (despite rumors that P1 had quit China)

Here is one bit of the interview I found quite amusing. To the question whether palmOne is lagging on the technology curve, Colligan replies:

I probably would have accepted that a year ago. I think the category defining products in this space are at PalmOne. You read any review of any smartphone and the Treo 650 wins. So I don't accept that premise.

Well. I don't recall anyone questioning palmOne's leadership one year ago. Do you?

09:57 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

"International wireless solutions manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) believes the days of disconnected PDAs are gone" is how an article in today's ZDNet UK begins.

According to RIM Asia-Pacific vice-president Patrick Spence,

"Disconnected PDAs were great in the past but today, people's information is changing too rapidly for that type of model and customers want to synchronise their PDAs with their PCs fast."

This statement is not suprising in light of RIM's announcement from last month of the 7270 BlackBerry, the first Blackberry to support VoIP and 802.11b WiFi. The device is due to go on sale in early 2005, with selected customers testing it already.

02:42 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Sunrise

Laurens decided to abandon the standalone Sunrise Viewer for Palm OS platforms. Here he explains why (taken from his blog):

The main reason is that I seriously doubt whether PalmOS will survive in the long term. At any rate, the news of late has not been favourable: PalmOS's dwindling market share, Sony exiting the US and European markets, PalmOne investigating the use of Linux and WinCE in their products, no OS6 devices on the horizon. Hopefully my assessment will turn out to be wrong, but I simply cannot afford to spend time, energy and money into marketing, supporting and maintaining a product for a platform with such an uncertain future.

I'm pouring all my energy into the Windows CE version of the viewer. I expect to release the public beta in February. I'm also investigating the feasibility of creating versions for SymbianOS and RIM Blackberry. These are attractive platforms from a marketing standpoint as they are both seeing significant growth.

Note that his decision does not affect the Sunrise desktop convertor, at least for now. Sunrise 0.4 is still due for release next month.

02:25 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Free PPC-based Plucker document viewer Vade Mecum V0.6 alpha has been released. New in this version: support for composite images; 16 bit images no longer turns up black; images that are too wide to fit in the reader are resized; all images, except those used as links, are clickable and opened in a new image viewer, which allows you to scroll and zoom the image; a few minor changes to the search dialog and small bug fixes.

10:02 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Utimaco Safeware has launched SafeGuard PDA 3.0, allowing every Pocket PC user to encrypt (with AES encryption) not only specific files and directories, but also the internal Personal Information Management (PIM) databases, in the same transparent manner.

As a result, your e-mails, SMS, tasks, dates and contact data can no longer be displayed without the correct authorization. Even after a hard reset the PDA's security settings remain active giving only authorized users access to the data.

There are two variants, intended for private customers and companies. The enterprise edition also allows companies to block Bluetooth, WLAN, infrared interfaces and telephones on staff PDAs, control ActiveSync connections and use Active Directory to distribute security guidelines.

You can download this pdf for more information.

09:27 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

"[A] newly obtained document provides incontrovertible evidence that the company has been experimenting with wireless iPods for nearly two years," reads an interesting headline at AppleInsider today.

Somehow the Apple news site was able to get hold of a patent application. It begins with:

"One aspect of the media player system pertains to a docking station that allows a media player to communicate with other media devices. Another aspect of the media player system pertains to a wireless media player system that includes a hand held media player capable of transmitting information over a wireless connection and one or more media devices capable of receiving information over the wireless connection. Another aspect of the media player system pertains to a method of wirelessly connecting the hand held media player to another device. The method includes selecting a media item on the hand held media player; selecting one or more remote recipients on the hand held media player; and transmitting the media item locally to the hand held media player, and wirelessly to the selected remote recipients."

I only wonder what is taking Apple so long to implement WiFi. Two years is an insanely long time.

09:21 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The Independent was able to chat with palmOne chief Ed Colligan, uncovering some more interesting information on what we might expect from palmOne in future.

Read closely the three following quotes from the article (I marked the important parts in bold):

These changes [enhancements of the Treo 650], Mr Colligan believes, will help PalmOne to compete with manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson and Nokia, as well as persuading existing Palm users to switch to a smart phone.

"The PDA market has been flat to declining," he says. "But I look at the mobile computing and communications business and see that growing rapidly. We are cannibalising ourselves. If PDA sales are shrinking, it is because we have a smart phone business."

The low-end market [of PDAs] is one where Mr Colligan believes he can make money - and where the competition struggle.

Mark my words: There won't be any high-end PDA from palmOne anymore. Not today. And not in a year. Colligan CLEARLY says so himself. He says he wants his (btw shrinking) customer base turn towards smartphones. He says there cannot be place for both, PDAs and smartphones, and without doubt he is in favor of smartphones. And lastly, to avoid spreading rumors that palmOne is completely abandoning the PDA market he mentions that the low-end sector is still of his interest.

So only a shift in strategy?

I suspect there is more what Colligan is not telling us. Notice that palmOne has had some serious distribution problems. In Europe, you'll hardly find anyone on the streets with a Treo in his hand. Colligan says there was a problem of over-supply; but he fails to explain why his only European partner is UK Orange so far, and what he could do to win other important alliances with European phone network companies. This just doesn't sound right. And if palmOne is really focusing on, I quote, "mobile computing and communications", why then did they decide to release a Tungsten T5 without WiFi?