Wireless Archive

Palm has revolutionized the PDA industry. In 1996, it released the Pilot and in less than ten years, sold 38 million devices outfitted with Palm OS. Read about the development of the Pilot (and the ill-fated Casio Zoomer and Graffiti for Newton) here.

Geeks.com were very generous to send us in one of Sony Ericsson's best sellers: the very popular K700i. We took it for a quick spin and here is our mini-review.

Mobile browser-maker Access announced Friday that it will acquire Palm OS developer PalmSource in an all-cash transaction for approximately $324 million. The acquisition adds operating system platform expertise and Linux development resources to Access's existing "content delivery and Internet access software" for mobile devices, the companies said.

"Okay, I’ve had an opinion change I’d like to announce. I’m betting that the future of mobility will be Linux, and not Symbian, Windows or anything else. This is quite a change from my previous pro-Symbian stances, but I’ve been sort of leaning this way for a while - or rather, leaning away from Symbian as it fails to live up to its potential - and now I’ve finally come to a religious change of faith when it comes to mobile OSes."

Entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins has left his palm prints all over the high-tech industry. After selling off two high-profile companies, the creator of the PalmPilot handheld computer and the Treo smart phone now works as chief technology officer at PalmOne Inc., the corporation that now churns out both those products. BizJournals interviews him.

A senior Palm executive says his company could benefit from building a mobile computing device that runs on the Windows operating system made by once-bitter rival Microsoft but he is stopping short of confirming the maker will do so.

Lately, rumours had been popping up that Palm's new Treo 670 would be running Windows Mobile 5 --however, no hard evidence confirming these rumours ever appeared. Until now. This is a major blow to PalmSource. More pictures here. Note that this does not mean the device will ship with Windows Mobile 5 --it just means it can run it.

You thought you'd seen it all, but no. Here's the MTV phone: the Motorola e398 ("as seen on MTV" says the sticker on the box). This is a GSM music and video playback phone that was originally targetted at the T-Mobile lineup in Europe but is now sold in the US through Geeks.com. We take a quick look of what to expect of this good-looking device.

The global market for smart mobile devices continued its rise in Q2 2005 according to estimates released by research firm Canalys. Nokia once again saw its smart phone shipments increase at more than twice the average market rate. Palm still leads the handheld segment, with 31% market share, but its handheld shipments declined 32% year on year, resulting in a 1% unit decline overall. Handheld shipments fell in most regions, with North America down by 36%, while Latin America and Asia Pacific fell 12% and 21% respectively.

There's been a lot of talk lately about how phones with mp3 functionality will inevitably take over the mp3 player market. Consolidation seems to be the word. The folks at Geeks.com sent us the US edition of the (unlocked) Nokia 3300 mp3 phone -- one of the first of its kind -- and we put it to test.

One of the new requirements of WM5 was that it now had to be installed in the flash ROM instead of the main RAM (on WM5 there is only "program" memory and not "data" memory shared anymore). Microsoft's Mike Calligaro blogged as to why this change can save lots of battery life.

Aeronix used Linux to build a $99 instant messenger appliance aimed at kids. Naturally, hackers soon took an interest in expanding the device's functionality. The Zipit includes an 802.11b/g WiFi radio, 16-color greyscale LCD with QVGA (320x240) resolution, and a thumb keyboard with rubber buttons. It's based on a 90MHz ARM720T-based Cirrus embedded processor, running a 2.4.21 Linux kernel. This detailed device profile of Aeronix's Zipit showcases several Zipit hacks, and offers device vendors advice on how to sell more units.

There was a lot of buzz when Sharp released its first Zaurus Linux-based PDA a few years ago. Today the new Zaurus models only sell through selected channels in the US, but apparently you can get the most successful Linux-Zaurus model, the SL-5500, for real cheap (Geeks.com sell it for just $140). So how does the SL-5500 compares to other similarly priced PDAs today? Find out at TuxTops.

Consumers will soon be able to recognize Web sites specially designed for use by mobile phones by the new .mobi suffix, which will be introduced alongside the popular .com and other top-level domain names. Update: Opinion of a mobile phone web browser engineer on this (& ex-Be kernel engineer).