More Personal Digital Assistants hit stores
More Personal Digital Assistants hit stores
Zatni Arbi, The Jakarta Post, Columnist
If you spend a couple of hours window-shopping in Dusit Mangga
Dua and the upper floors of Mal Mangga Dua, you will notice that
more and more stores there are showcasing Personal Digital
Assistants (PDAs).
Slimmer, more graceful and somewhat more affordable, they
still come in two main flavors: PocketPC and Palm. Making the
choice between the two still difficult, as Palm still holds
strong in the competition.
Talking about PDAs, one thing that we have been eagerly
waiting for is the full integration of a cellphone into these
gadgets. A number of products have been creeping into the
marketplace. Among the more interesting ones, for example, is PC-
Ephone from CyberBank (www.pc-ephone.co.kr/english/).
What is special about a PC-Ephone? Unlike Palm's 160 x 160
resolution, this Intel StrongARM-based PDA has a true VGA (640 x
480) resolution and is capable of displaying up to 256 different
colors.
CyberBank claims that this high quality display screen is the
first to become available on a PDA. It is not easy to achieve
this level of display resolution not only because of the size but
also because the screen is touch-sensitive. It comes with 32 MB
of RAM.
Unfortunately, so far CyberBank makes its products available
for the CDMA network only. It can send and receive SMS, uses IE
4.0 as its Web browser and comes with DioPen handwriting
recognition, Pocket Word, a Korean-English dictionary and several
other goodies.
Research in Motion (www.researchinmotion.com), which we have
known for its BlackBerry two-way pager that has a built-in-
although minuscule-keyboard, has also signed an agreement with
Motorola and Nextel (in the U.S.) to offer a new breed of
handheld device that can also make voice calls.
In Canada, just last week, RIM also signed an agreement with
Rogers AT&T Wireless, enabling its BlackBerry users to use the
GSM/GPRS services that the latter operates. RIM's cooperation
with mm02 also expands its market to several European countries.
In the meantime, HandSpring (www.handspring.com), one of the
defenders and at the same time the strongest competitor of Palm
in its own turf, is also aggressively pushing its Treo
Communicator, a mobile phone cum a handheld computer complete
with Web access and text messaging facilities.
In fact, at the end of last month, the company officially
announced the availability of its Treo 180 and 180g in Singapore,
which customers can buy for S$960. Service will be provided by
SingTel.
The Treo 180 has a built-in keyboard, a very tiny one. If you
have mastered the art of Graffiti, you can choose Treo 180g,
which comes with the Graffiti handwriting recognition software.
Later this year, HandSpring will introduce the color version of
its Treo Communicator, the Treo 270. All of them come with 16 MB
of RAM.
Samsung (www.samsung.com), a leader in Korean electronics, has
also been very well recognized for its great handphones and other
digital gears. Its NEXiO S150, which is actually a combination of
a PDA, a PC and a cellphone, was announced at the International
Consumer Electronics Show event in Las Vegas early last month.
With a screen that is also capable of giving us the VGA
resolution (800 x 480), this PDA even has a VGA port so we can
connect it to a projector and we can give a presentation without
having to tote a notebook into the boardroom.
And do you want to know the latest buzz in PDA?
On February 1, 2002, Toshiba gave a demonstration of a PDA
that ran on a fuel cell. So we now have more alternative source
of power, including a battery, a hand-crank recharger, and a fuel
cell. It seems that the days when you have to carry a cellphone,
a calculator, an organizer, a Franklin dictionary, a PDA and a
spare battery are finally going to end soon. Still, we cannot
tell the PDAs to really sing and do the tap dance for us yet.