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.