They’ve been bustier than Jock McHasty in a rush at i-mate, as the PDA/smartphone vendor releases another addition to their range, the i-mate PDA-N – the company’s first GPS PDA.
Aimed at swivel-action business types and people who sit in cars all day (sorry, “road warriors”), the PDA-N positively bristles with connectivity, including built in GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
The units come with Skype pre-installed, letting users make free VoIP calls over wireless connections.
Running on Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC Edition, the PDA-N comes bundled with the full Office Mobile suite and runs on a 300MHz Samsung processor.
The front of the slim device is dominated by a 2.83″ 240×320 pixels transmissive TFT-LCD screen supporting 64k colours, with a row of four buttons and a joystick below.
Unusually, there’s no camera onboard (least not one we could see), but there’s a fair range of multimedia support onboard, with the device able to play back WAV, WMA, AMR, and MP3 music files, as well as M-JPEG/WMV video files.
Onboard memory is a bit skimpier than we would have liked – just 128MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM – but there is a SDIO/MMC expansion slot available.
According to I-mate, the PDA-N notches up a rated battery life of 5 hours in GPS mode and 8 hours playing a looped video.
The PDA is scheduled for release in April.
Specs:
Dimensions: 109.7mm(H) x 59.4mm(W) x 17.6mm(T) (same as i-mate JAM)
Weight: 126g w/ battery
Processor: Samsung SC32442X33 300Mhz
Memory: 128MB embedded Flash ROM, 64MB embedded SDRAM
Screen: 2.83″ 240×320 pixels, 64K – colors Transmissive TFT-LCD
Interface: SDIO/MMC card slot, One Audio jack (3.5), MiniUSB connector
GPS: Embedded GPS antenna,Support NMEA 0183 version 3.0 or above, WAAS-enabled, 12 parallel channel GPS receiver:
Acquisition time
Hot start: 8 seconds, typical TTFF
Warm start: 60 seconds, typical TTFF
Cold start: 120 seconds, typical TTFF
GPS Accuracy:
Position: < 15 meters, 95% typical
Velocity: 0.05 meter/sec steady state
WAAS Accuracy:
Position: < 5 meters, 95% typical
Velocity: 0.05 meter/sec steady state
Battery: Removable rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery, 1,100mAH
GPS mode: > 5 hrs
Standby time: > 200 hrs
WMV playback: 8 hrs
WMA playback: 12 hrs
Connectivity: Infrared IrDA SIR, Bluetooth v1.2, WiFi 802.11b
Four months after releasing their first iTunes-enabled mobile phone, the disappointing Motorola ROKR E1, Motorola have had another stab at creating the perfect music phone.
The biggest complaint was the laughably feeble memory on the ROKR that could only hold a maximum of 100 iTunes songs – regardless of memory capacity – and a treacle-slow song transfer rate.
In a flurry of arty waffle, Steve Lalla, vice president and general manager for mass-market products at Motorola, explained that the, “L7 is really in what we call our ‘self-expression portfolio,’ where design and style is the key premise behind the product”.
International men of mystery, jet setters, globe-trotters and drug smugglers might just be the niche group targeted by Carpoint’s world-spanning navigation system.
Called the XRoad Paris (but, thankfully, no relation to the cash-rich, time-rich airhead of the same name) the device can guide users through nation after nation in a choice of seven languages.
We assume the two chunky buttons each side of the screen are for making onscreen selections and scrolling through the map, but seeing as babelfish packed up mid-way through our attempt at a Korean translation, I guess we’ll never know.
We can’t think of any over-riding reason why anyone would need a GPS unit stuffed full with half the world’s maps, but it’s certainly a well styled model and its encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s cities might come in useful in a pub quiz at the very least.
It won’t be long before kids think that “going to the chemists for some prints” is some kid of euphemism for scoring drugs, but with the onslaught of cheap digital cameras and high quality printers, the writing’s on the wall for the print developing business.
Images can be read from a built in CD-R drive for printing, with high quality scanning afforded courtesy of a 3200 x 6400 dpi MatrixCCD scanner scanner.
Users can monitor what’s going on through a high definition (256 ppi) 2.5 inch colour LCD preview monitor, with a USB port for backing up data on to external storage devices (such as CD-R/Zip drives).
A week ahead of its scheduled launch, smartphone bigwigs i-mate have revealed details of their latest model, the JAMin.
Switching from a 416 MHz Intel processor to a 200 MHz TI processor (we know it sounds like it must be slower but they’re not directly comparable), i-mate have stuck with the JAM form factor, adding a different button layout and twice the ROM.
Also known as the HTC Prophet (and O2 XDA Neo), the phone shouldn’t stir it up in the pocket department, measuring a compact 10.8 x 5.8 x 1.8cm and weighing 150g. Memory expansion is taken care of courtesy of a SD IO slot
Several thousand rural surfers across Europe suddenly found themselves sans le Internet after European-based satellite broadband provider Aramiska unexpectedly slammed shut its operations with just five hours’ notice.
The Community Broadband Network (CBN) is organising efforts to help Aramiska customers find an alternative satellite broadband supplier, with their director, Adrian Wooster, commenting, “The Aramiska issue totally caught our members unaware, and is causing many problems for rural businesses beyond simple connectivity; the Aramiska service was also hosting many Websites and has been offering file storage capabilities for businesses.”
Looking for new sources of revenue beyond their Internet telephony service, Skype have announced a deal with Warner Music Group to flog ring tones and artist images.
“We are excited that more than 70m Skype users around the world will now have the ability to enjoy content from Warner Music artists,” said Alex Zubillaga, executive vice-president in charge of digital strategy and business development at Warner Music (that’s some job title – we wonder if he meets people saying, “Hi, I’m Alex Zubillaga, EVPICODSABD at Warners?”)
Ringtone sales have proved a surprise hit for mobile operators and content providers, coining in an astonishing $4bn in worldwide sales in 2004 – around 10 per cent of the $32.2bn worldwide music market.
For the first time in its long history, Eastman Kodak is generating more annual sales from digital imaging than from film-based photography.
But it’s not all good news though, with the company reporting that total losses could top an eye watering $1 billion, as a result of the hugely expensive restructuring demands required by a potentially risky shift to digital.
The company is still half way through the arduous task of restructuring the business for the digital world, and has already laid off some 25,000 workers.
Fortunately for Kodak, Christmas proved a highly profitable period with sales of its EasyShare Printer Docks surging 95%, and sales of kiosks to drugstores and other outlets up 23%.
Google have released version 4 of their popular toolbar for Web browsers, with groovy new features to lure more visitors to their sites.
The Bookmarks functionality has also been enhanced to allow users to create and label bookmarks that can be accessed from any computer – something noticeable missing from arch-rival Internet Explorer.
By ramping up the feature set Google is hoping to grab a larger share of Web users (and thus more advertisers) and steal a march on Yahoo and Microsoft who both offer their own toolbars.
The average laptop is stuffed full of data worth more than half a millon quid.
According to the study – taken from 1,700 quantitative interviews with general employees and IT managers – over three quarters of respondents (80 per cent) laboured under the misconception that their employer had a safe copy of all the emails on their PC.