New devices to consumer digital media
Ramping up a ton of pressure on the Palm’s new Foleo is VIA’s new NanoBook Ultra Mobile Device, an ultraportable laptop with a claimed retail price hovering around the ‘dead cheap’ price band at just $600.
Sure, the thing looks like it grew from an ugly acorn, rose to the top of the ugly tree and then hit just about every ugly branch on the way down before landing in a pile of ugly dung, but the specs sure look pretty for such a bargain basement device.
(more…)
Feeling the squeeze from a rampant smart-phone market and faced with the shadow of the iPhone looming large, Palm has announced that it is selling a quarter of the company as as part of a cunning reorganisation plan.
The 25% share has been bought by Silicon Valley private equity firm Elevation Partners for about $325 million, with the terms of the transaction seeing about $940 million in dividends dished out to Palm shareholders.
(more…)
Slavering Mac fanboys anxiously counting the minutes until they can caress, fondle, drool and dribble all over their very own iPhone may be in for a very long wait.
Industry analysts are predicting that Apple won’t be able to keep up with demand and so will restrict sales of their shiny new iPhones until 2008.
A recent Merrill Lynch report sets the scene for much i-wailing and i-sobbing amongst the Apple cognoscenti with just 4 million iPhones rolling off the production line this year, with only a comparatively modest 12 million units coming out in 2008.
(more…)
Touted as a “business and personal journal for the Palm OS or Pocket PC,” DayNotez is a powerful companion to your handheld’s built in diary application.
Tailored for documenting and organising daily notes, thoughts and memos, the program lets you add multiple entries every day and add photos and voice memos to your text notes, with the option to synchronise the content with your desktop.
(more…)
Sky has made the decision to scrap the subscription charge for the Sky+ PVR service starting 1 July 2007.
Since its inception in 2001, Sky has been charging users of the Sky+ service £10 per month to keep using it, this includes receiving the EPG information, required to drive the service.
(more…)
The last time we went away on a business trip, we had to set off with a bag almost overflowing with adapters, lugging no less than five of the ruddy things for our travelling tech kit of a Palm Treo, Ricoh GR, Nikon D80, Vaio lappie and DVD burner.
(more…)
We spotted an interesting ditty about Microsoft Research getting excited about an array of speakers that they hope will irradicate the need for headphone wearing.
(more…)
In part two we looked at call quality and some of the functions of the Treo 750v, today we finish with software, connectivity and our conclusion.
Software
In line with its business aspirations, the 750v comes with mobile versions of Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Picsel PDF Viewer and Windows Media Player. Unfortunately, the Treo’s d-pad wasn’t fully integrated with some of these apps, so the trusty stylus had to be launched out of its silo from time to time.
(more…)
In part one we looked at the shell of the phone, now we look at how to use it.
Using the phone
Firing up the Treo with a push on the red ‘end call’ button brings up a smartly redesigned Today screen with two input fields; one for typing in a name or number from your address book and the other for directly searching Google. A nice touch.
We love playing with the latest widget-packed smartphones, but after a brief and ultimately rather unpleasant sojourn into the world of Windows Mobile, we ran screaming back to our Palm Treo 650, despite its age.
Over two years after the release of the wildly successful Treo 650, Palm released the Treo 750v, a Windows version of their popular smartphone and it’s now available contract-free in the UK.
Would it be enough to tempt us to jump back to the world of Windows?
(more…)