Palm’s PDA sales may be falling on lean times, but their hugely successful Treo650 smartphone continues to do brisk business, supported by an army of passionate developers producing a vast range of applications.
TreoAlarm is a neat program designed to replace the basic alarm functionality that ships with a Treo, letting users configure up to eight different alarm schedules, with the ability to set different sounds depending on the time and/or day (so maybe you’d select a particularly stubborn alarm for a Monday morning and something more relaxing for a hangover-laden Sunday morning).
Any way you like to be woken up from your slumbers, this application can offer it (within reason!), with options to set how long the alarm tone sounds, whether the phone should vibrate or not, how many times it should repeat, how long the gap should be between each repeat, and the minimum starting volume.
What’s the weather, Kenneth?
Although the smartypants alarm gizmos are pretty impressive, TreoAlarm’s got a better trick up its sleeve.
Minutes before its due to wake you up from your sheep-counting, the Treo can wirelessly download an up-to-date weather report and five day weather forecast, letting you know whether it’s worth getting out of bed or not.
The information is presented on TreoAlarm’s clear and simple interface, with weather icons displaying sunny, cloudy, rainy or stormy conditions. Underneath a text box offers more detailed weather information.
The program comes with some other useful tricks, including the option to turn the phone on and off at predetermined times to save battery life (and avoid early morning calls from your boss).
With full support for the 5-way directional control on the Treo, the program makes a practical and easy-to-use travel/home alarm clock and weather forecaster and represents excellent value for $18.50 (£11, E15).
Our verdict: 90% – Must-have Treo application!
With the under-whelming Pocket Outlook PIM that comes bundled with Windows Mobile, it’s not surprising that third party developers have been busy serving up their own offerings for users seeking more power.
Predictably, the calendar application served up a feast of different views, including Today, Hourly Day, Hourly Week, Week, Agenda, Month, and Year, and you can jump from view to view via a drop down menu.
Although we didn’t find Agenda Fusion’s Contacts interface to be a vast improvement over Pocket Outlook, it does have a few extras, including a preview pane at the top and the ability to attach a mugshot to any specific contact.
We’ve never been particularly impressed with the way Pocket PCs handle notes – the Palm OS does it much better, in our opinion.
We were pleased to see that Agenda Fusion had included an integrated project management tool, which lets you organise contacts, tasks, notes, appointments and documents into Projects with the ability to track time and create reports.
All-weather, lantern-jaw outdoor types and motorbike fiends should warm to the “ruggedized” version of the Pocket Loox N520 which has just been announced by the German based Andres-Industries.
Motored by an Intel XScale PXA270 312 MHz CPU, the LOOX offers integrated wireless LAN 802.11g Wi-Fi, SD/MMC slot (with support for SDIO) and a large, 240×320 pixels 3.5″ screen supported by 64Mb RAM and 128Mb flash memory
WorldMate 2006 Professional Edition v4.1
Travellers can get real-time information about their flights – including the inevitable delays, gate and terminal information – with global forecasts letting them know whether to pack the Goretex or the suntan lotion.
Essentially the same program minus the live flight and subscription services, this is an essential Pocket PC installation even for occasional travellers, with the updating weather and currency converters almost worth the price alone.
These minor quibbles aside, both programs offer a compelling suite of utilities for travel and come highly recommended for perambulating Pocket PC users.
Handango has released their annual “Handango Yardstick”, a global snapshot of the state of the mobile content industry in 2005.
New additions included the Motorola RAZR V3, the BlackBerry 7100 Series and the BlackBerry 7250/7290 (the first BlackBerry smartphone to ever make the top ten).
The top ten Windows Mobile Pocket PC applications were:
It’s been spluttering and wheezing in its sick bed for what seems like an eternity, but the latest figures from research firm IDC confirm that the prognosis isn’t good for the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
Although a bright Christmas period saw sales grow 37.6% over Q3, the trend remains resolutely downward, with the declining market segment driving PDAs into a market niche.
But don’t go ordering flowers for the PDA funeral quite yet, as IDC research analyst Ramon Llamas insists that it’s not all over for the PDA market, with plenty of smaller vendors remaining committed to a more niche PDA market.
With Palm winding down its PDA business and concentrating on its Treo smartphone range, Nelson argues that Palm will have difficulty competing against deep-pocketed rivals like Dell and HP who are currently ploughing big R&D budgets into similar products.
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.
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.
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.
Battery: Removable rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery, 1,100mAH
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
After many years of trotting around town with pockets stuffed full of a Palm PDA and a mobile phone, we decide that an all-in-one PDA/smartphone combo would be the best way to reduce our ostentatious trouser bulge.
The left hand side sports the camera button, volume control and voice memo switch, none of which are particularly well placed (it’s all too easy to fire off the voice memo/camera switched when turning the handset on).
Performance
Out just in time for overgrown boys to stick it on their Santa wish list, Mio Technology have announced their new Mio A201 integrated GPS model.
Mio are promoting the device as a ‘go anywhere’ portable sat-nav device which can be used for drivers, mountain bikes or walkers ambling through the countryside.
There’s the usual Outlook synchronisation options available, and we rather liked the new Compass Mode designed for navigating off road on foot or on a bicycle.