Bluetooth – Page 9 – Digital-Lifestyles

PalmOne’s New PDAs

PalmOne has released two new handhelds in their Zire range – the Zire 32 and 72.

The Zire 31, US$149 (€125) has a faster CPU than its predecessor and runs Palm OS 5.2. The PDA has a new-style controller on the front panel – allowing better navigation through documents, but also better for control whilst playing the growing range of Java games available. This controller, coupled with the new headphone jack and the mandatory expansion slot will ensure that buyers use the machine for playing media on the move.

Palm have included Bluetooth in their new Zire 72, US$299 (€251), allowing users to use an appropriate mobile phone to send messages on the move. The 72 is a somewhat striking Yves Klein blue colour – we can’t help but get the feeling that other colours might be in the pipeline.

The 64mb 72 also features a better digital camera than its 71 predecessor, sporting 1.2m pixels, backing that up with 2x digital zoom and 320 x 240 video capture. The camera has better integration with Palm applications than has been seen before – photographs can be attached to contacts and used as backdrops within programs.

But what about an update to the T3? Surely the Tungsten T4 (and Palm OS6) can’t be that far off?

The Palm 72

The Palm 31

BenQ Launch World’s First 12” High Definition Widescreen Laptop

BenQ are pitching their new Joybook 6000 as part of their “digital hub” – and is the World’s first high definition 12.1” laptop.

The high definition screen runs at a 1280 x 600 resolution (WXGA) – we haven’t seen it yet, but it is by all accounts beautiful. We’ve been looking around and it seems to retail at about US$2640.

The Centrino notebook has the usual WiFi/Bluetooth/IrDA capabilities, so will be able to connect users to data services easily and under a variety of conditions.

Joybook Home – Middle East

New Nokia Phone Converges Too Many Features To List

Nokia have released phones with radios incorporated in them for some time — but the 7700 is somewhat different as it incorporates a service that Nokia has termed “Visual Radio”. Listeners to participating stations can interact through their phones – polls, artist information, ringtones are all displayed in 7700’s browser whilst they listen a radio show. Helsinki’s Kiss FM will be the first station to offer the interactive services.

Adding interactivity to a radio programme through a browser (rather than streaming the programme to the phone) allows Nokia to avoid rights issues and save bandwidth. To us this seems like a good stopgap, but streaming directly to the phone offers so much more functionality that it won’t be too long before someone sorts out the rights nightmare and produces a proper internet audio/video phone.

Nokia will no doubt be analysing what users do with the new interactive features from radio stations – cookies and server logs will show them which features are popular. If successful, charging for ringtones and extras from stations will be a nice revenue channel for Nokia and its radio partners.

The look of the phone could best be described as “funky” — Nokia seem to be getting further and further away from traditional mobile phone design with every new iteration of their products.

Nokia on the 7700

Kiss FM

Nokia N-Gage Games Possibly Cracked

The world of introducing convergent devices is a tricky one. Following on the heals of their combined music player/mobile phone, Nokia launched their mobile phone/music player/games machine, the N-Gage, in October and its has been a shaky start. Before its launch, lots of people were less than positive, and following it, the reviews have not been great.

Despite Nokia claiming to have shipped 400,000 units to retailers, the number of customer sales is thought to be low. This has lead to some discounting, to the point where it was available for 1 pence in the UK, if you took a particular service contract out with it.

Nokia will be following the business model for other games platforms, sell the box for a minimum margin (or try to minimise your losses), then make your money in the medium to long term on licensing games for the platform. The same theory as razors and razor blades. Clearly this model only works if you sell the games as well.

Nokia will not like the latest news. A Swedish hacking group claim that they have got around the protection system that ensures that N-Gage games only play on the N-Gage. They have showed photos of the some N-Gage games running on a Siemens SX1, it’s not clear if these are mock-ups or real.

If true, the impact is far reaching. Games written for the N-Gage will run on any phone running the Symbian operating system and according to Symbian, over 2.68 million handsets were shipped with their OS in the first half of 2003.

The damage does not stop with them only losing sales of the N-Gage hardware, but that once the games have been extracted from the N-Gage and are stored digitally unprotected, people will be able to download them – not have to buy them for between $35-$40 each.

SX1 playing N-Gage games – Screen shots

Over 1m Bluetooth Units Shipping a Week

Six years after its launch, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group has announced that they are now shipping over one million Bluetooth devices a week. They hold this up as proof that Bluetooth has now moved out of hype and into reality.

It is generally thought that laws being enacted around the World, that forbid car drivers to hold their mobile phone while driving, are providing a significant contributions to the increased in these figures, and that this will only continue.

One concern in the Bluetooth circles are the number of non-ratified devices that are being brought in to the market, with TDK estimating that as many as half of products sold in shops are made by companies that are not member of the Bluetooth SIG. The industries big worry is that these devices will not function correctly and Bluetooth generally starts to get a bad name.

Bluetooth SIG