No relation to the fabulous football team known as the Bluebirds, the Korean electronics company Blue Bird have announced their shiny new BM-300 T-DMB Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
A slim and sleek affair, the PDA is kitted out in an all-black finish with a red strip running around the traditional 5-way D-controller.
Running on Windows Mobile 5.0, the big news for this PDA is its support for T-DMB – that’s Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting donchaknow – which lets perambulating punters tune into digital TV when they’re out and about.
Although the 2.8 inch touchscreen TFT-LCD (QVGA) display looks like a bit of a whopper, it can only support a miserly 240 x 320 pixel resolution -a bit of a disappointment for a PDA and hardly likely to enhance the TV watching experience,
Looking inside the gubbins of the unit, we can see that the BM-330 is powered by a nippy Intel Bulverde CPU, purring along at 520 MHz with 64MB RAM and 128MB ROM onboard memory.
Memory can be further expanded via an SD SDIO card slot.
Although the lack of a built in phone has seriously piqued our interest, there’s still a few connectivity options on board, with WLAN 802.11b/g, Bluetooth (v1.2 Class2), USB, and – if we’re not mistaken – IR.
The BM-300 is a pretty pocketable affair, measuring up at 110 x 60 x 13.8 (mm) and it’s scheduled to be released in Korea during October 2006, with – as usual – no news on a European/US release or pricing.
If you’re finding the relentless march of technology to be a little too pacey for your liking, perhaps you might like to seek solace with some reassuringly retro handset attachments for your mobile phone and home PC.
We know they look daft, but let’s be honest – do they look any sillier than a Bluetooth earpiece stuck on your lughole?
Hulger now offer a range of five retro handsets, two of which come with a cordless Bluetooth configuration.
Korean technology company KTF Technologies have unveiled a teensy-weensy phone, which is “smaller then a lipstick.”
KTF Technologies, are the handset-making subsidiary of Korea’s second biggest wireless carrier, KTF, and the company has said that it intends to market the mini-sized slider, EV-K130 from this week, priced at around 370,000 won (approx £210, €305).
As you know, we *heart* nice, new shiny gadgets and we love to sit on the (sometimes uncomfortable) cutting edge of technology.
With the Treo just about everything works. 
Moreover, the interface is fast and responsive and although Palm’s idea of multi-tasking is simply to close down whatever you’re doing and start up the next program (while remembering all the settings) it doesn’t suffer from the gradual slowdown to a crawl that constantly blighted our Windows experience.
Palm Treo 650
Symbian, the smartphone OS company, are pulling a smart move (pun intended) by offering free assistance to Universities and their lecturers to have Symbian programming skills built into courses. Very clever.
As a sweetener to the lecturers to get involved, Symbian will provide “exposure to Symbian’s industry partners.” Pretty healthy if you fancy running a software development company and want to get exposure for your potential products, or you’re getting a little bored of Uni life and fancy impressing those in industry that you’re a bit of visionary.
T-Mobile has announced that it is to extend its web’n’walk unlimited mobile Internet access service to include pay-as-you-go customers.
All the web’n’walk handsets come pre-configured to connect immediately to the Internet, with customers able browse any web pages they chuffing well like rather than the ‘cut-down’ mobile-optimised web pages available through some services.
We love it
T-Mobile has finally officially announced the T-Mobile Sidekick 3, adding a new trackball controller, Bluetooth and EDGE data to the popular Sidekick 2.
The Sidekick boasts a new 1.3 megapixel camera and assist light, with a large 65k colour, transflective TFT display supporting a rather underwhelming 240×160 pixel resolution.
New for version three is a Bluetooth system supporting both the OBEX Push and Headset/Hands Free profiles and a mini-USB port for transferring files from a PC.
With a full blown parp on their PR trumpets, Sony Ericsson has announced its new Sony Ericsson K610im, their first GSM/UMTS handset to offer full support for i-mode.
Although the download speed isn’t exactly impressive right now, the next-gen i-mode looks to be a much sleeker beast, supporting white-knuckle speeds up to 384 kbps.
Other features include a speakerphone, Bluetooth, USB 2.0, USB charging and a flight mode.
Imaging and messaging
Slipping and slithering down the well oiled product slipway at Nokia is their latest swishy tri-band phone, the Nokia 6080 (no relation to their 1997 phone of the same name!).
Sporting a backlit keypad and bright colour display, the handset comes bundled with a stereo headset and offers all the usual customisation options (with wallpapers, themes, annoying ring tones etc) to keep da kidz happy.
Talk time is a distinctively average 3.5 hours with a standby time of up to 12 days.
In the wake of the dot com boom, then the dot com collapse, equipment vendors have been feeling the fall-out and mergers seem to be the way to reconcile the collapsing markets. The Nokia-Siemens merger announcement bears witness to this.
Siemens, a German giant
Companies such as Huawei (“wu why” sometimes pronounced “who are we” which fits their appearance into markets that they had no presence in until recently) are starting to make serious dents into the Tier 1 telecoms/ISP markets.
Now they’ve established themselves in the ISP market, the surrounding markets are being worked on (and since most ISPs are now owned by telecoms companies, it’s the telecoms markets that are easiest to move into).