Fossil Ends Production for Wrist PDA

Fossil has recently removed their Wrist PDA product from their website. Abacus, the other brand, has also removed their version of the Wrist PDA.

The Wrist PDA was a nifty little device, bringing all the essentials of a PDA into a tiny watch. It featured Palm OS 4.1, 8 MB of RAM, and a 160x160 backlit LCD digitizer (touch screen). Of course it had an IRDA infrared communication port and USB port for data transfer, and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

Fossil's and Abacus' Wrist PDA didn't do so well at the start. It was named "Best of COMDEX" a while back, but was delayed for nearly 2 years before being released in January of 2005.

Finally a VoIP Application!

From the company that brought you Causerie Messenger, MantraGroup Inc., come a revolutionary new product, mobiVoIP

mobiVoIP is currently in a beta testing phase however once it's complete, it will be the first fully functional VoIP program for the PalmOS. You'll be able to use Bluetooth, Wifi, EDGE, EVDO on your PDAs or Smartphones to call your friends. mobiVoIP also is being tested for low bandwidth connections like GPRS and IrDA. With mobiVoIP, you'll be able to call other people with mobiVoIP as well as call people on POTS (the Plain Old Telephone Systems).

Personally, I'm a bit worried that the audio quality won't be up to par or that the price might be to high, however I look forward to seeing a VoIP program for the PalmOS. It's about time!

A glimpse into the future of iSpin and TapTarget

From TapTarget's Wiki:

SpinOS is a next step of Palm OS launcher development performed by TapTarget.com. Palm OS constrained capabilities forced to create an additonal system environment - SpinOS, which provides additional services either for Palm handheld user and Palm application developer.

SpinOS is a set of programs installed on the Palm handheld. It consists of SpinCore, which is loaded into handheld's main memory at boot time. It intercepts system API calls and controls underlying Palm OS behavior. It also provides API for application developers.

SpinOS comes with additional software specifically designed to run under SpinCore. Desktop, Explorer, Web browser and others are to be included into SpinOS distribution package.

The SpinCore provides the following capabilities:

1. Cooperative multitasking - allows to run several Palm OS 68K applications concurrently (SpinCore cannot run ARM native applications. In the future it is supposed to implement preemptive multitasking)
2. Virtual file system - hides all the differencies among various file concepts introduced by Palm OS. It provides universal API to access files in handheld's main memory, card, etc.
3. Graphics engine provides simple API to handle JPEG images and perform image 3D trasformations. The engine is implemented natively in ARM and provides high performance.
4. System registry is a single place where applications may store their settings and user preferences.

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For more information, please, visit SpinOS wiki page.

Apple to take bite at Palm?

From Personal Computer World:

Speculation that Apple plans to buy handheld maker Palm has been revived by a call from two leading Palm investors for the company to be put up for sale, according to the local paper of both companies.

Mike Nelson, who owns eight per cent of Palm shares, argued that the company is poorly equipped to dominate the market for smartphones which are beginning to eat into sales of traditional PDAs, reports Siliconvalley.com , online edition of the San Jose Mercury.

The drift from PDAs to smartphones is borne out today by a report from analysts IDG.

Palm has sold one million phone-enabled Treos and its stock has nearly doubled in value over the past year.

But Nelson is reported to have told the Palm board that competitors are developing products quickly and could afford to sacrifice profits to gain market penetration.

Another shareholder, with five per cent of Palm shares, also urged a sale of the company late last year.

The fact that Apple has been named as a possible buyer may seem strange to those who recall that one of the most controversial acts of CEO Steve Jobs was to kill off the pen-driven Apple Newton, a pre-cursor of the Palm Pilot, when he returned to the company after a 10-year absence in 1996.

Yet the two companies are closely linked. They are near neighbours and several early Palm employees, including co-founder and former company president Donna Dubinsky, previously worked with Apple.

Palm, at least in its early days, also enjoyed the kind of anything-but-Microsoft fan base that has long sustained Apple.

Jobs tried to buy the company in the late nineties, according to the Mercury.
Neither Apple nor Palm has given any sign that there is any basis for the renewed speculation but there are obvious fits between the two companies.

Apple's Ipod boom can hardly be sustained unless it can head off competition from PDAs and smartphones that can pack music players along with a host a other functions.

Palm itself was slow off the mark in adding tricky telephony technology to its products and Apple would have a hard time starting from scratch in the market.

Also, for all their vaunted style, the latest Apple notebooks look like antiques beside the latest pen-driven Tablet PCs.

The company will sooner or later be forced to offer a pen interface, and could benefit from Palm expertise in the area - especially as tablets are getting smaller, and may eventually supersede the PDA.

Palm Universal Wireless Keyboard Drivers for TX

Palm recently released its Palm Universal Wireless Keyboard Driver Version 1.10 for the Palm TX. This software lets you use your Palm TX with the Universal Wireless Keyboard.

Enhancements: (01/19/2006)

- Adds support for Palm TX handhelds
- Resolves Bluetooth wireless compatibility issues seen on the Palm TX handheld when the 1.08 version of the driver was used. Symptoms could range from the inability to add a Bluetooth device to total lockup of the Palm TX handheld
- NOTE: Do not install this version unless you have a Palm TX handheld

Read more at Palm

Treo 650 running Linux

It seems that someone has managed to get Linux to run on a Treo 650. Check out a bunch of pictures of Linux on a Treo 650 here

Treo 700p Info and Pictures

According to a guy at Treocentral, the Treo700p has a EVDO data support, a 320x320 pixel display, a 1.3 megapixel camera with a 1280x1024 max resolution and 62.8 MB of free RAM. He also claims it runs Palm OS Garnet v5.4.9, and has PocketTunes, Blazer v4.5, Sprint TV and Documents to Go v8 built in. He also reports that it may have a 312mhz cpu, and performance seems faster than the Treo 650.

You can check out the Treocentral forum thread here
You can check out the PalmInfocenter article here
You can check out the Treonauts article here