Handheld computers chat at DEMOmobile
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On the heels of the 2-GHz Pentium 4 microprocessor, Intel Corp. is readying a mobile version for notebook PCs in the first half of next year.
On the heels of the 2-GHz Pentium 4 microprocessor, Intel Corp. is readying a mobile version for notebook PCs in the first half of next year.
The first mobile Pentium 4s will run faster than 1.5 GHz, Intel vice president Frank Spindler said. The chipmaker also is enhancing its ultra-low-voltage SpeedStep Pentium III to extend notebook battery life.
In the handheld computer market, Motorola Corp.'s DragonBall processors are powering Palm OS and Handspring Visor personal digital assistants, and Motorola's StrongArm chip made an appearance in the new, $600 Hewlett-Packard Jornada 560 series of Pocket PCs, the first with the Microsoft Pocket PC 2002 operating system.
Pocket PC 2002 has pocket versions of Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Terminal Services Client, Media Player, Reader and other applications.
The announcements were highlights of the DEMOmobile show last month in La Jolla, Calif.
Oplayo Inc. of Vienna, Va., demonstrated software to stream video via Java or Microsoft Windows over Internet connections without separate player software.
Anttoni Vesterinen, Oplayo's chief executive officer, said the software can stream to handheld devices, but 'the fixed Internet is the market.' He said agencies could use the technology to stream meetings, training sessions and other programs to an audience of users with disparate hardware platforms without having to configure a player on each computer.
Voice Signal Technologies Inc. of Woburn, Mass., demonstrated a real-time, large-vocabulary speech recognition system for the Compaq iPaq handheld PC. Elvis, for embedded large vocabulary interface system, is a speech recognizer that will be available from handheld makers next year, according to Chip Reiner, a company vice president.
Elvis on the iPaq will let mobile users compose and send e-mail or Short Messaging Service text by speaking the words.
Networking via short-wave Bluetooth or IEEE 802.11b, or Wi-Fi, standards drew the most interest from DEMOmobile attendees.
Pico Communications Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., demonstrated wireless Bluetooth synchronization with a Palm OS handheld using a PicoBlue wireless Internet access point. The product can manage up to seven simultaneous wireless links, letting seven users share access to the Internet at a time.
Talking to me?
Voice recognition and dictation by telephone or PDA was presented by Copytalk LLC of Sarasota, Fla.
The Copytalk service, priced at $24 per month, takes dictation to create e-mail, appointments, contacts, to-do lists and expense items that synchronize directly with a PDA.
LapLink Inc. of Bothell, Wash., demonstrated its $60 PDAsync software for synchronizing contact information on Palm OS, Pocket PC and certain mobile phone devices with desktop PCs.
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