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Nokia, Ericcson, and Symbian and Palm all penned agreements to unequivocally ally themselves against Microsoft and Britsh Telecom.

I think Microsoft is shaking in their boots when they see a product like the Qualcomm PDQ and they contemplate what it would be like for their US smartphone marketshare to be similar to their PDA marketshare. EPOC32 has been available for some time in the US and it hasn't caught on nearly as rapidly as the Palm. I think Nokia's plan to wed the PalmOS to the EPOC32 kernel is genius.

I hope it will be enough to put the kibosh on Microsofts plans to ram yet another inferior product standard down the world's throat.

You do have an option to turn off the phone and continue to use the Palm side of the device.

Overall I didn't like this thing. It is just too large to use as a primary phone. It's easier for me to carry a clamshell phone and a Palm V in my pocket. The stylus that it comes with is kinda flimsy and it's flat. To use the Palm you have to
flip down the entire keypad because part of the palm screen doubles as the screen for the phone.

It is worth noting that they do make a CDMA version, so you're not limited to PCS.

Here's the webpage from Qualcomm with specs.

Qualcomm has announced a few months ago that they had struck a deal with the evil empire to create a WinCE-based cell phone, just shortly after they announced the Palm-based phone.

See the press release for details.

In case you wondered what this beast looks like, here's the link (to Qualcomm's site). IMO, it looks pretty decent.

Some Qualcomm cellphones are "data capable." From what I've been able to glean, this means that there is a cable which plugs into your cellphone, and on the other end is a standard 9 pin serial port. When you send "AT\n" over your computer's serial port, it will respond with "OK\n". When I first heard about this, I very nearly cried.

Unfortunatly, I've never been able to confirm with anyone that this works properly, or even at all. Most of Qualcomm's information says "Coming soon, check with your carrier." Anyone else know anything about this?

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Some Qualcomm cellphones are "data capable." From what I've been able to glean, this means that there is a cable which plugs into your cellphone, and on the other end is a standard 9 pin serial port. When you send "AT\n" over your computer's serial port, it will respond with "OK\n". When I first heard about this, I very nearly cried.

Unfortunatly, I've never been able to confirm with anyone that this works properly, or even at all. Most of Qualcomm's information says "Coming soon, check with your carrier." Anyone else know anything about this?

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Oh, here is a URL for the PDQ.... http://www.qualco mm.com/phones/products/pdq_phone/0,1352,,00.html

Left that out of my previous post

One thing not mentioned in the articles is Qaulcomm's pdQ, check it out here http://www.qualcomm.com/pdq. It is basically a digital cellular phone that is built around/ is integrated with a Pilot. You can even click on phone numbers in the pilot's address book to have it dial. I looks pretty slick.

Alright, so the Palm stuff is really looking good.
The Visor is promising, and the PdQ phone is a great hybrid...

The WinCE machines are surging over the retail counters.

Some time ago (a year or so) I bought the Philips Nino... It's a neat little device, and the virtual recognition area really appeals to me. But I think I would like to jump ship to the PalmV or Visor. I hate to just throw the Nino away, and it's not worth half of what I paid for it.

My question to /. then is this: What's there to be done with old PDA's?? They're still functional, they're still potent hardware. The Nino has a 75Mhz chip in it. Can I plug it into my fuse box and have it serve as a power consumption controller?? Obviously, I'm being facetious, but I'd like to dedicate the PDA to a task rather than just pitch it off a bridge - it's a matter of principle - I don't like to throw things out.

What have those of you who didn't throw out or retire the old PDA done with them? Are they of any use? Can my Nino run Linux (and hence be a web server) ? Can I wire it to my car, and have it at least show me what it's computer is thinking - i.e. diagnostics, efficiency, etc??

I'd be much more willing to buy a new one if I didn't feel the old one was going to go to waste.

Take a look at the Qualcomm PdQ PDA... It's a cell phone, pager and Pilot all in one.

But I agree with your statement. Integrated functionality, and modular items, are sorely needed. Hopefully this new Handspring Visor - with it's expansion slot - will spurr the other vendors to get on the bandwagon.

Of course we will see a bunch of competing standards until either a de facto standard is chosen for technological superiority, or more likely a consortium forms, and royalties are paid.

In any case, in about three years, there's sure to be a PDA bus standard, for which expansion modules, port duplicators and such are available. Hopefully the modules will be intelligently enough designed that their functionality will be software definable - so the MP3 player will be able to do multi-duty as a voice recorder & speach-to-text convertor etc...

This way we'll be able to buy the hardware option that matches all the software options we are interested in (storage, special purpose processing, DSP, opticals, audio I/O...). That Transmeta chip might be in for a broader market then they realize. :)

I guess you haven't seen the Qualcomm pdQ phone + Palm computer.

We already have cell phone Web browsers (they just don't do TV). They're filling up the Smart Phone market right now. Take a look at Qualcomm's pdQ phone, just for starters.

http://www.qualcomm.com/phones/pro ducts/pdq_phone/

The pdQ (PalmOS cellphone) is here if you want to see it. It's way overpriced but still cool as hell.

This should explain a lot.
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Phil Karn, KA9Q, has a web page where you can listen to samples of various voice encoding techniques.

For digital data, you skip the vocoder and pipe the data into the ECC (error correction code) encoder and modem.

I found the address for rrlogin.c

You can email Phil Karn (it's creator) if you'd care to thank him. I did.

I found the address for rrlogin.c

You can email Phil Karn (it's creator) if you'd care to thank him. I did.

oops, forgot to post the link.

That link doesn't work. This one does.

Basically, the patent system works far better in theory than in practice. For every abstract argument you can make about the need to spur innovation, I can give you a dozen horror stories from real life about how it has destroyed businesses, careers and products and denied the public the benefits of competition and innovation. I have personally been involved in the defense of a very high stakes patent dispute, and I can assure you that it is even more expensive, messy, arbitrary, unfair, emotionally draining and wasteful of talent and resources than you can possibly imagine if you haven't been through this experience.

Even the patent attorneys I know concede, in their unguarded moments, that the system is almost totally broken. Why does it continue to exist? Some of it is simple governmental intertia. But the people with the most influence over the policy are the patent lawyers, and they always win whenever a patent is litigated, no matter what the outcome. The going rate for reasonably experienced patent attorneys working on a litigated case is $400/hour, and you may have several dozen working off and on over the space of a few years on a major case.

Nor do the patent lawyers have a monopoly on greed. There are countless individuals who, mindless of the historical experience to the contrary and heedless of the general damage to society, see the patent system as an easy get-rich-quick scheme. It's the same mentality that keeps casinos and state lotteries in business. At least I have the choice of not playing the lottery or patronizing a casino; I don't have that option with the patent system.

The whole thing is so sickening and depressing that it almost makes me want to give up engineering.

Phil Karn

Basically, the patent system works far better in theory than in practice. For every abstract argument you can make about the need to spur innovation, I can give you a dozen horror stories from real life about how it has destroyed businesses, careers and products and denied the public the benefits of competition and innovation. I have personally been involved in the defense of a very high stakes patent dispute, and I can assure you that it is even more expensive, messy, arbitrary, unfair, emotionally draining and wasteful of talent and resources than you can possibly imagine if you haven't been through this experience.

Even the patent attorneys I know concede, in their unguarded moments, that the system is almost totally broken. Why does it continue to exist? Some of it is simple governmental intertia. But the people with the most influence over the policy are the patent lawyers, and they always win whenever a patent is litigated, no matter what the outcome. The going rate for reasonably experienced patent attorneys working on a litigated case is $400/hour, and you may have several dozen working off and on over the space of a few years on a major case.

Nor do the patent lawyers have a monopoly on greed. There are countless individuals who, mindless of the historical experience to the contrary and heedless of the general damage to society, see the patent system as an easy get-rich-quick scheme. It's the same mentality that keeps casinos and state lotteries in business. At least I have the choice of not playing the lottery or patronizing a casino; I don't have that option with the patent system.

The whole thing is so sickening and depressing that it almost makes me want to give up engineering.

Phil Karn

And you've seen Qualcomm's Palm-phone, yes? http://www.qualcomm.com/pdQ/

According to the Qualcomm web site, Eudora has 18 million email users worldwide
Qualcomm

If everyone took a moment to write to Qualcomm and asked them to consider a Netscape style opensourcing (GPL seems unlikely to happen)... I wonder what would happen....

Eudora Suggestions emailbox (eudora-suggest@qualcomm.com)

GO GO /. effect!!!!

what it takes to get a patent nowdays. It involves multiple thosands of dollars just to submit it. Even worse if you create it and do not patent. Then some big company can patent it from under you and sue you for patent infringement.

For more information as to why the USPO needs to be fscked, see Phil Karn's page.