TI Lands OMAP in a Pocket PC.

An anonymous reader writes: "TI has officially invaded Intel's territory, having landed its OMAP chip in HP's Jornada 928. TI also landed a SmartPhone reference design agreement with Microsoft, but so did Intel. See the article, and a picture of the unit at Forbes.com."

Comments

I'm dissapointed.

[Bonker]

Doesn't TI know they're supposed to rename any chip for portable/handheld use so that it's an Anime reference?

*cough* Dragonball *cough*

Microsoft and "standards"

[MosesJones]

Umm two standards from Microsoft with one thing in common.....

Microsoft

Well what a suprise, in some ways this must be a massive boon to the people associated with Symbian as it means Microsoft has a fragmented strategy and is pissing off its partners. Could this be the beasts strategy for this market, lots of deals with lots of people so it doesn't progress anywhere ? Wait till Moore's law allows WindowsXP to run on Mobiles, probably 5 years by my calculations.

Who said this:

[Matey-O]

"If you combine a cell phone with a PDA, you're either going to get a PDA that's a crappy cellphone or a cellphone that's a crappy PDA"

As cool as this looks, I don't think the above has been invalidated yet. I'll STILL point to the example that came up with Qualcomm's PDA/Cellphone: What happens when you want to talk to comeone and LOOK AT YOUR PDA at the same time? (Nah, I don't carry the hands free earbud everywhere I go...it's got a CABLE...it gets TANGLED.)

Re:Who said this:

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

I don't remember who said that, but I remember the article. The problem stems from having opposing customer requirements.

People want cell phones to be small and unobtrusive.

People want PDA displays and interfaces as big as possible and still be portable and convenient.

It's a 'have your cake and eat it, too' problem.

Competition

[Renraku]

Wow. Some competition. Guess we'll soon start seeing Microsoft TI-89 calculators coming out.

TI-85

[aardwolf64]

Well... I guess with TI's calculator background we don't have to worry about any floating point errors...*grin*

Re:The article wasn't clear

[Sc00ter]

From the article: " The Jornada 928 combines a PDA based on Microsoft's PocketPC operating system with a mobile phone capable of handling e-mail and Web access using a technology called General Packet Radio Service."

What's not clear?

Re:The article wasn't clear

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

Does this mean that the Jornada in question isn't a Pocket PC 2002 device any more?

No. The Pocket PC 2002 uses an ARM processor which can be made by anybody, and TI, Motorolla and Intel all manufacture ARM processors.

I'm not sure which brand HP was using prior to this, but I was surprised to see this as 'news'.

Nokia 9210

[MosesJones]

Its a better phone (if a little big) because of the PDA functions, and the PDA is superb.

And its actually available in the US as the 9290. Nokia are very smooth also can be used as a terminal emulator to plug into a switch or firewall via the RS232 cable it comes with.

And as for the talking thing.... the Nokia has a full and very good speaker phone, so its open on my desk right now. You can do everything while on a call.

Re:Nokia 9210

[Matey-O]

You're not from here are ya? )/me looks at email address.) See, you're from _over_there_. You've had better phone stuff your YEARS! :P

Good Thing

[D_Fresh]

Anything that challenges Intel's processor hegemony in emergent platform markets is fine with me. Not because I hate Intel, but because tying the future of any industry's hardware to a single vendor is just asking for trouble. Monopoly or not, excessive dependence on a single architecture smacks of too many eggs in one basket, which ends up giving the suppliers greater control than the customers over the capabilities and cost of the units. Any biologist can tell you that host diversity goes a long way toward stopping epidemics that threaten to wipe out the whole species.

Perhaps the fabrication of these PDA chips will be a good toehold for the next Intel of the chip industry, since it's too hard to break into the current desktop market with the complexity of those chips.

Re:ARM

[edremy]

"Get back into the palmtop market"??? They've never left: the iPaq and a dozen other PocketPC devices are already StrongARM based.

Re:The article wasn't clear

[Wesley Felter]

StrongARMs are only made by Intel; OMAP is ARM-compatible but it's not a StrongARM.

Re:OMAP explained...

[_Stryker]

Is searching for it on Google really that hard?

I'll save you the trouble and place a direct link to the OMAP page at TI.

Other OMAP-related products

[EricKrout.com]

Other OMAP-related products:

MICROSOFT AND TEXAS INSTRUMENTS INTRODUCE WINDOWS-POWERED SMARTPHONE 2002 AND OMAP(TM) REFERENCE DESIGN

New 2.5G Reference Design Combines Strengths of Smartphone 2002 Software and TI's OMAP Processors to Enable Rich Voice and Data-Capable Phones in Small, Sleek Form Factor

You can read the full article at http://focus.ti.com/docs/pr/pressrelease.jhtml?pre lId=sc02025.

I also suspect that many other products will begin to appear similar to this new Jornada and SmartPhone. You can probably sign-up to be notified on ti.com (Texas Instruments' website).

EricKrout.com :: A Weblog On Crack (updated daily)

pictures...

[zome]

For those who are not so lucky to get there quick enough, go here to see pics and screenshots.

If I have to choose between HP and Treo, I would prefer Treo. It's smaller and I want a phone that can be PDA. This HP is PDA that has phone feature. but for someone who paln to do a lot of wireless web browser, HP beats treo to the ground.

OMAP not just for Windows CE

[Glock27]

From the "features and benefits of OMAP" PDF document, OMAP (an ARM based processor with DSP functionality) has good OS/language support:

"Supports leading mobile operating systems such as Windows CE, Symbian OS, Palm OS and Linux."

also

"Use high-level programming languages such as C/C++, Java etc."

Mmmmm, another nice mobile Java platform. =)

299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

Re:ARM

[JordoCrouse]

They have a tendency to sneak their way into practically everything: cars, mobile phones, PSIONs, even your Gameboy Advance.

And this is a problem?

The ARM architecture has consistantly shown to be a cheap and easy to use processor with low power requirements, and a complete set of integrated components. Whats more, the ARM chips are fully supported under both Linux and Pocket PC.

It is not by chance that most of the PDAs being readied for production this year are StrongArm based (see here
for a list of those PDAs that support Linux).

I'm not one to support a monopoly for the sake of having a monopoly, but if a company manages to crawl to the top based on superior products, I can only say one thing: w00t.

infoSync has a better picture

[Raetsel]

infoSync's article has a much better picture of the Jornada 928 than the token thumbnail Forbes provides.

They also have an article about what has been added to WinCE (guess I know why MS calls it PocketPC now...) to turn it into a mobile phone-integrated PDA. There are six (!) pages of screen shots in that one. You can also look forward to "...Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002 Enterprise Edition, which adds Server ActiveSync..." -- here's ANOTHER pie MS wants to sell you pieces of.

The interesting thing is that ringtones -- which phone companies want to charge you for -- aren't there. Instead, you can assign .WAV files as ring tones, and specific files for specific callers. Wonder what the motivation for that move is...?

Still... I want one!

Intel's territory?

[tiomapengineer]

Yes, I do work for TI.

>> TI has officially invaded Intel's territory, having landed its OMAP chip in HP's Jornada 928.

I would hardly call the cell phone and handheld market "Intel's territory." The cell phone market already dominated by TI (60%+ market share), while Motorola has a much stronger presence in the handheld market with its Dragonball processor. In fact, TI has signed up 9 out the top 10 cell phone manufacturers to use its OMAP platform.

Re:Intel's territory?

[ZxCv]

Maybe the post should have been a little clearer, but I took "Intel's territory" to mean PocketPC-based devices. Nearly every PocketPC-based device in its current incarnation uses an Intel StrongARM chip (including the current Jornada).

Re:ARM

[GoRK]

Maybe you should actually *read* the ARM website you link to.

OMAP is an ARM core with extra DSP functions. TI makes it.

StrongARM is an ARM core with lots of flexibility (ie reconfigurable pins). Intel makes it.

XScale is an ARM core with some neat extra extensions and very high clockspeed. Intel makes it.

NETsilicon makes a neat little ARM7TDMI core processor with an ethernet controller in it. Nearly a full system on chip.

Other companies produce various ARM cores. Almost everyone and their dog makes ARM core chips. A project got shut down recently on Opencores that had an open design ARM core chip that you could make in your garage fab (shea)! It is very difficult to find someone NOT developing a handheld today on top of any other processor. All the PocketPC devices are ARM core. New PalmOS devices are (imminently) ARM. This handheld is ARM. Gameboy Advance is ARM. I have two telephones on my desk that have StrongARM's in them. (Another admittedly has a PPC core)

Get back into the palmtop market? You must be smoking crack.

~GoRK

Re:ARM

[jonr]

No. Intel licences the ARM core from ARM Ltd. AFAIK, ARM is still an independent company.

2.5 G!

[MosesJones]

So that means its got a life expectancy of around 12 months everywhere else but the US. Add in time to manufacture and get running and this really is a bizarre agreement. Its like signing an agreement for 56k modems as everyone else moves to DSL.