Pictures Leaked of 3 new Palm handhelds

ahecht writes "On Thursday, Palm's Solutions Group's CEO Todd Bradley announced that 3 new handhelds will be released in October. Within 24 hours, pictures of all three handhelds have leaked out on the web. The first to be released, the sub-$100 Zire, can be seen here. The second handheld, previously known as Oslo, now has the name Tungsten T, and features OS 5 and built in bluetooth (pictured here). The third handheld is the Tungsten W, pictured here, which is a GPRS smartphone (although it does not have a built-in speaker or microphone). Zire will be released October 7th, while both Tungsten models will be released on October 28th." Could just be rumors or fakes, but it seems reasonable.

Comments

Re:still dragonball

[Nerant]

I quote: "Yesterday, Todd Bradley, CEO of Palm's Solutions Group, said his company would be launching a handheld that runs Palm OS 5 on October 28. This appears to be the model he was referring to.

Bradley said that this high-end model will have Bluetooth wireless networking built in and use a Texas Instruments OMAP processor, which is based on designs from ARM Holdings. According to rumor, the Tungsten T will use the OMAP1510 processor, which combines into a single chip an ARM-compliant processor with a DSP for multimedia capabilities, and runs at 175 MHz. Sources familiar with this device say it will have 16 MB of RAM."

Also, Palm OS 5 includes PACE (Palm Application Compatibility Environment), an emulation enviroment of sorts that allows the running of existing Palm Apps. (It emulates the DragonBall)

Tungsten W may not fall under the patent

[coding_ape]

Each one of the independent claims in the RIM patent is very specific about the geometry of the keyboard. From the piture, the only one that the Turngsten W would come near is claim 23, which (among other things) claims

... the three sets of tilted keys are arranged into a QWERTY keyboard having at least three rows of keys, a top row, a middle row, and a bottom row, wherein the first set of keys is tilted at a first angle to a vertical reference and forms a top row of keys in the QWERTY keyboard, the second set of keys is tilted to a second angle to the vertical reference and forms a middle row of keys in the QWERTY keyboard, and the third set of keys is tilted to a third angle to the vertical reference and forms the bottom row of keys in the QWERTY keyboard, wherein the first, second and third angles are equal;

Besides the fact that this could probably be shot down by prior art, all Palm would have to do (if they cared about being sued) would be to change the angle of the key rows a bit and they would be in the clear. Seems like a patent so specific as this one really shouldn't be a threat to innovation; all it really stops is exact BlackBerry clones.

But I agree with your first point, important moving parts on a thing that's supposed to ride in your pocket all day are a Bad Thing.