stuart test blog

There have been a lot of gadget related announcements over the last couple of days.

Apple Announcements

Obviously Apple stole the show with their latest lineup of iPods: (images © Apple)

iPod Shuffle

New colours, same form factor and still just 1GB storage.

iPod Nano

New, ‘squashed’ form-factor, allows for a wide screen for watching videos and using the cover-flow feature. Not sure I like the look of this, but it may grow me – especially with the choice of cool colours.

iPod Classic

Similar form-factor to the 5th generation iPods, but thinner and an all-metal casing makes it look very cool. Incredible increase in storage means you can now get up to 160GB! This also gets the new cover-flow feature – this lets you flip through your album art like you were flipping through a stack of CDs.

iPod Touch

This was the big announcement. As expected, the iPhone form-factor comes to the iPod and includes 16GB flash storage, multi-touch screen, Wi-Fi, and internet browsing. Not to mention the beautiful, 3.5 inch widescreen display. Apple have also done what the Zune team couldn’t do, and that’s to allow downloads of tracks directly from the iTunes Store to the iPod Touch over wi-fi. Plus the awesome Safari web browser, gives you a great internet-browsing experience anywhere there’s wi-fi. Unfortunately no Bluetooth though – this is how I access the internet on my PDA, by using my phone’s 3G connection over wi-fi. It’s too cumbersome to use CafeNet on the PDA as you have to log in to the CafeNet website each time you connect.

HP Announcements:

In a more sensible, business-oriented approach, HP announced 5 new iPAQs aimed mainly at business users. (images taken from the press release)

HP iPAQ 100 Series Classic Handheld (Data sheet)

This is a standard looking PDA with a 3.5 inch screen and 240×320 resolution. Has all the goodies though, like wi-fi, Bluetooth 2.0, Windows Mobile 6.0, etc.

HP iPAQ 200 Series Enterprise Handheld (Data sheet)

This is the mother of all PDAs: 4 inch screen, 480×640 resolution! Designed for business use, this has all the features that a serious PDA user would want – apart from, oddly, no fingerprint reader. Runs Windows Mobile 6.0 with all the standard apps you would expect.

HP iPAQ 300 Series Travel Companion (Data sheet)

This is an interesting one as it isn’t actually a PDA but is a 3D navigation system with GPS functionality. It runs Windows CE 5.0 with an HP customised interface and has the most powerful CPU that I’ve heard of in a device this size – a dual-core 600MHz Titan processor. The 4.3 inch, 800×480 resolution screen makes it perfect for viewing maps in landscape mode.

HP iPAQ 600 Series Business Navigator (Data sheet)

This is my favourite of all the gadgets announced – it’s a PDA/phone with a 2.8 inch 240×320 resolution screen mounted above a standard phone keypad, with some additional function keys on either side of the key pad. It has been designed for single hand use and has a Smart Touch wheel and a three-way thumb wheel, but I’m not sure how these work yet. This also has GPS, wi-fi, and Bluetooth 2.0 as well as Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and Tri Band HSDPA. I’m really looking forward to checking these out and I may have to purchase the 610c model which has the additional 3 megapixel camera too.

HP iPAQ 900 Series Business Messenger (Data sheet)

This follows the more conventional, ‘Treo-like’ shape of a 320×240 resolution screen mounted above a full qwerty keyboard. This has similar specs to the 600 series.

Palm Announcement

The Palm announcement was the complete opposite to Apple and HPs announcements in that they announced a non-release of a product. Specifically, they announced that their controversial new product, the Foleo mobile companion, has now been canceled despite the face that it was due to ship shortly. The Foleo, was a device that looked like a small notebook, but ran a customised, stripped-down Linux operating system that operated in tandem with a Palm mobile phone such as a Treo. Many people couldn’t see the point of the device that was useless without an accompanying Palm device.

I think this was a brave decision by Palm, and usually brave decisions work out for the best as you’re more motivated to make them work. Here’s what the device would have looked like: