Comments on: Kyocera Extends Palm OS License Through 2005

Here is a warning from someone who just bought a T-mobile PPCPE. I read it on some other forum. It's not inflamatory, only a statment of truth.

"Please, beware of Pocket PC ,- buy only if you need multimedia - media player , video , skins and bla bla bla If you want stable system , I recomend to you stay with Palm."

---
David

Find the Kyocera 7135 lurking about, bouncing from hand to hand at the CTIA show this week, surely...

---
Mike Compeau

See the specs here.....

http://www.kyocera-wireless.com/showroom/showcase/coming_soon_7135.htm

All the reently announced PalmOS based PDA/Smartphones have been OS 4.1 based (or lower).

The fact that the OS Licence ha been extended for Kyocera (and recent Samsung as well), bodes well for future development.

As for the 7135 in a European market ... I'd love to see this as GSM triband (world) phone. But contrary to popular FUD, CDMA is available outside of North America. Predominantly SE Asia (Japan, Korea, China), but also in Europe (UK, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Romania ... approx 2.2M subscribers, and growing), and the south Pacific (Australia, and New Zealand). The Kyo 6035 is available in a lot of these places, so I imagine the 7135 will follow suit.

Check out http://www.cdg.org/world/region.asp?region=Europe%20-%20Russia for the European coverage.

~ "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed." - DV ~

Don't forget - one of the big reasons that Palm chose the ARM processor family was that it was favored by cellular phone makers (such as Nokia, back in the days when Palm and Nokia were going to try to build a merged PalmOS/Symbian software base).

> CDMA is available outside of North America.
> Predominantly SE Asia (Japan, Korea, China),
> but also in Europe (UK, Germany, Poland,
> Ukraine, Romania ... approx 2.2M subscribers,
> and growing)

Which carriers in, say, the UK and Germany are
providing CDMA service today? The link you provided
highlights those countries, but there seems to be
no further information available (search doesn't
return anything, clicking on country name doesn't
return anything...).

Oliver

Hutchison and Orange are CDMA licencees in the UK and Germany. Currently in evaluation modes, Hutchison have demonstrated 3G CDMA technology along the M4 corridor.

Russia has a deployed CDMA network. The others are approved, but not yet deployed.

~ "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed." - DV ~

Ah. :-) 3G -- the thing that, real soon, will
solve all our data access problems. If it doesn't
bankrupt the carriers first ;-)

So basically, there isn't much of a CDMA network in
Europe yet that an owner of this device could count on.

Oliver

Fortune just published a column on the ascendency of CDMA:

http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=209811

From reading it, it looks like CDMA technologies have a good chance of taking over a lot of the major markets, and their cost advantage may eventually push aside GSM. Of course, that's just the writer's opinion.

--
Ben Combee, CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead
Programming help at www.palmoswerks.com

Most CDMA MSM chipsets from Qualcomm have Bluetooth support onboard as well. Bluetooth chip solutions like this are very important for Bluetooth (see costs, volume, easy to use etc.). You will see CDMA Bluetooth Solutions integrated into interesting new products by Kyocera, Samsung and Sony imho....it's just a matter of time. (more info see link)
http://ragingbull.lycos.com/mboard/boards.cgi?board=XTND&read=8161

"There are 2 kind of people my friend....those with wires and those without"

While it is true that most of Europe will soon be moving to CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) and away from TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) GSM; the CDMA standards between USA/SE Asia and Europe are different (and largely incompatible). USA et al use (I think) cdmaOne, and Europe CDMA2000 -- could be the other way round, just doing this off the top of my head!

FBN

I could be wrong on this, but my understanding is that in terms of local carrier speak, cdmaOne == digital, cdma2000 == PCS. That means that phones that are labelled as trimode (as opposed to the GSM triband world phones) are analogue, cdmaOne, and cdma2000 compatible.

The chipsets produced by Qualcomm are very cool. They are moving to the newer ARM cores (ARM7 -> ARM9? sorry, my notes from the 2002 BREW conference are at home), and incorporate a lot of very cool fuinctionality, including Bluetooth, and aGPS (assisted GPS - to address the USA E911 mandate, still requiers access to a cell tower, but just wait fo the slew of location based services about to arrive on cellphones :)).

As telcos move to 3G and 4G networks, we will see a convergence of CDMA and GSM. A world standard is required. At the moment we are at a point akin to the ethernet vs token ring type debates ... which will be the underlying bearer medium.

~ "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed." - DV ~

You're right, it does matter. But there are enough "PDA first" devices out there. The sole reason I haven't purchased a smartphone yet is that they are too PDA-like (read: big). I want a small phone form-factor w/ PDA capabilities.

I'm actually leaning more towards the i500 since it looks to be smaller than the 7135, but we'll see once we can put them next to each other.


-- derby

I have read in the past that Palm makes about $8.00 per license, but that was for 3.5 & 4.x. I am not sure that it is any more or less expensive with 5.x

Visit us at www.tdscomputer.com

While I don't have exact details, most license contracts like that would usually have a major up-front charge, either an initiation fee, a support fee, or an advance royalties. Usually, the contract would also specify a minimum software royalty -- if you sell under X devices, you still have to pay as if you sold X devices. Finally, its likely to have lots of other provisions, like requiring the licensee to commit to support marketing activities like trade shows and advertising.

--
Ben Combee, CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead
Programming help at www.palmoswerks.com