TamsPalm - the Palm OS / web OS Blog » Prototypes

Treo 680 – S60 powered

Tam Hanna, Site Founder — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:38:25 +0000

I am not sure if this was an oversight or intentional. Rumors of S60-powered Palm devices have been peddled a few years ago – as the OSses were very similar, the image below could be the only thing we will ever see of these devices (unless Palm goes belly-up Enron style):

P.S. It was sighted at the Satyan booth. Company representatives have neither confirmed nor denied this theory…

The Motorola A780 – a look at an early Linux phone

Tam Hanna, Site Founder — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:48:12 +0000

By good luck and ill fortune, we were recently given 5 minutes of time with a Motorola A780 “Ming” – one of the first Linux touchscreen phones ever. Mobile Linux didn’t grow much in the last years…was it the Ming’s fault?

Size-wise, the machine is very similar to Nokia’s N71:

Motorola chose a very interesting concept in order to make the phone usable without a stylus. The keys are on the outside of the flip – if the lid is closed, the phone behaves like a regular phone:

The user interface has a ‘japanese’ touch, but worked very well. The phone’s home screen has two bars that allow quick access to a few applications.

When a third-party application is fired up(I was shown Picsel Viewer), the bars remain on top(allowing instant access to important phone apps):

The device that we were given was an early engineering sample, but nevertheless seemed very stable and well-built:

In the end, the A780 is a very impressive touchscreen phone…especially given its age. Mobile Linux has been capable to power a decent phone on 2004’s hardware(aka max. 200MhZ CPU) – if Google can stay as effective, I predict that Android will have no issues…

Whatever happened to The Medison Celebrity

Ryan Rix, Vice Administrator — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:38:28 +0000

Well, according to about 1,000,000 posts filing in to my inbox via google alerts, everyone’s favorite $150 laptop, the Medison Celebrity has not shipped yet, and parts of there site are going offline.

With the foleo gone and now my (and about 90% of the general net population’s) predictions on the Medison Celebrity have turned to, seemingly, truth, what does this mean for folks on the go?

Laptops/sub-laptops are gaining much popularity lately with the eminent release of the Asus EEEPC, and more and more hints of a sub-notebook MacBook, which makes you wonder about the future of mobile computing: Will UMPCs and sub-notebooks eventually outnumber PDAs and Smartphones?

IMHO, not. While these devices are steadily becoming steadily smaller and smaller, they are not becoming more usable. Laptops are hard to lug around, and they are hard to use while on the bus, or walking, etcPossibly the worst idea of all is a mobile device with no way to back it up. Find me a quick and easy way to copy 8-16GiB of flash memory to a hardrive, and i will be a very happy guy…

Another thing to think about is with the foleo II running on the same OS as will be the Linux based Treos, we can most definitely count on applications designed for one device running on the other (which is borderline amazing to think of… )

What are your thoughts on the future of mobile computing? will the laptops rule, or will it be handhelds ftw?

Saguaro Sneak Peek Released!

Brad Green — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:00:48 +0000

You can find the details at PDA Performance’s website, but im posting a blurry screenshot for you to view. You can download the preview app from their website, and it will run on most newer Palm devices. The preview app simply shows the desktop with the CNN and Weather widgets running. Although there is not much that you can see, there is full multi-layer alpha blending on the widgets (think Konfabulator), and it is very cool to see.

Atari laptop concepts

Tam Hanna, Site Founder — Thu, 25 May 2006 22:01:24 +0000

Some of you may still remember Atari-they were producing loads of computers in the 80ies. Anyways, this link(dig up on Wikipedia) looks interesting for all Atari afficionados and everyone else interested in 1983 ideas on how portable computers will look:

http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/CONCEPTS/concepts.html

To be honest, I wonder why they never realized such a concept. They had a “data pad”, a “notebook”, a “foldup pc” and many more…

Tungsten X420 #2

Alexander Gratz — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:48:32 +0000

This time it looks like a Zire 31, but it has 2 MB RAM and a b/w screen.

eBay link

Tungsten X420 – a Tungsten W prototype?

Alexander Gratz — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 12:58:30 +0000

There is an auction at eBay, where you could buy a “Tungsten X420″.

It seems to be a prototype of the T|W:

click here

What do you think about this? Do you have further information?

Bei Ebay gibt es eine Auktion wo Sie einen “Tungsten X420″ ersteigern konnten.

Dabei scheint es sich um einem TungstenW-Prototypen zu handeln:

klicken Sie hier

Was denken Sie? Haben Sie weitere Informationen?