HTC to launch new PDAs with Qualcomm chips
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Taiwan smartphone maker High Tech Computer (HTC) said on Wednesday it will launch 10 new PDAs and smartphones using chips from U.S.-based Qualcomm Inc by the end of the year.
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(InfoWorld) - Taiwan's High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC) has taken the wraps off a thinner, faster version of its Touch smartphone. "This is the much anticipated 3G version of Touch," Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, said at a news conference in Tokyo on Thursday. From the outside the HTC-1100 looks much like the existing Touch handset, which wasÂ launched in June this year and is based on the same Windows Mobile 6 operating system. But there are some changes inside. While the original Touch works only on second-generation GSM (global system for mobile communications) networks, the HTC-1100 works on both GSM and 3G (third-generation) WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access) networks. The data transfer capabilities include support for 3.6M bps (bit per second) HSDPA (high speed downlink packet access) networks. The Wi-Fi in the previous version is gone from the HT1100, however. That's because there was more of an emphasis on design, and the inclusion of Wi-Fi would have led to a thicker handset. Other changes include a slight reduction in screen size, from 2.8-inches to 2.6-inches. The phone includes the same gesture-based touch-screen navigation system, called TouchFlo. Other features include an FM radio, an audio player and support for streaming media including YouTube Mobile. There's a 2-megapixel camera on the back for taking pictures, and a 100,000-pixel resolution camera on the front for video-conferencing. The device measures 107 millimeters by 55 mm by 16.5 mm and weighs 120 grams. It will go on sale early next year through NTT DoCoMo Inc. in Japan. Plans for other countries have not been decided, HTC said. The HTC-1100 was unveiled alongside the first smart phone from Japan's Fujitsu Ltd. Like the HTC-1100, the F1100 is a slider-type handset running Windows Mobile 6. It will be available early next year. The device can function as both a conventional cell phone, via a WCDMA network, and as a VOIP handset using 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi networks. The device is designed to work with Fujitsu's corporate VOIP systems, allowing employees to make internal video calls in much the same way as they make cell phone calls. The phone also supports 3.6M bps HSDPA and comes with a fingerprint reader and a 1.3-megapixel camera. It measures 112 mm by 51 mm by 16.9 mm.
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Windows smartphone maker HTC released details of its holiday phone lineup, including a device that appears to be taking on the Motorola Q in both form and functionality. The devices are expected to begin shipping in September and October. Photos: View images of HTC's new phone lineup
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Smartphone maker High Tech Computer (HTC) has started taking advance online orders for its Shift ultramobile PC in partnership with one of Taiwan's largest electronic chains.
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Taiwan smartphone maker High Tech  Computer Corp. (HTC)  said on Tuesday it will launch  one of its own-brand touch-screen phones in the United States  by the end of the year, as it seeks to compete with Apple's   iPhone.
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Google&#39;s Android software platform for mobile phones&#160;is coming to life in Barcelona with a number of chip manufacturers showing it running on prototype or proof-of-concept phones at the Mobile World Congress on Monday.Freescale, Marvell, NEC Electronics, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments all had Android on show. Most of them expect to see Android phones based on their chips on the market in the second half of this year.The hardware ranged from bulky development boards with daughter cards sticking out at unlikely angles to more compact devices small enough to slip into your pocket. All were built around chips containing processor cores designed by Arm, a British fabless semiconductor company.One of the most polished prototypes is on the Texas Instruments stand -- although TI representatives insisted that it&#39;s just an example of how a finished product could look as the company only makes chips, leaving the development of phones to its customers. &quot;We don&#39;t do plastic,&quot; one said.TI actually had Android running on two different devices. One was based on its OMAP850, a single-chip device containing an application processor for Android and a baseband processor for controlling the phone&#39;s radio interface. The other contained TI&#39;s OMAP3430 multimedia application processor, capable of decoding high-definition television signals at a resolution of 720p. It requires a separate baseband processor, and is designed for high-end multimedia phones.Developing software for a new phone typically takes 14 to 18 months, said Ramesh Iyer, mobile Internet device product manager at TI. &quot;Android cuts that dramatically. It&#39;s a disruptor,&quot; he said.Google is shaking the market in other ways, Iyer said. &quot;Android is a single stack. You don&#39;t have to go looking for third-party solutions. Suddenly, they have defragmented the whole Linux ecosystem into one building block,&quot; he said.Android is entering an already crowded market for mobile phone software: To see how crowded, you only had to look at the NEC stand, where four prototypes containing its Medity2 processor were packed onto a narrow table. One was running Symbian OS, one Windows Mobile, one Android on top of Wind River Linux, and the last was running the same Wind River Linux but with a different application layer based on software from Trolltech and Esmertec.NEC staff expressed surprise at the level of interest in Android, saying they expected more attention for the completed phones based on the Medity2 at the next table. Manufactured for NTT DoCoMo, those phones contained the version of Linux promoted by the LiMo Foundation.The two systems are not necessarily in competition, though. With Android&#39;s focus on the application layer and Limo&#39;s work on the middleware, the underlying services needed to link applications to the Linux kernel, the two can be complementary, NEC staff said.Marvell took the prize for the most secretive Android demonstrations, refusing to allow photographs and declining even to say on which of its communications processors the software was running. The company showed a compact handset running the Android interface with a bare minimum of applications and a more complete installation playing video and browsing the Web on a bulky development board. Shrinking that down to a pocket-sized device will not take long, staff said. In fact, they had one ready -- just not loaded with the Android software.Android&#39;s Linux roots are likely to encourage the development of a wave of new handset applications, said Marvell&#39;s marketing director Vish Deshmane.&quot;You will see a lot more software to run on devices from people who want to exploit the commonality with desktop systems. It&#39;s going to be a boon for the 3G world because more applications means more data traffic, so operators will be happy,&quot; he said.Over at Freescale Semiconductor, staff showed Google Maps zooming in on the center of Barcelona on a development board built around Freescale&#39;s i.MX31 processor. This processor is not intended for mobile phones at all, and is more at home in GPS&#160;terminals or media players such as Toshiba&#39;s Gigabit and Microsoft&#39;s Zune.Qualcomm&#39;s demonstration of its 7201 combined baseband and application processor sparkled, but did not exploit the chip&#39;s full potential. The spinning globe of Android&#39;s Global Time application turned smoothly even without the assistance of the 3D graphics hardware acceleration, for which the drivers are not yet ready, said Rob Woodford.Android phones based on the chip will go on sale in the second half of this year, Woodford said -- but U.S. readers should contain their excitement: the Qualcomm display was overshadowed by a card warning that&#160;it may be prohibited from shipping the products on show to the U.S.&#160;because of a Dec. 31 court injunction obtained by chip rival Broadcom in a patent infringement case.The Mobile World Congress runs through Thursday at the Fira de Barcelona showground.
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Qualcomm made a clear statement about its vision for future mobile devices on Monday by buying SoftMax, a provider of noise-reduction algorithms.SoftMax&#39;s technology works with multiple microphones to suppress background noise, separate the speaker&#39;s voice from that noise, and cancel echoes, all to make voice calls more intelligible. The battle for better sound was stepped up recently when Motorola delivered a system called CrystalTalk, with a similar aim, in its Razr2 line of phones.The SoftMax Signal Separation technology broadens Qualcomm&#39;s toolset for devices, including mobile phones, Bluetooth headsets, VoIP phones, and notebooks, according to a company statement. It consumes less battery life, processing power, and memory than alternatives, the company said. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Qualcomm was not immediately able to provide more details of its plans for SoftMax.SoftMax already has deals with mobile operator SK Telecom and with communications chipmaker Broadcom, which is&#160;embroiled in a fierce legal battle with Qualcomm over various patents. Qualcomm may have acquired SoftMax as much for its engineers and intellectual property as for its current products, said analyst Will Strauss of Forward Concepts.Similarly,&#160;Qualcomm acquired wireless broadband vendor Flarion&#160;last year just for its team and OFDMA (orthogonal frequency-division multiplex access) technology, Strauss said. That company&#39;s intellectual property is expected to be valuable as OFDMA technologies including WiMax and&#160;LTE (Long-Term Evolution)&#160;become widely adopted. In addition, it would have been hard to simply recruit top-notch talent in a field as obscure as noise reduction, Strauss said. Qualcomm is probably looking both to integrate SoftMax&#39;s algorithms in its own single-chip systems for devices and to license them to other hardware vendors, Strauss said.Privately held SoftMax is based in Qualcomm&#39;s hometown of San Diego and was founded in 1998 by scientists from The Salk Institute and from the University of California at San Diego, where Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs is a former professor and endowed the Jacobs School of Engineering in 1997.
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With the release of Windows Mobile 6 at 3GSM, several companies have unveiled new phones based on the platform. Among them are a high end PDA phone from Toshiba, and smartphone devices from HP and HTC.
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Wireless chip maker Qualcomm Inc.   said on Wednesday new chipsets, designed to comply  with a court's patent infringement ruling, were now available  and expected to be in handsets before the end of March.
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Taiwanese electronics specialist HTC has a touch-screen phone of its own.
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Qualcomm is showing prototypes this week at the Consumer Electronics Show of 'pocketable computers', which fall between smart phones and laptops in terms of size and functionality.
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Palm and Vodafone have launched the Treo 750v, the PDA maker's new 3G Euro-centric smart phone, and pledged to ship the gadget on 2 October in the UK.â¦
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US version as Libra HTC looks set to market its upcoming candybar smart phone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard as the Vox, leaked roadmap slides reveal. The Taiwanese handset maker showed off the device in September as carrier UTStarcom's Libra.â¦
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With PDA sales slumping, company is planning new devices.
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NEW YORK - Why would wireless chip company Qualcomm want to get into the display business? To do what it does best: license technology to mobile phone manufacturers everywhere.
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The LiMo Foundation plans to announce 18 phones based on its platform, including some that are already on the market, on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.The phones come from LG Electronics, Motorola, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, and others. Included among the&#160;LiMo phones&#160;already used by consumers are Motorola&#39;s Razr2 and Motorokr as well as a number of NTT DoCoMo handsets.&quot;The LiMo platform in Release One uses technology that the founder companies had created from two to three years ago,&quot; said Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation. That means that some existing phones can now be designated as LiMo handsets, even though Release One isn&#39;t officially available.&#160;LiMo plans to release the first version of its open-source Linux-based operating system platform for mobile phones&#160;in March.Some of the handset makers, including LG, Aplix and Purple Labs, plan to exhibit prototype and reference handsets based on LiMo at the conference. The Purple Labs reference design is a 3G (third-generation) phone designed to cost less than US$100, Gillis said.LiMo also plans to announce on Monday that it will make a software development kit available in the second half of this year. The SDK will provide Eclipse-based tools so that developers can build software for LiMo handsets. Access, Motorola, Wind River and other LiMo members are developing the SDK.&quot;We&#39;re hoping to empower mobile developers on a broad scale to work with us and to bring their applications and services to consumers in a direct way,&quot; said Gillis.Despite the interest in Linux mobile phones and the variety of groups working on it including LiMo, the&#160;LiPS (Linux Phone Standards) Forum&#160;and&#160;Google&#39;s Open Handset Alliance, market momentum has stalled. A recent report from Canalys revealed that total&#160;Linux phone shipments in 2007 were essentially flat&#160;compared to 2006.
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U.S.-based wireless technology company Qualcomm said on Tuesday it expects &#36;50 handsets for faster third generation (3G) mobile phone networks to be on the market in two years' time.