yowkee essential

Nokia no longer release business phone without WiFi capability

Nokia is being agressive on WiFi. It draws a roadmap for all its high end mobile phone all equiped with WiFi capability, further with WiMax while available. That means most of its new series of Series 60/80 phones would come with WiFi. It seem to be a good move, with the low cost of WiFi chipset, data transfering on the widely used wireless network, and hints on bypass GSM/GPRS — WiFi phone?

PDA Phone

I was doing some Palm application development few years ago. At that time I brought along a PDA everyday, fully enjoy the feel of productivity —- just the feel, I didn’t ever actually fully utilize the tool. At times I did enjoy the convenience of stuffing lots of e-books into it, so I always get something to read on the road.

May be it’s the lack of multimedia functions of the PDA I owned made me step back. Now my hand is itchy again. I am looking for a new mobile phone, and wondering, why not getting a PDA phone?

Some web surfing and googling show Treo is possibly out of my budget. And Pocket PC is out of my choice because I don’t like my electronic device all attached with Windows. Wow…thing like Palm LifeDrive and Nokia 770 just looks awesome, so attrative :~~) . But they are also much over the budget :(, and, they are not phone.

Motorola is producing a series of Linux phone, like the A728 and A732. Linux phone seem to be a good fit for my PDA phone choice. It has the OS I wanted — at least I knew a little of it, and I could have done some hacking with it. And then I found more hacking stuff with Motorola Linux phone, e.g. Hacking the Motorola A780. Hacker Harald Welte form a project OpenEZX for Motorola EZX phone platform, mainly the A780, E680 and E680i. There are either toolchain and customized made image to load and overwrite the existing OS on the phone.

That sounds good. E680i is available in Malaysia and seem cost around RM1200 at the mean time. I am looking forward to it.

AOpen's MiniPC

Here’s the Mac Mini looks-alike MiniPC. More interesting, it is pre-installed with Linux by default. The Linux distribution came with it is Linspire, which claimed to be The World’s Easiest Desktop Linux.

It’s an interesting way AOpen approachs the mini-size desktop market. But why do they do that? Mac Mini might have some success, and that probably make some PC users wish they could have such a mini sized and cute PC at their desktop too (or laptop?). Is it the only reason Mac Mini making successful sales? I don’t think so. What Apple selling is the superb feel-good consumer experience —- a combination of great looking, cute Mac Mini with Mac OS X, and even their other product lines (iPod, high quality monitor…etc). An only look-alike PC might not replicate the same success sales on market. Moreover, what market are they targeting for? If it’s loaded with Linux by default, would normal PC users buy the idea? Would Linux hackers feel cool to get a cute looking cube but suffering lower performance (which they could get higher specification with lower price).

MiniPC is going to ship with price starting US399 (Linux) and US499 (Windows). Yes, it did come with Windows pre-loaded. It is in a more or less same pricing range with Mac Mini. On the other hand, small form factor PC has long been every where ever since Mac Mini out in the market. I don’t think PC users would be so excited then about a Mac Mini “replica”.

I just couldn’t agree to such an marketing idea.