October 2007

HTC unveils three new devices
&Once known just as the Taiwanese maker of early iPAQs and such, HTC has developed into perhaps the primary innovator and manufacturer of avant-guard handhelds. The company announced three new devices, the HTC Shift, HTC S730 and HTC P6500. The HTC Shift is a small 8x5x1 inch Vista-based Windows machine with a 7-inch 800 x 480 touch screen. The HTC S730 is a Windows Mobile 6 HSDPA/UMTS GSM/GPRS/EDGE smartphone with a 2.4 inch screen, a 400MHz Qualcomm processor, and a QWERTY keyboard that slides out on the side. The HTC P6500, finally, is a Windows Mobile 6-based PDA phone with a 3.5-inch screen, a 3 megapixel camera, fingerprint scanner, WiFi and Bluetooth and two SDIO slots. [;a href="http://www.htc.com/press_room/03-press-071001_02.htm" target="_blank">see HTC news release] -- Posted Friday, October 5, 2007 by chb

Nokia plans to buy Navteq
Finnish cellphone maker Nokia said it plans to buy digital-map supplier Navteq for almost US$12 billion. This comes after navigation device maker TomTom recently said it plans to pay about US$2.5 billion for Navteq's only serious rival, Tele Atlas. So instead of having two independent digital mapping companies supplying their maps to device makers, they will be owned by device makers. What will that mean for the competition? -- Posted Monday, October 1, 2007 by chb