Portable Gadgets - Mobile Gadget News

O2 released its first 3.5G Pocket PC in HK on the last day of February. The new Xda Atom Life basically looks pretty much the same as its predecessor, the Xda Atom: a black body with simple and clean outline, a 2.4-inch QVGA display, a media player navigation panel along with the basic Pocket PC buttons, and a pair of shortcut bottons on the lower right side of the phone’s body. In addition, it has a 0.3-megapixel supplementary camera for video conferencing purpose. The Xda Atom Life weighs 145 g, which is only 5 g heavier than the Xda Atom.

Following Dopod and ETEN’s foot steps, Asus announced their first GPS-enabled Pocket PC, the Asus P535 on Wednesday. This new model is powered by Intel Xscale 520MHz processor, 64 MB SDRAM, 256 MB NAND flash memories, and Microsoft Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition (AKU3.2). Asus is targeting the P535 at the Asian Pacific market, with retail price of around US$740 (23,900 TWD in Taiwan).

When Motorola Q successfully penetrated the market of smarthphones with QWERTY keyboard which was previously divided by Blackberry and Palm Treo, did Motorola expect a new great competitor coming from an Asian brand that wasn’t even too well known at the time? Dopod is kicking in their new kid in the block, the Dopod C720W, which is their slimmest smartphone so far. If you’re wondering how good the C720W is, it won against the Motorola Q in CNET Asia’s very own Prizefight, owning the Motorola Q in sexiness, connectivity and call quality while losing for navigation and multimedia.

To make life easier for people with visual impairments, Ray Kurzweil in associate with National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has invented a portable scanner reader named after them, the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader. The Kurzweil-NFB Reader is a hybrid device that combines a digital camera with a Braille-aware PDA to create a hand-held gadget that lets its user snaps a picture of printed material, scans the text and reads it in clear synthetic speech few seconds later.

Motorola on Tuesday introduced the new Motorola A1200 along with the PEBL U6 and the SLAR L7 in Shanghai. The new A1200 smartphone is rather slim comparing with other smartphones, and it weighs just 95 g.

Another new handset from Samsung, the Samsung SPH-M8000 is a WiBro compliant PDA phone, equiped with DMB capabilities. This sexy gadget operating on Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition (Pocket PC) is powered by an Intel PXA 272 processor with 520 MHz clock speed.

The Sharp W-Zero3 PDA phone measures 70 × 130 × 26 mm in dimensions and weighs 220 g. Although it’s not really small, it’s definitely a sexy PDA phones with an astounding 3.7” LCD display with a resolution of 640×480 pixels (65,536 colors – should have been more but Windows Mobile 5.0 does not support higher colors).