Mark Arteaga

Marcus Perryman writes about the new Motorola Q Smartphone.  Expected release is Q1 of 2006.  The device used to be called 'RAZORberry' which I think is obvious what market they are going after.  They also may be trying to grab some market share from the treo.  Below are some pictures of the Q, the BlackBerry 7100g and the Treo 650 (obviously not to scale).  Don't forget with the Windows Mobile 5 Messaging and Security Feature Pack the Q can have push email with device management with no third-party servers.  With the recent BlackBerry outages why not look at having your email pushed straight from your corporate servers using Exchange SP2 instead of through a third-party proprietary server/network your enterprise has no control over.

At TechEd today during Steve Balmer's keynote a new Messaging and Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5.0 was announced.  This will provide direct push email to a Windows Mobile device and is aimed directly at RIM.  It will push not only email but also contacts, calander entries and tasks.  You will even be able to provide device policies and kill devices remotely via a hard reset.  Looks like the enterprise messaging market is starting to heat up and now RIM will have some competition.  There are a lot of third party sync solutions out there and Exchange did have a sync option for mobile devices but was not great because of the use of SMS.  The mobility market is really starting to get exciting now!!

Looks like palmOne has come out with a new device called the LifeDrive...strange name if you ask me.  Maybe it's there last shot at “life” in the market :)  The device contains a 4GB Hitachi harddrive with WiFi and BlueTooth built in.  They are trying to market it as a digital media device to contain all content such as Photos, mp3 etc but still keep it's roots as a digital organizer.  It still has the ability to open MS Office documents and connect to Exchange servers.  With Windows Mobile 5, iPod, and PSP it's going to be a challenge for the LifeDrive to reclaim some of the market share, and personally I don't think it will reclaim any. The only thing it might do is give Palm III or Palm V user a reason to upgrade their palm (which doesn't gain market share), but at $499US they might as well look at the other options.

Looks like RIM has announced a new developer platform called BlackBerry Mobile Data Systems (MDS) 4.1.  It's based on Java and uses Web Services (SOA) on their Enterprise Server to connect applications.  MDS is a visual IDE and has application deployment and management built in.  Good thing is since it's based on WS it should be able to connect to Windows Mobile based devices as well as Java based devices. 

http://www.rim.net/news/press/2005/pr-04_04_2005-01.shtml

Samsung developed a new windows mobile cell phone with a 3GB HD and showing it at CeBit in Germany .  Looks like Apple has inspired companies (with the iPod) yet again with thier innovative products.  I think it's the next logical step with proliferation of mobile media into the consumer market...currently devices lack space but now with HDs getting smaller than ever the HD space is finally here.  No price yet but i'm sure it will cost a fortune!
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/03/10/HNsamsunghddphone_1.html