Despite the current sluggish market for PDAs, Toshiba Corp. Monday dipped
its toes into that well becoming the second company in a week to enter the
increasingly crowded space.
Toshiba is looking to take share away from market-leader Palm Inc., and it
has turned to Microsoft Corp. to provide its Windows CE operating system for
the push.
Toshiba’s first offerings, the GENIO e550 and the GENIO e550/MD, are aimed
squarely at high-end enterprise customers. Both feature an Intel StrongARM
206 MHz processor, 32MB of DRAM, two expansion slots — a Secure Digital
Input-Output (SDIO) slot for an SDIO card and SD memory card, and a CF-II
slot for compact flash cards — and Pocket versions of Microsoft Word,
Excel, Outlook, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. The GENIO
e550/MD adds a 1GB Microdrive.
Toshiba said it and third-party developers will support the expansion slots
with a number of applications, including memory cards, PHS data
communications cards, modem cards, Bluetooth cards and barcode readers.
Other cards, including GPS and wireless LAN modules, will be future
additions to the market.
“Toshiba is demonstrating its expertise in mobile computing by combining an
eye-catching industrial design with a unique and innovative approach to
expansion,” said Ben Waldman, vice president of the Mobile Devices Division
at Microsoft. “Toshiba’s Pocket PC is not only a beauty to behold, but is
also the first PDA to combine a compact flash slot and an SD slot, meaning
that users have access to both wireless connectivity and external storage at
the same time. Customers have clearly indicated that they need and expect
more than just a simple organizer, and this combination of Microsoft
software and Toshiba hardware has been designed specifically to meet and
exceed customer needs.”
Utilizing the multi-layer circuit boards it developed for its portable PCs
and cellular phones, Toshiba has slimmed its PDAs down to 17.5 mm. The
devices weigh 180 grams with a battery. They feature a 3.5-inch front-light
reflective TFT LCD supporting 65,536 colors and 240 x 320 pixel resolution.
Toshiba has not revealed pricing details for either model, but said it would
launch the e550 in Japan on August 20, and the e550/MD in September.
Toshiba rival NEC Corp. announced its entry into the PDA market last week,
saying it would unveil a PDA targeted at the corporate market by the end of
the year. Compaq’s iPAQ is currently the leading PDA to utilize Microsoft’s
WindowsCE platform. Market-leader Palm and runner-up HandSpring both use the
PalmOS.
“We looked at many options to power our future Toshiba PDAs and found
Microsoft’s Pocket PC software to be the best choice to help us build the
enterprise-class devices we’re known for, combined with software
functionality that can’t be matched,” said Steve Andler, vice president of
marketing, Toshiba Computer Systems Group. “We’re thrilled to be working
with Microsoft in this space — its Pocket PC platform has redefined the PDA
market by offering customers the widest range of functionality on a mobile
device and raising the bar for what a mobile device should do. Together we
plan to raise that bar even higher.”
