Stories by Ephraim Schwartz

Dell to showcase first handheld

Dell Computer Corp., the market leader in desktop PCs, is set to announce its entry into the handheld market at Comdex Las Vegas on Nov. 18.

Microsoft unveils .NET speech platform

Microsoft unveiled Wednesday the first technical preview of its .NET Speech Platform and also announced availability of the second beta release of its .NET Speech Software Developer Kit (SDK) at the Speech TEK conference in New York.

Vendors to make Bluetooth connectivity simple

Palmsource, the operating system arm of Palm Inc., and BVRP Software Group, a mobile middleware software vendor, announced at the CTIA conference solutions that will make Bluetooth devices simpler for the end-user to operate.

IBM intros machine translation for handhelds

IBM Corp. unveiled a machine translation software application called ViaVoice Translator that will run on Pocket PC 2002 devices on Wednesday here at the DemoMobile show.

PacketVideo to support MS Windows Media Player

PacketVideo, a provider of MPEG 4 streaming video to wireless carriers announced this week that it will support Windows Media Audio and Video 9 series in its PacketVideo pvServer Mobilemedia content delivery system.

Vendors ready for Tablet OS

Microsoft.'s Windows XP Tablet PC Edition OS isn't slated to launch until Nov. 7, but companies such as Motion Computing Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Toshiba Corp., and Fujitsu Ltd. already have revealed plans to release Tablet PC products. Groove Netw...

Nokia launches multimedia application developer kit

Forum Nokia this week is shipping Mobile Internet Toolkit Version 3.1, enabling development of MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) applications for sending messages between handsets that contain voice, video, graphics, and photos.

Microsoft unveils next version of Win CE .NET

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday unveiled details of the next version of its embedded operating system, Windows CE .NET Version 4.1.

RIM gets third-party support for over-air synchronization

Xtended Systems announced on Monday that its XTNDConnect Server software, which currently runs on Palm, Pocket PC, and Symbian operating systems, will be extended to do similar wireless and cradle-based synchronization for the Research in Motion (RIM...

RIM opens platform to hardware manufacturers

Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the BlackBerry devices, joined the growing number of handheld and handset manufacturers offering their reference design to third-party hardware and software developers in an attempt to gain market share.

Speech vendors shout for standards

The battle for speech technology standards is set to escalate next week when a collection of industry leaders submits to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) a proposed framework for delivering combined graphics and speech on handheld devices.

Palm to unveil OS 5 with multitasking capabilities

Palm's next-generation operating system, OS 5, which uses the ARM (Advanced RISC Machines)-compliant OMAP (Open Multimedia Applications Platform) family of processors from Texas Instruments Inc., will be unveiled at PalmSource the week of Feb. 4 in S...

Auto giants switch on radio in fight for supremacy

Much as PC vendors count on new software to boost hardware sales, auto makers are increasingly placing their bets on in-vehicle services as a way to increase profit margins on new auto sales.

GM does US$98 billion in transactions via Covisint

While Covisint LLC is still in the midst of deploying all of its online business-to-business marketplace functionality, online procurement via its quote manager for electronic RFQs appears to be gaining traction in the industry, to the tune of US$96 ...

Research reveals mobile phone hazards

The results of a study on the brain's ability to process two cognitive tasks simultaneously appears to prove that hands-free use of cell phones while driving impairs a driver's ability to perform at 100 percent.