Kyocera Smartphone Ideas
Like many developers, I've gotten really excited about the new Kyocera Smartphone, the QCP-7135. As a user of their current device, the QCP-6035, I really like the all-in-one Palm OS device and phone form factor. However, the 6035 is a little bulky, and the screen is hard-to-read, compared to 2002-era color Palm OS devices. I usually find myself carrying around both my smartphone and my Sony CLIE T615C, using the phone for all my PIM applications, and the Sony for gaming, e-book reading, AvantGo, and picture viewing.
 The 7135 solves several of my problems, and it also adds some capabilities I'd not yet used. First, it has a color, backlit screen. This makes it much easier to use at night, and actually makes it practical for e-book reading. It has 16Mb of RAM, which is great for development, and it has a SD card slot, so you can store lots of media (books, music, pictures).
The two new features that look really interesting are MP3 playback and GPS. Both have been available on Palm OS devices before, but never on a device this small, and never integrated together. It will be interesting to see how GPS gets integrated into applications. The ZIP code identifier that the Palm VII series supported made a lot of mobile applications simpler, and GPS can handle those apps better, since the location is a lot better specified. Of course, I'd expect map programs to handle this, but there are lots of other uses. My buddy Eric will probably have a few ideas for apps that can help geocachers. What about a photo viewer that lets you save locations of pictures you shoot on your SD-capable camera.
MP3 playback is nice -- I already use an MP3 player when I go on walks. We need SD media size to increase for this to be really useful, although I could see a SD BlueTooth card that pulled songs from a pocket BT hard drive as an interesting idea. I think we need more Palm OS apps that integrate music playback with the program -- consider a game that used music to create specific moods, or just storing speech as low bitrate MP3.
Finally, while we've had wireless Palm OS devices, this is the first 3G device, and it offers instant bandwidth, similar to a current 56K modem. This is fast enough to enable picture messaging, music streaming, and online gameplay. I want to see some really clever applications find a way to use this bandwidth for good purpose, and I hope Sprint PCS and the other carriers don't hamper creativity through high usage charges.
The only downside to this device is its small screen size. 160x160 works pretty well, but with Sony showing how good a 320x320 screen can look, it will be hard to go back. However, considering that I was really happy with my Prism, it might not be much of a sacrifice.
Battery life is also up in the air right now. Kyocera says 3.5 hours of talk, 160 hours standby, but those figures rely on no Palm OS usage, from what I can tell. Once you start using the battery to run your organizer too, we'll see if its going to be a charge once-a-week device like the current 6035, or a charge every day device like the current CLIEs.
Mozilla Alert
If you're using Mozilla to surf the web, you might want to try the latest nightly builds from mozilla.org to view this site. Mozilla 1.1a and older were giving me problems with not recognizing that the pages on this site had changed, but the latest builds fix this for me.
Send feedback to combee@techwood.org
Copyright © 2004 Benjamin L. Combee
Palm OS is a registered trademark of PalmSource, Inc.
Metrowerks and CodeWarrior are registered trademarks of Metrowerks Inc.
The views expressed on this website/weblog are those of mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of PalmSource or Metrowerks.
qwertYAK / frobnovich
|
