Carmen Nobel

Handspring Inc., Palm Inc. and Compaq Computer Corp. are playing the slots. All three have developed a bevy of handheld devices featuring expansion slots for holding a variety of add-on modules—from gaming applications to digital cameras—that will give users new choices in the form and function of their PDAs (personal digital assistants). Leading the charge […]

A year after several hundred companies including Sun Microsystems Inc. and America Online Inc. converged on New Orleans and the CTIA Wireless show to predict that new killer applications would soon make wireless devices overtake PCs, much of that promise is still unfulfilled. In particular, over the course of the last 12 months, wireless carriers […]

Wanting to mean as much to CIOs as it does to average Joes, Palm Inc. last week announced plans to reorganize and acquire mobile middleware company Extended Systems Inc. The move makes Palm one of a growing number of wireless hardware and software vendors eager to show they have the goods and the support necessary […]

With the grand hope of making the wireless data experience more productive and less cumbersome, Sprint PCS Group and Compuware Corp. are working together to develop customized business applications for use on the Sprint Wireless Web. But the new tools, which will include a variety of vertical and general business applications such as ERP (enterprise […]

To accelerate software development on its new mobile device architecture, Texas Instruments Inc. is investing $100 million in next-generation wireless applications. The Dallas company plans to disperse the money over the next 12 to 18 months to developers who write applications for its OMAP (Open Multimedia Applications Platform). The architecture will let applications take advantage […]

Late to the smart-phone operating system game and eager to make up ground in the United States, Microsoft Corp. is now focusing its forthcoming mobile operating system on its loyal customer base: the enterprise. As U.S. carriers are not ready to begin deploying high-speed wireless networks, such as GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)—networks on which […]

Carving itself a more obvious niche in the wireless space, Hewlett-Packard Co. has launched a business organization focused on handheld devices. The Embedded and Personal Systems unit will be its own entity, the fifth of Hewlett-Packards business units. As it comprises 400 of HPs 88,500 employees, the unit will be decidedly smaller than the others—at […]

A handful of software developers are building enterprise applications on early versions of a new wireless platform from Qualcomm Inc. that promises easy downloads and broad compatibility. But whether users buy into the technology is another matter. The platform is Qualcomms Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless, or BREW. Companies including Visto Corp. and Wireless Knowledge […]

The integrity of wireless LANs is under attack with the revelation of several holes in the WLAN security protocol. As a result, IT managers and security experts are scrambling to find a solution. Last week, three researchers—two from the University of California at Berkeley and one from security vendor Zero Knowledge Systems Inc.—announced they had […]

Although debate rages on, longstanding problems with the development of hosted applications for Palm OS-based handhelds could be solved by an Extensible Markup Language middleware tool kit under development by Citrix Systems Inc. The object-oriented tool kit, code-named Vertigo, will let developers write a single version of a Web-based application and then translate the softwares […]