PDAs

For some of us personal digital assistants are a piece of equipment without which we cannot lead a normal business life. Since the first old monochromatic Palm I had, I saw the major benefits that handheld computers provide to its owners.

Nowadays, as handhelds overcame their basic disadvantages such as networking and peripheral usage, these little machines became a normal thing within most of the households and organizations. With all the features handhelds offer and their increased usage comes a great responsibility for keeping the data secure.

Palm OS 5 provides an implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol through the SSL library. By using the SSL protocol, you can guarantee that the data you send to and receive from the network or Internet will be secure and authentic. This article shows you how to use the Palm OS 5 SSL APIs for secure data communication.

Dell's Axim x3 PDA, announced last week and due to be released next month, will feature integrated Wi-Fi, according to Federal Communications Commission filings that detail the product's spec.

The FCC documents reveal the x3 is based on Intel's XScale CPU running at 300MHz or 400MHz, depending on which version of the x3 you buy. The 400MHz version ships with 64MB of SDRAM and 48MB of Flash memory. The 300MHz x3 has 32MB each of SDRAM and Flash. These specs. match those of the current x5 models.

If one in three houses in your street were left with their front doors open at night would you think their owners were asking for trouble? One in three PDA users keep their PDA's unprotected by not bothering with passwords which could end with the same dire consequences as keeping their doors open at night.

Symantec will introduce this week Symantec AntiVirus for Handhelds, mobile device-residing software designed to detect malicious code for the Palm and Pocket PC platforms.

Despite little evidence that viruses severely affect handheld devices, security vendors want to ensure on-demand AV (anti-virus) infrastructure protection if an outbreak occurs.

By the end of this year, the plain, vanilla PDA market will have shrunk by nearly ten per cent. Instead, users are demanding "converged" devices, says a survey by research company IDC. And at last, the market seems to be getting the design right.

The shrinking of the PDA business isn't a new trend, either. It will come as small surprise to anybody working with mobile devices, but the figures show that PDAs without voice capabilities sold less this year than last year by 8.4 per cent - the second year in a row that sales have dropped substantially.

Hand-held computers used to store phone numbers, medical and credit-card information leave millions of gadget lovers fully exposed to identity-theft and other crimes, security experts said Saturday.

Software is now widely available to allow people to steal passwords and other information from popular Palm-based computers, especially when they connect to other computers to share data, said Bryan Glancey, a manager at wireless security services provider MobileArmor of St. Louis, Missouri.

Samsung today announced what it claims is the world's fastest PDA processor, the ARM9-based S3C2440, clocked at 533MHz.

Actually, Samsung claimed the device is "the world's fastest mobile CPU", but we think Intel would challenge that assertion. Its mobile Pentium M is clocked at 1.7GHz, more than three times the frequency of the new Samsung part.

Sony's next handheld computer promises to break new ground in September, but even impressed analysts think its price tag may outweigh its benefits.

The miniature computer does it all: helps customers manage their schedules, records and plays back hours of video, takes pictures, sends and receives e-mail, and surfs the Web wirelessly. Sony has even developed its own Handheld Engine to ensure that the device does it all without taxing the battery life.

Have you ever wanted to use some of those cool gadgets shown in Star Trek? Phaser rifles and replicators are high on my list. How about a universal translator??? Well check this out. It's called the Phraselator and was developed by Applied Data Systems . It's a portable and ruggedized PDA-size device with large vocabulary and speaker independent phrase recognition.