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Palm OS 5 Powers Up Cell Phones
Arik Hesseldahl, 03.14.03, 10:00 AM ET
Ten O'Clock Tech
http://www.forbes.com/home_europe/2003/03/14/cx_ah_0314tentech.html

NEW YORK - If this week was all about mobile computing, the coming week will be all about mobile phone handsets.

Next week the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association kicks off its big trade show in New Orleans. It's at this show that manufacturers of mobile handsets start showing off their new phone models that will carry them through the rest of the year.


Samsung's SGH-i500 PDA phone features Palm OS 5.

As it happens, the CTIA trade show is taking place within a few days of the CeBit trade show in Germany, which started March 12, where many phones also tend to be unveiled for the first time. One that caught our eye came from South Korea's Samsung.

The SGH-i500 is the first mobile phone-PDA combination that runs on Palm OS 5. This is the newest version of the Palm operating system, which has so far debuted in handhelds from Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) and Palm (nasdaq: PALM - news - people ), and is coming in a handheld from Garmin (nasdaq: GRMN - news - people ). It is produced by Palm subsidiary Palmsource.

The phone has a clamshell design, which for Samsung is a departure from its previous candy bar-shaped Palm phones. It runs on global system for mobile communications/ general packet radio services networks (or GSM/GPRS networks) like those operated by Cingular Wireless, Deutsche Telekom's (nyse: DK - news - people ) T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless (nyse: AWE - news - people ). It's a tri-band phone, so it should work in the U.S., Europe and much of Asia.

It can handle features like multimedia messaging and WAP Web browsing, and it has a 330,000 pixel digital camera. Inside is an Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) Xscale chip running at 300 megahertz.

Another new feature is the new Graffiti 2 pen-input system, which replaces the original Graffiti system that was unique to the first Palm handhelds. The original Graffiti system fell victim to a legal fight between Palm and Xerox (nyse: XRX - news - people ). Xerox has argued that Graffiti too closely resembled a Xerox-made system called Unistroke. Graffiti 2 is based on software called Jot from a software firm called CIC, of Redwood Shores, Calif.

Samsung hasn't yet said much about price of its unit, but it should appear in the third quarter of this year. The company has aggressive plans for mobile phone sales for the rest of the year. San-Jin Park, head of Samsung's mobile phone division, told an audience of reporters in Hannover, Germany, that the company plans to sell 52.5 million handsets this year. That would solidify its place as the number three maker of handsets behind Finland's Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people ) and Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people ) in the U.S.

It might just make that goal. Samsung's unit sales grew by 50% while the rest of the industry's players saw their sales pick up by smaller margins.