Handspring launches PDA phone with keyboard

London: US-based Handspring introduced a handheld computer with a built-in cellphone for the European and Asian markets on Monday, beating its biggest rivals to what is expected to be a fast growing market. Called Trio, the 150-gram monochrome display product will go on sale for around $600 in January in an English-language version, starting in Britain, Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore. Other languages will follow in later months.

The Trio is designed for the GSM (global system for mobile communications) mobile transmission technology prevalent in Europe. Handspring said it did not plan a version for the dominant wireless networks in the US, based on CDMA (code division multiple access) technology. Makers of handheld computers and cellphones are rushing to introduce new do-everything mobile devices, bringing back memories of the excitement produced by the launch of the first tiny mobile phones some five years ago.

Now that cellphone are widely owned, companies hope these new devices, which combine a phone and a personal digital assistant (PDA), will become the engines of growth.

With its announcement, Handspring steals a march on rival handheld computer maker Palm Inc, which last month postponed the launch of its long-anticipated I705 model, which is expected to be a PDA-phone combination.

Handspring and Palm, which use the same software but are rivals in hardware, together have well over 50 per cent of the total market for PDAs. They compete with PDAs using software from Microsoft, Canada’s research in motion with its Blackberry devices, and Psion.

A colour screen version of Trio will go on sale at an estimated $750 next summer, when Handspring also plans an email service similar to the one offered by Rim’s Blackberry devices. The Blackberry service, which is a huge success in the US, forwards corporate email automatically to a small handheld computer. It has just been introduced in Europe by British Telecommunications Plc’s wireless unit O2.

Handspring was founded by key executives who had earlier helped to set up Palm before it was sold to US Robotics, now a 3Com company.

Handspring has tweaked the Palm software to improve the phone functions. Consumers will be able to make calls and send text messages from their address books.

— Reuters