HTC to Acquire Dopod

In a move that is sure to make some smartphone makers a bit unhappy, and some smartphone customers a touch nervous, the smartphone design and manufacturing powerhouse, HTC, has announced that they have begun to take steps to acquire Dopod, one of its top rivals.

DigiTimes reports, "Dopod will serve as a subsidiary of HTC. Both parties are still working out the details of the agreement, according to the [Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE)] filing."

 

Acer Boosting PDA/Smartphone Plans, To Release New Devices

A recent news article at DigiTimes pinned some interesting comments and observations about what will be going on with Acer.

Acer chairman JT Wang said earlier that Acer aims to boost sales of its handheld devices, including GPS devices, GPS-enabled PDAs and PDA phones, to US$1 billion a year.

and

As part of its plan, Acer will launch two GPS devices (one handheld model and an in-car-use model), one GPS-enabled PDA and one PDA phone in the second half of this year, according to company sources.

 

Symbian Streamlining Screen Resolution Support

With Symbian looking to expose more of the smartphone features of its OS to more and more users, standardizing on things like screen resolutions makes it a lot easier for developers and customers alike to have a better perspective of what a device is capable of.

In a recent post at the Mrktngman S60 Blog, it was stated that

...we have also decided to drop resolution support for 176x208 and double of that from 3rd Edition FP1 onward. QVGA is becoming widely used standard resolution in smartphones. Display component prices are dropping and supporting reduced set of resolutions makes life in platform development easier, less verification and testing and I'm sure it helps also in 3rd party application development and testing...

While some traditional Symbian users will surely feel the hit, the overall experience of the platform will most likely be helped by this move.

 

Fitaly 4 Released for Windows Mobile

Expanding on the very successful Fitaly 3 alternate input keypad for Pocket PCs comes Fitaly 4. This application brings three keypad sizes on VGA devices, and a host of macro and customizable settings that is sure to make an already fast keyboard, a whole lot faster.

Some of these new macro features include:

  • expand any key, letters and special keys, to whatever you want it to be with a preview of your customized definitions 
  • change an option in the Fitaly menu like changing the size of the keyboard from medium to large or changing to digits direct 
  • change to one of the other panels of the keyboard like the accent or the number panel 
  • use metakeys to execute functions like launching a photo, a document, typing today's date, editing documents, etc.

Read the entire release note and then download the trial of Fitaly 4 for your Windows Mobile device.