According to Japan Today, Toshiba is about to enter the rather crowded European mobile phone market with a high-speed Internet handset in 2002. Do we smell a GPRS Pocket PC?
There is a trend among PDA manufacturers which has become more and more obvious over the course of the past few weeks - and that's integrated wireless functionality. Compaq is about to launch its tri-band GSM/GPRS sleeve later this year, a new Pocket PC named O2 xda has taken our breath away, HP is working on some top-secret wireless sleds for the new Jornada 560 series, but Toshiba is taking it farthest of them all (while there's no clear indication of what Casio is up to these days).
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Toshiba has already earlier entered into an agreement with Sierra Wireless where the latter one will provide Toshiba with chipsets to provide Toshiba's U.S. model Pocket PCs with integrated 3G wireless functionality based on CDMA20001x networks, and according to a recent article in Japan Today, Toshiba is now about to enter the European mobile phone market with a new high-speed Internet handset.
The introduction of the new handset will take place next year, and will be a first for Toshiba which has until now avoided producing mobile phones using the GSM/GPRS standard - probably because of the fierce competition in this market. The more interesting part is that GPRS technology in mobile phones would also be used in a new line of portable computers that would come out next year, one of which would probably be a tablet-like device running on Linux according to a Toshiba spokesman. This opens up for the possibility of Toshiba branching such technology into other areas, including the Toshiba line of PDAs running on Pocket PC 2002.
Considering how Toshiba is already pursuing integrating 3G wireless connectivity in the U.S. Pocket PC models, it is more than likely that the company will follow a similar path in Europe where the market for such products simply is bigger because of the unified approach to wireless networks based on GSM and GPRS. In other words, we believe that somewhere between January 1st and December 31st 2002, we'll see a Toshiba Pocket PC with integrated GSM/GPRS - or maybe even integrated 3G connectivity.
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