CeBIT 2004 news: Wi-Fi (802.11b) comes to Microsoft smartphone !
March 21, 2004 [Wireless (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ...)] | By anonymous 1.
We firmly believe, that ultimately the success of Microsoft smartphone platform at large, depends on availability of Wi-Fi drivers for SDIO cards for the smartphone - only then these phones can be also used to the full in enterprise and home environments and thus spawn new wave of applications. While visiting CeBIT 2004 trade show we were talking to 3 companies that promised delivery of SDIO Wi-Fi drivers for the Microsoft smartphone (they are working on it now): Socket Communications, SanDisk and Mitac.
The SDIO Wi-Fi cards are a bit longer than SD memory cards, so when insterted into the smartphone, they are protruding a bit:
... but generally it is not a big problem - the big speed of Wi-Fi (11 megabit/second in minimal version - 802.11b) makes up for this size.
Below we present exactly how the situation of "Wi-Fi for Microsoft Smartphone" looks like.
- Socket Communications
On picture above you can see Martin Croome who is General Manager at Socket Communications. He said that his company already has drivers for Microsoft smartphone for SDIO Wi-Fi cards and that they are testing them in "SPV2" (meaning: Orange SPV e200). He was confident that these drivers are coming, but SanDisk unfortunately was not showing anything about MS Smartphone at their stand at CeBIT so we have still some doubts...
- SanDisk
On picture above you can see David Guidry who is Product Marketing Manager at SanDisk. He was saying that SanDisk is going to release drivers for SDIO Wi-Fi cards for Microsoft Smartphone too. He was underlining that the core operating system of Microsoft smartphone and Pocket PC (for which SanDisk already has drivers) are the same, so that it will be (according to him) easy to port these drivers. Here again we have some doubts whether Mr. Guidry really knew what he was talking about... because again SanDisk was not showing anything specific to Microsoft smartphone at the CeBIT trade show.
- Mitac
On picture above you can see product description of new Microsoft smartphoen from Mitac: the Mio 8860, where it is clearly written that this smartphone will support Wi-Fi! On top of that we were interviewing Mr. Francis Tsai who is president of the whole Mitac corporation (click here to see his picture and more infos from this interview), who told us that Mitac has Wi-Fi cards working in their smarpthones in labs already. He said that they cooperate with SyOnChip company in development of these drivers and mentioned that Mitac will be offering Mitac-branded SDIO Wi-Fi cards, that however will be compatible with other SyOnChip Wi-Fi cards (used also by SanDisk and Socket Communications). So you can see that we got double confirmation from Mitac about Wi-Fi for MS Smartphone, so at least in case of Mitac we can be certain that Wi-Fi is coming.
Please note: the term "Wi-Fi" denotes 802.11b (2.5 GHz frequency, 11 megabit/second speed), 802.11g (2.5 GHz frequency, 54 megabit/second speed) and 802.11a (higher frequency, 54 megabit/second speed). Previously the term "WLAN" = Wireless LAN was used to denote Wi-Fi.
Conclusions: while still there are no drivers for Microsoft smartphone for SDIO Wi-Fi cards, it is clear that several companies are working on them now. If everything goes well, then yet in this year we will see Wi-Fi available commercially for end users for Microsoft smartphones. Since Symbian smartphones (like for examples Nokia´s Series 60 phones) use only MMC card slot, that is good only for memory cards, but not for input/output cards like Wi-Fi, the release of Wi-Fi drivers for SDIO Wi-Fi cards will mark major breakthrough for Microsoft smartphone platform and constitute finaly proof of superiority of this platform over Symbian.
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