Nokia PDA speculation increases

AHEAD OF THE announcement later today concerning Psion's former Symbian holding, The INQ has been deluged with information concerning a possible successor to the Psion Revo to come from Nokia.

Basically there seems to have been three Symbian based machines that never made it: - Psion developed Thor - a more data centric Revo-like device with QWERTY keyboard; Motorola developed Odin, a device similar to the Sony Ericsson P800/P900 with flip and Conan was the Psion Revo with Bluetooth and a backlight whose development costs were blamed for the decision to pull the plug on the entire consumer PDA range.

Most correspondents trash the original rumour that a Series 60 based PDA as mooted here as highly improbable. Mainly because the Series 60 is so handset centric. That machine was supposedly the 6870.

It appears the Odin inheritance is the Motorola A920/A925/A1000 line using the UIQ interface. The Thor was apparently kicking around at CeBit 2000 and here's a pic of it. The pic comes courtest of Psionwelt.de.

Which brings us onto the latest Nokia PDA rumour. Apparently the device is called the 9800. Seems unlikely as there's another (non-handset) Nokia product with the 9800 tag. Perhaps that should be 9580? Whatever it's called it should boast a large Qwerty keyboard; 640x240 display; Bluetooth; a camera, and an MP3 player. Allof this might account for the sudden decision to can the 7700. Which incidentally is a blow for the launch of visaul radio?

Nomura recently predicted that 13 million of the 22 million smartphones it expects to ship in 2004 will use Symbian, against a mere 1.1 million for Microsoft. That figures appears a bit low as Sierra Wireless' Voq started shipping yesterday (July 6th) with KPN in the Netherlands and Motorola should have more Windows based smartphones out soon. Don't dismiss The Beast's effort to capture the smartphone sector quite yet. µ