Vodafone may go with BSquare

NOW WE KNOW Vodafone is going to offer Citrix over GPRS to its customers, we started sniffing round in the byways of Edinburgh, to find a device letting operators deliver this service.

Enter Ivan Donn, director for mobile applications with Vodafone, who gave us a big clue.

At a special scotch-laden, haggis-heavy Citrix hosted dinner, Donn waxed lyrical about BSquare.

Last year this company launched its Power Handheld reference design. The proposed device will be powered by a 400MHz Intel XScale processor and crucially will use the Windows CE .NET o/s.

It features a retractable QWERTY keyboard and a 640 by 480 'landscape' screen.

It fits the bill for a mobile Citrix terminal as the blurb says it is intended as an enterprise device, rather than a dedicated email terminal like RIM's Blackberry. End user price should be around $500 but we're not sure who will be making it for Vodafone - if that should prove to be the case! µ