Information Technology & Communication

The Palm TX

A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a palmtop computer, is a mobile device which functions as a Personal information manager and connects to the internet. The PDA has an electronic visual display enabling it to include a web browser, but some newer models also have audio capabilities, enabling them to be used as mobile phones or portable media players. Many PDAs can access the internet, intranets or extranets via Wi-Fi, or Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWANs). Many PDAs employ touch screen technology.

The term PDA was first used on January 7, 1992, by Apple Computer CEO John Sculley at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, referring to the Apple Newton. In 1996, Nokia introduced the first mobile phone with full PDA functionality, the 9000 Communicator, which has since grown to become the world’s best-selling PDA and which spawned a category of phones called the smartphone. Today the vast majority of all PDAs are smartphones, selling over 150 million units while non-phone (“stand-alone”) PDAs sell only about 3 million units per year. The RIM BlackBerry, the Apple iPhone and the Nokia N-Series and HTC are typical smartphones.

Popular consumer PDAs

Abacus PDA Watch
Acer N Series
AlphaSmart
Amida Simputer
BlackBerry
Encore Simputer
E-TEN
Fujitsu Siemens Computers Loox
HP iPAQ
HTC Corporation (Dopod, Qtek)’s series of Windows Mobile PDA/phones (HTC)
HTC, especially the HTC P3470 aka Pharos
I-mate
Palm, Inc. (Tungsten E2, TX, Treo, Zire Handheld, and Pre)
PocketMail (email PDA with inbuilt acoustic coupler)
Psion – obsolete
Royal
Sharp Wizard and Sharp Zaurus – obsolete

AP - Business software maker Tibco Software Inc. said late Thursday that it agreed to buy privately held business data matching software company Netrics for an undisclosed sum.

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Macworld.com - As developers are revving up for the iPad’s release, I-Play and Tequila Mobile hope to make a splash with their own launch announcement. On Thursday, I-Play announced that Warships: Sea on Fire will be sailing the expansive screens of the iPad when the device launches next week.

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BusinessWeek - Just how much should you trust the cloud? It's a question you'll need to ask yourself as software and data slip the confines of your hard drive and take up residence on remote servers thousands of miles away.

PC World - It's no secret that Netflix has been gearing up to stream movies and TV shows via the Nintendo Wii console, but now it appears the launch is near. Netflix today announced that it has shipped instant-streaming discs to some of members for testing. "Their feedback will ensure that we deliver a great experience to everyone when we launch," writes company spokesperson Jessie Becker on The Netflix Blog.

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The first use of the term in public was by Jesse James Garrett in February 2005.^[1] Garrett thought of the term when he realized the need for a shorthand term to represent the suite of technologies he was proposing to a client.

Although the term Ajax was coined in 2005, most of the technologies that enable Ajax started a decade earlier with Microsoft’s initiatives in developing Remote Scripting. Referring to the idea as Inner-Browsing, Netscape Evangelism published an article in 2003 which presented ideas for implementing models in which “all navigation occurs within a single page, as in a typical application interface.”[2] Techniques for the asynchronous loading of content on an existing Web page without requiring a full reload date back as far as the IFRAME element type (introduced in Internet Explorer 3 in 1996) and the LAYER element type (introduced in Netscape 4 in 1997, abandoned during early development of Mozilla). Both element types had a src attribute that could take any external URL, and by loading a page containing JavaScript that manipulated the parent page, Ajax-like effects could be attained. This set of client-side technologies was usually grouped together under the generic term of DHTML. Macromedia’s Flash could also, from version 4, load XML and CSV files from a remote server without requiring a browser to be refreshed.

Microsoft’s Remote Scripting (MSRS), introduced in 1998, acted as a more elegant replacement for these techniques, with data being pulled in by a Java applet with which the client side could communicate using JavaScript. This technique worked on both Internet Explorer version 4 and Netscape Navigator version 4 onwards. Microsoft then created the XMLHttpRequest object in Internet Explorer version 5 and first took advantage of these techniques using XMLHttpRequest in Outlook Web Access supplied with the Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 release.

The Web development community, first collaborating via the microsoft.public.scripting.remote newsgroup and later through blog aggregation, subsequently developed a range of techniques for remote scripting to enable consistent results across different browsers. In 2002, a user-community modification^[3] to Microsoft Remote Scripting was made to replace the Java applet with XMLHttpRequest.

Remote Scripting Frameworks such as ARSCIF^[4] surfaced in 2003 not long before Microsoft introduced Callbacks in ASP.NET.^[5]

In addition, the World Wide Web Consortium has several Recommendations that also allow for dynamic communication between a server and user agent, though few of them are well supported. These would include:

• The object element defined in HTML 4 for embedding arbitrary content types into documents, (replaces inline frames under XHTML 1.1)
• The Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Load and Save Specification [1]

References

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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