NeatTrix

Palm announced and demonstrated their new phone, the Palm Pre last week at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas.  The phone runs their new Linux-based WebOS and it looks very nice.  Palm, the one-time undisputed leader of the PDA have been playing catch-up for several years now, chasing the blackberry and the iPhone -not to mention all the windows-based systems.  It’s definitely late to the party, but it looks like they have put a lot of work and thought into the functionality of this phone, unlike a lot of the crappy touchscreen phones that surfaced in the wake of the iPhone.  Here’s hoping.  Videos after the jump. (continue reading…)

GainSpan (www.gainspan.com) is an electronics manufacturer that is using system-on-a-chip technology to produce a chip with an embedded 802.11 radio. Operating at 1.8V the chip can supposedly run for up to 10 years on a single AA battery. The chip also includes an ARM 32-bit microcontroller and memory. Intel is an investor in GainSpan.

Sound great! This should be great competition for Zigbee and allow the practical implementation of many solutions. Potentially, low-power 802.11 should be better than Zigbee. Sadly, price information (even for the development systems) and data sheets are not evident on the company’s website. That’s always irritating! Hopefully, GainSpan will be more forthcoming soon.