Oct/Nov 2006

It's a brave company these days that launches itself into the competitive international mobile phone market. But German-based ROAD (standing for Remote Office Access Devices) thinks it can appeal with its clamshell handyPC system, which doubles as a PDA and general lifestyle device.

There's basically one launch model, which looks somewhat like a flip-top mobile phone in the HP mould, but runs under Linux, which makes it more of a rarity.

It come fully equipped with must-have features such as quad-band GSM phone capability, personal information manager, Internet browser and email client, MP3 player, PC synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook, and viewer application for Microsoft Office documents and PDFs.

The display is a Colour TFT 640x240 pixel with touchscreen capability, and there is also a full QWERTY keyboard, plus optional 2-megapixel camera.

 

The main processor is a 400MHz Intel PXA 263 unit, backed by 128MB of RAM and 64MB flash memory. The operating system is Linux kernel 2.6, with a Qtopia graphical front end. Connectivity features include Bluetooth wireless networking, infra-red, mini-USB port and SD-card slot.