Wireless World: New roaming standard?

CHICAGO, Jan. 20 (UPI) -- Consumer interest in mobile Internet access continues to climb, and computer industry leaders including Intel Corp. and others are now calling for the creation of a global roaming standard for wireless, experts tell United Press International's Wireless World.

Current standards like WiFi and WiMax cannot take wireless to the next level -- international roaming -- because convergence of technologies is creating new demands on networks. By Gene Koprowski

Sounds good to me. With the technology update for hard drives, microdrives could be stuffed into PDAs and you could truely have a hand held PC

PDAs have the bright color screens and interface parts down; iPods have 60GB hard drives. I'm increasingly frustrated that someone, preferably Apple, hasn't yet combined the two devices (three, if you consider smartphones like Treo).

I still can't get used to how cell phones are done in the US. In Germany I paid X low amount monthly, plus for my individual outgoing calls. Incoming calls were paid for by the caller. Going anywhere in the country was exactly the same for billing, it was only an issue when driving to a different country.

I know. I want a treo with a hard drive.

Tell it, brother. But Palm OS is kind of lagging lately, and I'm not a fan of pocket PC, so I'd like to see a PDA version of OS X, maybe with an emulation layer for the Palm apps I've gotten used to.

Going from a Palm/Cell phone/iPod to a Treo/iPod cut my pocket clutter from three devices to two. I'd like to cut it to one.

I had a Treo 650 with a 1 GB SD card installed. The Palm OS crashed 3 to 10 times EACH DAY. I never knew whether my phone was crashed or not. I handed Verizon another $200 for a Samsung sch-i730. The SD card worked in that phone as well. It is now loaded with MP3 music and music videos. The phone is stable and the Internet Exporer does a decent job of rendering most web content. No Java JVM.

Palm was getting sued over the Treo 600/650 crashes as I traded mine for the Windows Mobile 2003 based Samsumg device. The Treo is now available with the Windows Mobile 5.0 AND upgraded phone hardware to handlr 1XEV-DO (just like the Samsung). The Palm version of the Treo was 1XRTT only.

I liked the Treo. I wanted it to replace my 1998 vintage Palm III. It failed as a replacement Palm Pilot. It failed as a phone. I wish them better luck with the upgraded phone hardware and Windows Mobile 5.0 OS.

If you are fortunate enough to live in a city with 1XEV-DO service, the web browsing a very quick on the i730. It is less so where only 1XRTT service is available.

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