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Socket plugs gap in market for company handhelds
Notebooks were for years heavy and ugly, and looked as if they were designed by engineers for travelling salesmen who spent their lives in cars. This was very largely because they were designed for travelling salesmen in cars.
Time after time vendors would come to PCW Tower to show their latest and greatest, and face an earbashing from your reporter along the lines of: "When are you going to make notebooks people actually want? Something you can carry about without wheels, perhaps?"
It became clear that notebooks were not made for the consumer market at all. Manufacturers would ask big enterprise buyers what they wanted, and that was what got made. If any were sold in the high street, so much the better.
Now the reverse is the case, not so much with notebooks, which come in distinct enterprise and consumer models, but with handheld computers. Dell has dropped out of the market with the demise of the Axim, and HP is wavering, leaving small companies who need handhelds only a narrow choice of consumer models.
So says Kevin Mills, Irish-born head of the Californian company Socket Mobile, which was formerly known as Socket Communications. The change of name stems from his belief that a gap has appeared between the market for consumer PDAs and that for industrial-strength models from the likes of Symbol and Britain's Psion Teklogix.
He says consumer models change too fast and lack features required by small companies, whereas industrial models work out very expensive, and are generally sold in batches of thousands to very big enterprises.
Mills stresses that he is talking about models without cellular links, a dying breed even in the consumer market where they are being supplanted by the smartphone. There remains a big market in hospitals, shops, restaurants and warehouses for devices with local wireless links.
Socket, in its former incarnation, specialised in industrial add-ons like bar-code readers that can transform a PDA into an information-logging device. "Now we have basically pressed the reset button," he says. "We're a systems company."
It will still sell add-ons for any make of mobile (its Bluetooh barcode scanner, which is worn as a ring, is pictured right) but it will now sell complete systems built round its own PDA. The SoMo 650 (top left) is built for durability and packs 11g Wifi, Bluetooth 2.0, CF and SDIO slots, 128MByte SDRAM, and 256MByte of working memory, a 624MHz Intel processor, and The Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system.
It will be available here in June.
Posted by Clive Akass on May 2, 2007 | Permalink
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