I had written previously that I didn't see a future in the Cradlepoint Portsmith PHS-300 personal router but apparently Sierra Wireless does. Yesterday Sierra Wireless announced that they were purchasing Cradlepoint for $21.8 million and 463,000 shares. The acquisition may fit Sierra's portfolio well as it matches up on a consumer level to the machine-to-machine / corporate markets that Airlink pursued.

However it goes it is good to see Sierra's strategy is not to stray into the smartphone market again after the disastrous Voq foray. eBay acts as a continually reminder of the Voq which persistently shows up on auction lists.

Wall Street Journal announcement.

UPDATE: On July 7th Sierra Wireless announced a termination of their purchase agreement for CradlePoint Inc based on a precondition not being met.

Tags: Sierra Wireless

Earlier this week deployed a customer trial of a Digi HSDPA enabled ConnectPort WAN and felt it was long overdue to write the following.

There are so many wireless routers to choose from, with a limited set of features, that it is hard for most to stand out from their competitors. On the face of things there is nothing remarkable about the ConnectPort WAN. It has serial connections, four port 10/100 ethernet, web setup page and support for both EVDO Rev A or HSDPA available. From here the differences start to become apparent. Read More...

Tags: Digi International, HSDPA, UMTS

The HTC S730 is the successor to the S710 and combines a full slide out QWERTY keyboard with a standard number key pad. The S730 doubles the ROM to 256MB, doubles the processor speed to 400 Mhz and adds HSDPA/UMTS to the original S710 design. I had been meaning to play with one since I first had a hands on with it in October or November. Read More...

Tags: HTC, S730

The PHS-300 was only ever a matter of time from one point of view. Prior to 2004 most wireless routers were cobbled together systems for sharing EVDO data connections. Then Junxion appeared in 2004 and was followed by Top Global in 2005 with their MB8000 which were the first, that I recall, wireless routers that allowed plug and play capabilities with PCMCIA cards from Sierra Wireless Novatel Wireless and others. Read More...

Tags: Wireless Router

A project in the UK recently gave me the occasion to reflect on the Skype phone from 3. There are the obvious points about it that have been heralded and criticized across the web for over a month now that don't need to be repeated. They all have merit to one degree or another however I think they are missing the elephant in the room. Hutchison Whampoa continues to challenge the status quo in the stodgy European wireless community and does so again with Skype. Read More...

Tags: 3, Hutchison Whampoa, Skype, iskoot

NTT DoCoMo launched the world's first commercial UMTS network on October 1, 2001 and the world watched in awe at just how fast UMTS drained the batteries of phones. It has been some time since I remember seeing in the industry news articles talking about battery problems and the high drain of UMTS. There have been the occasional stories about exploding cell phone batteries which usually leads to some story about quality control in a supplier factory or low grade third party battery suppliers. Hardly a word is spoken about battery life beyond the publish specifications. Something is missing. Read More...

Tags: HSUPA, UMTS, Bouygues Telecom

The integration of the CDMA and GSM components by RIM has piqued my interest. The normal set of BlackBerry functions in the current 4.2 OS and 8800 form factor are all present in the 8830. The two key questions I had were exactly how well had RIM integrated GSM and CDMA and how was the Sprint Worldwide International BlackBerry plan configured. For those of you interested in the actual P2K or Ensemble codes I am not going to print them all here for brevity sake. Read More...

Tags: Sprint, Blackberry, 8830

I was hoping to order a Neo 1973 but it is still premature for me. I am however intrigued by the device, as many people are with Linux in general, for what it may portend for the wireless industry. The Neo 1973 is lacking in some areas as people will be quick to point out. Yes it is missing HSDPA, WiFi and a keyboard at this stage but those are all secondary to what could be an avalanche of creative programming and be far more disruptive to the wireless industry than the iPhone. Even though Linux based phones have been available from Motorola and others in the Pac/Asia area for sometime this is the first time one has been billed as totally open for developers and hackers to play with.

http://openmoko.com/products-neo-base-00-stdkit.html

For those of you considering order it note this excerpt from the OpenMoko developer Wiki.
What you CAN NOT expect yet

* reliable means of making phone calls, esp. not from the UI
* reliable means of sending/receiving SMS, esp. not from the UI
* integrated GPRS data access
* bluetooth integration (basic bluez driver works)
* proper power management (i.e. no reasonable battery life yet)
* ringtone (or other) profile management
* network preferences (call deflection, manual operator selection, ...)
* a complete application framework where third party application developers can write apps that easily integrate with the OpenMoko world

Tags: Neo 1973, OpenMoko, Mobile Linux