Low Cost Palm PDA

Palm has launched Z22 its latest entry level PDA. Good news is that it is color version of its predecessor Zire 21, rest of the specs are almost same. Palm is offering this color variant of Zire 21 at its old price of$99 in US.

On Palm India its listed price is Rs. 8500 without local taxes. I fail to understand the logic behind import duties for PDA, something costing around 4500 costs double here. Maybe this is responsible for low penetration of PDAs in India.

Anyway leaving aside all that I will still say that it's the cheapest PDA available in India now and is very lightweight and sleek. Those of you who want to check it out can do so at:

http://www.palm.com/in/products/handhelds/z22/

I think import duties on mobile phones are much less as we can get cellphone models almost at same price here in India, unlike old days.

Irony here is even PDA phones like O2, Imate and Treo are perhaps treated as PDAs and not phones and thus attract higher duties resulting in higher prices. I think somebody should take it up with custom department or IT department of India. May be if they listen, it can help many companies and people in India to do work on field and become more productive.

Integrating PayPal with ASP.NET

There is a good article for Integrating PayPal into E-CommerceApplications with ASP.NET on DevX by Rick Strahl.

It starts like this:

If you run a Web shop that uses direct credit card processing and youwant to integrate PayPal, you'll find that using PayPal as a processingservice is not as straightforward as using a payment gateway. In thisarticle, I'll describe how you can minimize the external PayPalinteraction and work the PayPal payment into your order processingworkflow to provide a seamless interface using ASP.NET and C#.

Read full article at: http://www.devx.com/codemag/Article/29342

Palm embraces windows mobile

Finally palm (erstwhile palmone, which was palm earlier too) has introduced a new Treo smartphone running Windows Mobile 5.0

Its called treo 700 and not the treo 670 about which there was a rumor since a long time now. Microsoft's official page for treo is at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/5/palm.mspx

You can view a webcast on that link.

Another interesting page with some pictures of new Treo 700 is: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000867059961/

Technology working at Grassroot level

Hi everybody,

I just wanted to share with you 2 software solutions, Mobile solutions to be precise. I found out about them while doing my routine surfing for getting some information. Its really good to see some top end technology working for the most need of our society.

More of such solutions are required to change the face of our mother India.

1. Tribal Welfare Information Management System (TWIMS)

TWIMS is an integrated solution of India Health Care (IHC), the School Education Management System (SEMS), Beneficiary Monitoring System (BMS), Village Monitoring System (VMS) & Accounts.

This application enables the effective distribution of the benefit schemes to tribals through the Integrated Tribal Development Agency (ITDA).

The system retrieves data from MPHS data and filters data for health, beneficiary, education and village level information. The various health-related services and information about school children is captured using personal digital assistant (PDA), a pocket computer from which the data is transferred to a desktop computer. Using this data, various reports can be generated and be given to the corresponding statistical officials.

Check out the full article at:
http://www.cmcltd.com/industry_practices/e-Governance/general_administration/twims.htm

2. Software for dairy farmers

There was a front page story in today's City Line supplement of our local english daily The Hitavada. It talks about a special software kit developed in collaboration with Maharashtra Animal and Fishery Sciences University(MAFSU), which consists of an electronic ear-tag (RFID) that can store lifetime records of the animal. The kit also includes a Pocket PC based animal data recorder based on a software named 'Herdman'.

The field persons involved in process can maintain the data at village level using a Pocket PC which is regularly transferred to milk union server via computer at village cooperative dairy. These records help the animal owners to fetch a good price for the animal. The data can also be used by the banks and insurance firms for settlement claims.

I could not find its online version, so those of you, who are interested in full story need to check out Nagpur city edition of Hitavada dated 21 September 2005.

SATHI

Encore creates the world's first integrated Battle Computer, SATHI(Situation Awareness and Tactical Handheld Information). It's a device with inbuild GPS and Radio for location awareness.

http://www.ncoretech.com/sathi/index.html