I made the name up, OK? But, sounds good doesn't it? John Manzione has a post on MacNETv2 claiming he is certain that there will be a hard drive-based PDA from Apple by this July, maybe sooner. Today Palm announced at its developer conference that it's upcoming Palm OS 6 - now dubbed Cobalt - will not support Mac OS X. So, John says, this forces Apple's hand to pre-announce or rush deliver their secret PDA. (However, Mark/Space says they'll release a version of Missing Sync for Cobalt later this year in time for the release of Cobalt-based devices.)
This *iPDA* is said to be cross-platform and to synch with iSynch. It will be an iPod and play well with iTunes. John says the screen will be 480x320 with 65k colors. You know I want 640x480 - come on Apple! There's already a PocketPC out there with 640x480 and the clamshell Sony Clie UX50 had 480x320 in September with big borders around it that looked like more room for pixels to me.
There's a sweet spot between a cell phone and a notebook if you give us enough pixels to work with. The device is supposed to use an "OS X-like operating system" and I'm reading that to mean a subset or lite version of OS X with less cpu-sucking UI glitz and *not* an upgrade of the iPod OS. That would be an interesting possibility. MacOS Rumors has recently speculated that OS X 10.4 would have closer ties to Linux. There are several Linux-based PDAs. Maybe there's a connection there.
If this is more of a tiny notebook than a big PDA, I like the direction. Hardware is getting fast enough to give us a full-fledged computer in our hand, more in the vein, but hopefully markedly better than, the PocketPC platform.
John says it will have a keyboard and a flip screen with Bluetooth, USB and Firewire. Guess it doesn't need a card slot. If not, you better have a way of getting wi-fi on it. Or maybe Steve is counting on us running Bluetooth cell phones with fast Net access like Edge or something? I could deal with that. Then I would go with a small bluetooth phone plus the iPDA or color iPod or whatever it will be called.
One more thing, as mentioned above, John says it will have a hard drive. Its supposed to use the same drive as the new iPodmini but with a larger capacity. Sounds like summer to me before Apple could pull that off since those bigger drives don't exist yet.