14 DAY TRIAL // Elektrobit, a Finland-based company, announced the future release of their first PDA, under the name of "EB Satellite/Terrestrial Reference PDA Phone". Despite this not quite attractive name, the future device will apparently bring together both good looks and advanced functionality and it won't even cost too much.
Resembling in terms of design to Motorola's Q smartphone and several BlackBerries, the EB Satellite measures 118 x 64.8 x 16.25 millimeters (4.7 x 2.5 x 0.6 inches), which is more than OK for a PDA / smartphone. The new device will offer quad-band GSM connectivity (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz), dual-band WCDMA (850 / 1900) and TerreStar HSDPA connectivity (2.2 Ghz). The last one will be compatible with TerreStar's satellite network that should be launched in the US next year.
EB Satellite also offers a 2.6 TFT touchscreen display with 16 million colors and 320 x 240 pixels, built-in GPS, Wi-Fi, VoIP, Bluetooth 2.0, a full QWERTY keyboard for easy text input, a 5-way navigation key, a 3 Megapixel camera with flash, auto focus and video recording (QVGA at 15 fps), Music and video players with most of the common formats supported, 100MB of internal memory and microSD card support for up to (only) 2GB.
The new Elektrobit PDA runs on Windows Mobile 6.1, hence it brings the whole Microsoft suite, including Outlook for mobile email, Office Mobile, Internet Explorer Mobile and Instant Messaging.
EB Satellite will be launched at the beginning of 2009, for a "competitive" and yet unannounced price. At the moment, we can't say if this PDA is indeed as good as it appears to be, but we sure hope so, as the Finnish origin of Elektrobit ups the company's credentials when it comes to producing mobile devices (think about Nokia, world's leading handset manufacturer).