Toshiba PDA to offer VGA screen

Quadruples traditional Pocket PC screen size

Toshiba's next Pocket PC PDA will take a leaf out of Palm's book by offering a large format LCD display bigger than anything seen on the platform to date.

The e805 will sport a 480 x 640 screen, according to a number of US and Taiwanese web sites. Traditionally, Pocket PCs offer a display offering a quarter of that resolution, 240 x 320.

Toshiba will apparently get around the problem of very limited 480 x 640 support in software by shipping its own launcher application and a number of other programs that can handle the extra screen space. The larger screen size is not believed to be supported by Windows Mobile 2003.

It's also unclear at this stage whether Toshiba's screen will be larger than the regular 3.5in Pocket PC screen, or of a similar size. Alleged dimensions of 13 x 7.8 x 1.6cm (5 x 3.2 x 0.7in) suggest the latter. The e805 is said to weigh 195g (6.9oz).

It is believed the device will be powered by a 400MHz Intel XScale PCA263 processor, and ship with 128MB of SDRAM, 32MB of ROM and 32MB of Flash memory. The e805 will offer an SD and a CompactFlash slot, online reports suggest.

The e805 is expected to be launched later this month. While it hasn't appeared on Amazon.com itself, we note that a number of accessories said to be applicable to the new machine have done. ®

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