iPAQ

The iPAQ is a discontinued Pocket PC and personal digital assistant which was first unveiled by Compaq in April 2000. HP's line-up of iPAQ devices included PDA-devices, smartphones and GPS-navigators. A substantial number of devices were outsourced from Taiwanese HTC corporation. The name was borrowed from Compaq's earlier iPAQ Desktop Personal Computers. Following Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of Compaq, the product has been marketed by HP. The devices use a Windows Mobile interface. In addition to this, there are several Linux distributions that also operate on some of these devices. Earlier units were modular. Sleeve accessories were released called "jackets", which slide around the unit and add functionality such as a card reader, wireless networking, GPS, and extra batteries. Later versions of iPAQs have most of these features integrated into the base device itself, some including GPRS mobile telephony (SIM card slot and radio). History The iPAQ was developed by Compaq based on the SA-1110 "Assabet" and SA-1111 "Neponset" reference boards that were engineered by a StrongARM development group located at Digital Equipment Corporation's Hudson Massachusetts facility. At the time when these boards were in development, this facility was acquired by Intel. When the "Assabet" board is combined with the "Neponset" companion processor board they provide support for 32 megabytes of SDRAM in addition to CompactFlash and PCMCIA slots along with an I2S or AC-Link serial audio bus, PS/2 mouse and trackpad interfaces, a USB host controller and 18 additional GPIO pins. Software drivers for a CompactFlash Ethernet device, IDE storage devices such as the IBM Microdrive and the Lucent WaveLAN/IEEE 802.11 Wifi device were also available. An earlier StrongARM SA-1100 based research handheld device call the "Itsy" had been developed at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory (later to become the Compaq Western Research Laboratory).