News

First SD format WiFi card to ship; XDA owners to get WLAN links

It would be nice to get excited about it, but the announcement of a secure digital (SD) format card with WLAN functions is probably going to cause more frustration than joy, because of the number of PDAs that don't support SD input-output, when it ships at the end of this year.

Intersil Corporation has announced that SyChip, a fabless semiconductor manufacturer based in Plano, Texas, will use the Prism 3 chip set in an SD form factor Wireless LAN card - with a reference design expected by October, and sample product hopefully, shipping by year end.

But although Intersil are SyChip are both promising that the card will provide 802.11b connectivity for PDAs that have an SD slot built in, this isn't always going to be true, because several PDAs were built before their designers realised that SD would be usable for anything other than memory expansion.

So the SD card will enable wireless connectivity for these devices- but only if they have the SD I/O spec drivers - and the iPaq 3870 model, to give just one example, doesn't have SD I/O.

These new modules will support Windows 2000/XP/CE (2.11 or greater), and the Palm OS (4 and higher). Before buying a PDA, expecting to get access to the WLAN, make sure it actually does have this level of software support.

Devices which do have it, will include the Palm 500 series and the new Handspring non-phone Treo PDA. Almost certainly, the mmo2-branded Pocket PC phone, the XDA, will also accept the SD card and get network access, too.