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Hewlett-Packard is expected to unveil a wireless-enabled addition to its Jornada range of personal digital assistants at the GSM World Congress in Cannes beginning February 19.

Details of the HP Jornada 928 WDA are scheduled to be released at an introductory event at Cannes.

Existing models in HP's Jornada range all run variations of the Microsoft Windows CE operating system software. Microsoft has been working to develop a new version of its PDA operating system, integrating wireless telephony functions such as dialing numbers straight from the address book, maintaining logs of calls made and received, and sending and receiving text messages by Short Message Service (SMS) technology.

Wireless OS Ready

Microsoft has said that new handheld devices using the updated software, provisionally titled Wireless Pocket PC, will go on sale in the first half of this year. The company gave a preview of its PDA telephony technology at the Consumer Electronics Show last January.

HP is among the partners that will manufacture the devices for use on Global System for Mobile Communications mobile phone networks, Microsoft officials said at the CES event.

The standard configuration for Wireless Pocket PCs will be a 206MHz StrongArm processor with 32MB of RAM and ROM, Microsoft officials said at the CES show.

Wireless Pocket PC is the third flavor of Windows CE being developed for handheld devices going forward. Of the other two, the vanilla version, Pocket PC 2002, includes no support for wireless telephony functions and is intended for standard PDAs.

Alternate Windows

For devices that will function more as phones than as PDAs, Microsoft has developed a slimmed-down version of the software, Windows-Powered Smartphone 2002. Better known by its Stinger codename, Smartphone 2002 has a keypad interface rather than a touch-sensitive display and stylus, and excludes the Pocket Word and Pocket Excel applications included in the standard Pocket PC configuration.

HP's most recent Jornada update is the Jornada 560 handheld series, first shown in September at the Demomobile conference. It runs Pocket PC 2002, Microsoft's second version of the operating system for handhelds, which became available in October. That version of the OS adds features that Microsoft said were most often requested by business users. The Pocket PC 2002 supports handwriting recognition and VPNs, and can "beam" information to devices running either Pocket PC or Palm's competing operating system.

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