Building a PDA from scratch

Extremely powerful ARM microcontrollers have been around for ages now, but only recently have they been available for just a few dollars with a good enough toolchain for some serious development work. [Jose] wanted to develop something awesome with an ARM chip he had lying around, so he built a PDA (Spanish, translation) that can be used as a … Read the rest

Reverse engineering old PDA software

[Troy Wright] acquired a lot of twenty broken Dell Axim PDAs. This type hardware was quite popular a decade ago, but looks archaic when compared to a modern cell phone. That’s why he was able to get them for a song. After a bit of work he managed to resurrect eight of the units, but was dismayed to find there’s … Read the rest

Smartphone anti-virus software

cracked

With DEFCON and Black Hat going on, a lot of security issues are being made public. This year, cellphones have been a larger target than before. More and more people are carrying complex smartphones that have more ways to go wrong. Even worse, since phones are tied to a billed account, it is possible for malicious software to charge phones … Read the rest

Apple Newton dev kit?


[phooky] picked up this bizarre bit of dev hardware three years ago and isn’t really sure what it is. It has lots of general purpose switches, LEDs, and audio jacks. The processor is a StrongARM chip in a ZIF socket. It has two serial ports, a CF, and PCMCIA slot too. Commenter [Glen Raphael] says it looks a lot like … Read the rest