The SIMpad is a portable computer developed by the company Keith & Koep by order of

Siemens AG Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad. The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', ''E ...

, with an 8.4" TFT

touchscreen A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input ('touch panel') and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is ofte ...

. Commonly used with wireless network cards, it was marketed as a device to browse the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

. Initially announced in January 2001 at the

Consumer Electronics Show CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event ty ...

There are five known model variants, all out of production: *CL4: The low-end model with 32 MB

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch ...

and 16 MB

Flash ROM Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use t ...

without

PC card In computing, PC Card is a configuration for computer parallel communication peripheral interface, designed for laptop computers. Originally introduced as PCMCIA, the PC Card standard as well as its successors like CardBus were defined and devel ...

slot but with

DECT Digital enhanced cordless telecommunications (Digital European cordless telecommunications), usually known by the acronym DECT, is a standard primarily used for creating cordless telephone systems. It originated in Europe, where it is the common ...

modem. *WP50: A variant sold by

Swisscom Swisscom AG is a major telecommunications provider in Switzerland. Its headquarters are located in Ittigen near Bern. The Swiss government owns 51.0 percent of Swisscom AG. According to its own published data, Swisscom holds a market share o ...

. Same as the CL4. *T-Sinus Pad: A variant sold by

Deutsche Telekom Deutsche Telekom AG (; short form often just Telekom, DTAG or DT; stylised as ·T·) is a German telecommunications company that is headquartered in Bonn and is the largest telecommunications provider in Europe by revenue. Deutsche Telekom w ...

. This one is the same as the CL4 but with a PC card slot. *SL4: The high end model, with 64 MB

and 32 MB

. This one also has a PC card slot. *SLC: Identical to the SL4, but with the addition of a Siemens MD34

modem, allowing connection to certain Siemens

ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is a set of communication standards for simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data, and other network services over the digitalised circuits of the public switched telephone network. Wor ...

telephone systems. All variants contain: *An

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

StrongARM#SA-1110 SA-1110 32-bit

RISC In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set compu ...

processor with a clock frequency of 206 MHz *An 8.4"

TFT LCD A thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT LCD) is a variant of a liquid-crystal display that uses thin-film-transistor technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active matrix LCD, in con ...

with an

SVGA Super VGA (SVGA) is a broad term that covers a wide range of computer display standards that extended IBM's VGA specification. When used as shorthand for a resolution, as VGA and XGA often are, SVGA refers to a resolution of 800×600. History ...

resolution (800×600 pixels) *4-wire analog resistive touch interface *A single 16-bit

slot (not included in some CL4 models designed to use the Siemens MD34 DECT module) *A standard

ISO/IEC 7816 ISO/IEC 7816 is an international standard related to electronic identification cards with contacts, especially smart cards, and more recently, contactless mobile devices, managed jointly by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO ...

SmartCard A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card (ICC or IC card) is a physical electronic authentication device, used to control access to a resource. It is typically a plastic credit card-sized card with an embedded integrated circuit (IC) c ...

interface *A

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply ( interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broa ...

1.1 client interface (not fully functional in production releases, but see Mullenger.org below) *An

IrDA The Infrared Data Association (IrDA) is an industry-driven interest group that was founded in 1994 by around 50 companies. IrDA provides specifications for a complete set of protocols for wireless infrared communications, and the name "IrDA" also ...

interface (V1.3, SIR) *A serial interface (proprietary Siemens "Lumberg" socket) *A 7.2 V 2800 mA·h

Lithium Ion Battery A lithium-ion or Li-ion battery is a type of rechargeable battery which uses the reversible reduction of lithium ions to store energy. It is the predominant battery type used in portable consumer electronics and electric vehicles. It also see ...

(~4hr life) *A built-in mono speaker *A built-in microphone (not on CL4 models) *A headphone interface (proprietary Siemens "Lumberg" socket) All devices weigh approximately 2.2 lb (1 kg) and measure 10.35 × 7.08 × 1.10 inches (263 mm ×181 mm × 30 mm). The SIMpad was initially released with the

Handheld PC A handheld personal computer (PC) is a miniature computer typically built around a clamshell form factor and is significantly smaller than any standard laptop computer, but based on the same principles. It is sometimes referred to as a ''palmto ...

2000 (

Windows CE Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system subfamily developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is ba ...

3.0) operating system, while later units (mostly SL4 and SLC) were released with Windows CE.NET (Windows CE 4.0). Since the SIMpad was discontinued in 2002, all manufacturer support was also discontinued. Th
OpenSIMpad
project offers a SIMpad related Wiki where one can find information about

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, Windows CE, hardware and mods.

External links

Developer's homepage
{{Siemens Portable computers Embedded Linux Siemens