07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

In case you've missed any MobileRead news from this week, here is our usual roundup:

E-book Devices, eREAD STAReBOOK
First week with the STAReBOOK

E-book Devices, Sony Portable Reader
Sony Reader Guide for creating optimized PDF content - Exclusive Preview
Sony Reader Linux sources updated

E-books, Elsewhere on the Net
eReader 10% discount through 02/06/07

E-books, News
Adobe wants PDF to become the formally recognized standard
Winthrop University testing the Sony Reader
Universal Display as potential supplier of e-book displays
Nemoptic offers prototype kit of BiNem e-paper

Miscellaneous, Lounge
80% of Americans want to write a book
Best non-SuperBowl WII commercial

Mobile Devices, Handhelds and Smartphones
Dell making plans for a gaming handheld
Apply to beta test PalmOS SlingPlayer
Vista ActiveSync is now available as "Windows Mobile Device Center"
The Register "proves" PalmOS is dead

Mobile Devices, Others
H9 - The first "real" Linux UMPC?

Web to Mobile, General Talk
Where do people spend their time online?

Web to Mobile, Mobile Sites
Quote launches mobile financial portal

03:46 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Although simple, this is just so neat and professionally done that I had to post about it. A commercial that really does look like it could be the real thing... at first. Very cute.

Wii: Hold on Tight.

Now if I could only get one for myself. Surely it can be a great on screen e-book reader. Imagine the text on a huge plasma TV, and turning pages with a flick of the controller!

12:43 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

A graph presented at Compete shows the sites where people spend the most time. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a breakdown that shows where people spend their mobile time, but I'm sure one will eventually pop up.

MySpace is the champion. I wonder how long they will be able to hold that spot. And note that Google is only #5, but that's because the graph doesn't represent how often you use a site, but how much time spent there.

The other obvious anomoly is the absence of MobileRead.com. Surely it was a sampling error! ;-)

12:17 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The emotional online wars about PalmOS are legendary. It used to be that you could stir up an active discussion on any blog by simply saying that Pocket PC was better than PalmOS, or that PalmOS was a "has-been." Trying out Pocket PC was considered a move to the "dark side" and you were in danger of being considered a traitor. And by all means, never dare to say the words "PalmOS is dead!"

My how times have changed. It's true that much of the new perspectives are due to the fact that Cobalt was the future hope of PalmOS and it never made it into a commercial product. (But there were actual working smartphone prototype devices running Cobalt, but then nobody seemed to want it. We may never know the true story of why, but it just didn't happen.)

So many changes. Access has bought PalmSource, and the next generation of the PalmOS is going to be coming out of the Access Linux Platform, which will have a compatibility layer to run "most properly-written" existing Palm software. (That's not so far fetched as you might think... the recent PalmOS also has a similar compatibility layer called PACE, and we made it past that bump just fine.)

Further confusing things is the announcement that Palm has bought back the rights to Garnet. Now the "real" Palm company could be going in at least four different potential directions, one of which brings new hope for PalmOS: (1) Produce a revamp of Garnet to bring it up to date, (2) Create a new Linux based platform for Palm devices, (3) Create a whole new platform for the future based on Jeff Hawkins' mysterious third line of business that is supposed to be announced some time this year and/or (4) Continue to expand the product line with Windows Mobile devices.

So the whole "PalmOS" landscape is obviously quite muddied, and it's not clear which new directions will be a success, or which ones may become the undesired Cobalt of the future. With additional hot competition for creating the most popular mobile platform of the future (including other consortiums of major players, and of course Microsoft and Nokia), there is a lot of uncertainty.

But one thing appears to be certain -- PalmOS is dead. Maybe.

The Register has published an article that basically mocks PalmOS. It not only claims that PalmOS is dead, but it claims that it is so completely dead that no one even cares to argue the point anymore. They prove this position by pointing to their previous article about the StyleTap emulation software for Windows Mobile devices. (Whose very existence seems to prove that PalmOS will live on in some manner.) The tag line for the article was "Another nail in Palm OS' coffin." And the point is that despite disparaging comments about the death of PalmOS, people have come to accept that fact so easily now that no one bothered to complain. I guess that the old days of flame wars are over.

Personally, while I also hope for Windows Mobile to flourish, I am hoping that Access and Palm will both provide successful new platforms that carry on and extend the Palm tradition. Competition is good, the PalmOS is like a friend that you don't want to say goodbye to, and there is such a treasure trove of fantastic third party software that is still important to many users like myself.

Furthermore, if you have interacted with any of those small developers or development companies supporting PalmOS (now Garnet), you can't help but appreciate that they are doing the work for more than just a buck. I was at the final PalmSource Developers Conference when Cobalt was still thought to be alive, and you could just feel the excitement. People were not a part of this because they just wanted to make a buck. We all thrived in the delight of the whole PalmOS community.

It's amazing the effort, generosity and kindness that is shown by these developers. Grace even in the face of lots of us nasty users who sometimes seem to be able to do nothing but complain. Losing PalmOS would be more than the loss of an operating system. It would be the loss of a friend and the loss of a whole wonderful ecosystem.

But I'm not ready to give up yet, and The Register can include me among those that stand up to object to the foregone conclusion that PalmOS is dead. Okay, maybe on life support. And the name PalmOS itself is likely to be forever relegated to the history books. But the offshoots and potential green buds of a new spring are still there. There's still much hope. The potential reincarnations of Garnet from Palm, the new Access Linux Platform with Garnet compatibility, and yes, even emulation layers like StyleTap. Long live PalmOS!

11:17 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

The Beijing Peace East Technology Development Co. seems to have a couple of Linux UMPC models, H9 model and the H10 model. Actually, while the H10 is described as a UMPC, it runs WinCE and seems to be aimed customers that require outdoor usage.

The H9 is a touch screen device with a 7" LCD display has a PRS/CDMA phone, email, pda functions, WIFI, Web browser, GPS Navigation. It runs some flavor of Linux, and includes a multimedia player, flash player, photo browsing & editing, and what is called a "recording & multimedia file manager." It seems to have a replaceable battery (called "Knock-down & rechargeable!"), but there's no indication of battery life or whether the back light is an LED (which extends the battery life significantly in some of the newer UMPC models now on the market).

The CPU, hard drive and memory specs are pretty meager, so one would expect pricing to be very reasonable.

H9 Specifications
* Intel PXA270 CPU, 520MHz
* Linux OS
* 128M Byte SDRAM, 64M Byte Nor Flash ROM,
* 7" TFT LCD Display (800*480) with back light and touch screen.
* PCMICA/SD Card socket,
* USB, Earphone Jack, Power socket
* Battery: Knock-down(!?) & rechargeable Lithium battery, 4000mah
* Power: DC 5.0V+/-10%, 2.0A
* Audio: AC97, Built-in Speakers
* GPS: Hammerhead IC adopted, from Global Locate
* Hard disk: 20 G
* Size: 205x120x19 mm
* Weight: 500g

The H10 is a WinCE device made to support outside use.

H10 Specifications
* CPU: Intel PXA270C520，OS:Windows CE 5.0，
* Outdoor 6.5" high luminance & contrast touch-sensitive TFT screen.
It can display clearly even in strong sun-light
* Built-in High Sensitivity GPS system;
* Water-proof and dustproof outer design
* Super capacity battery makes it possible to work outdoor for 8 hours;
* Supports blue-tooth, SD socket, USB

Other devices have, of course, also paved the way. For example, the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, GP2X and Pepper Pad are devices that could probably be loosely called UMPCs. One way or another, there seems little question that powerful Linux UMPCs are in our future.

Via Pocketables.

Update: Pocketables has done some follow-up research, and is now reporting the news that a sales manager gave a price of $490 for the H9 (in a wholesale quantity of 500, that is). When decent UMPCs are offered consistently for less than $500 retail, even Linux-based, we might see sales explode.

10:33 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The new version of ActiveSync is called "Windows Mobile Device Center", and it's ready for Vista (and only Vista). Some benefits and improvements:

* Streamlined setup
* Robust synchronization
* Enhanced user interface
* File browsing
* Photo management
* Media synchronization

You find download linds and read more about it at the corresponding Microsoft web page, and there's also a very nice description written a couple of months ago by Jason Langridge in the MSDN Blogs.

Via IntelliAdmin.

07:02 PM by Alexander Turcic in Sony Reader | Sony Reader Dev Corner

Thanks to eagle-eyed Vienna01 for informing us that Sony has quietly updated the Linux sources for their Reader. The only visible difference:

old: USBTG_EBOOK4_20060801.tgz
new_ USBTG_EBOOK4_20061205.tgz

I invite you to compare the two packages and to tell us exactly what has changed.

Related: Sony Reader GPL sources download link

04:12 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

One might think that book writing hopefuls are some sort of elite minority, or at least a peculiar minority. Not true according to a survey by the Jenkins Group, because about 80% of Americans want to become an author.

Here are quite a few more interesting statistics collected by Dan Poynter and presented by Robyn Jackson, which are sure to dash any romantic notions about the book business:

* 1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
* 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
* 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
* 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
* 57 percent of new books are not read to completion.
* 70 percent of books published do not earn back their advance.
* 70 percent of the books published do not make a profit.
* A successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies.
* A successful nonfiction book sells 7,500 copies.
* On average, a bookstore browser spends 8 seconds looking at a book's front cover and 15 seconds looking at the back cover.
* Each day in the U.S., people spend 4 hours watching TV, 3 hours listening to the radio and 14 minutes reading magazines.