09:54 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

It's almost impossible to be a fan of mobile devices without being fascinated by new display technology. The functionality of a device is greatly dependent on the quality of a display, even with regard to battery life. New display technologies are eagerly sought after.

There's been a lot of news on the topic recently that just hasn't made it to the MobileRead pages, so we are going to remedy that today with some interesting stories that caught our eye. And we even threw in a couple of articles on small liquid camera lenses and UMPC screen protectors as a bonus.

• 3-D TV That Actually Works [Wired]
  
• Artificial muscles light up TVs [BBC News]
  
• FOLED - Flexible OLED Display [TecheBlog]
  
• Payment Card with Electronic Paper display [Gizmag]
  
• New flexible display concepts [PaperGadgets]
  
• Rogers and Varioptic team up on liquid lens mini imaging system [Portable Design]
  
• Cell Phones to Get Tactile Touch Screens [Mobiledia]
  
• Flexible display market to exceed $100M in 5 years [Portable Design]
  
• UMPC Screen Sheet: a clear choice? [JkOnTheRun]

03:13 AM by Stuart Young in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Until recently HTC has been known as the behind the scenes manufacturer of the i-Mate and QTEK handsets. Not to mention many of the carrier branded phones. Back in June the company decided to capitalise on the HTC moniker and leverage it's own brand. - Full details here via msmobiles.com. Now they've gone one step further by making sure their support is also top-notch. Just launched is http://www.htcwiki.com/.

- Looks good already, if you use/work with these devices this site could prove very useful.

06:41 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book Formats | Workshop

Robert Nagle has put together a collection of links related to e-book creation that might be useful. You can find them at IdiotProgrammer.

Topics covered include conversion tools, standards, xml as well as many other subject areas with links to information sources.

05:38 PM by Stuart Young in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Now as you may know Nokia is a very popular mobile phone. So before you read this post, then email Alex saying: "Stu posted this news story and I managed to nuke my beloved Nokia," Mobileread officially has no responsibility for any problems you have if your firmware update goes wrong.

So..

The places online which talk about such things, are abuzz with word that Nokia have finally released updates that can be downloaded by Jo Public. The Official Nokia FAQ is now available. The firmware download page is here. Note that more phones will be added over the coming days. Like I said please read the FAQ before you attempt this - it's well known among the editors here at MobileRead that upsetting the Swiss is a bad thing.

Original link via The Register. US and Asia readers should check their own regional Nokia sites.

09:01 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Mobile Sites

Greenlight Wireless (the folks that bring us Skweezer) is reporting that MySpace has broken into the top five most visited sites through Skweezer. Other social sites like Flickr, del.icio.us and Friendster are also in the midst of rapid growth over the last quarter. Obviously, web portals and search engines are no longer the only popular show in town for mobile users.

To support users in such activities, Skweezer now allows users to "save browsing favorites to del.icio.us, Furl, Simpy or BlinkList from their cell phone or PDA."

Interestingly, Greenlight Wireless is also reaching out to work with mobile sites themselves to make them more friendly for mobile users. '"In the last quarter, we've partnered with a number of search, bookmarking, RSS, and shared media sites to mobile-enable their content," says Kevin Perkins, CEO of Greenlight Wireless.'

We appreciate and salute all those who are working to make the web a more friendly place for handhelds!

08:34 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Palm Addicts is both a great Palm news site and a wonderful casual Palm users community. One of the interesting topics that is covered in many ways is how various Palm users make use of their devices.

Today they have a delightful story from Benoit Hervier about how he became a PalmOS developer. In fact, he is the author of a today screen/app launcher program named kLauncher, and he is working on kMeteo, an open source weather application for Palm.

He got started developing software because he had two hours of public transportation to and from Paris each day for work. To kill the time, he started to play with iziBasic [a very simple and neat on-board programming language, by the way!] and then Palm Pascal [also an on board Palm compiler]. Next thing you know, he's a Palm developer using his commute time to create Palm software. How neat is that!

Our congratulations to Benoit, and our hopes that someone else reading this will get some more ideas to follow in his footsteps!

From Palm Addicts.

05:14 PM by Stuart Young in E-Book General | News

Another interesting piece of news via the Yahoo Librie Group:

"Bookpac is a Berlin-based company developing and trading eBook hard- and software for the German market.
We are a university spin-off and our enthusiastic staff have a strong research background as well as tight relationships to academic communities in Berlin and elsewhere."

For those of you who speak German, visit the site now and take part in a survey about the German e-book market, and you'll be given the chance to win some Amazon voucher.

For more information read Bookpac's Mission Statement.

03:44 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Turns out you might get caught if you lie on your cell phone! Korean mobile operator, KTF, is offering a service that detects emotions in a speakers voice. 'According to KTF, "the technology was used by the Israeli intelligence agency MOSSAD and this is the first time that the anti-terrorism technology was applied to mobile entertainment service."'

From Textually.org.