01:22 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

What do you know about the history of the mobile phone. Here's a short five question quiz to check out your knowledge.

I got four out of five, only missing the bit about which film first featured a mobile phone. I would brag about that more wholeheartedly, but I think I was pretty lucky also.

Via Textually.org.

By the way, mobile phones appeared on TV a long time before they did on the film mentioned in this quiz. Check out this for an example.

07:03 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Palm Addicts has recently reminded us of The Palm Business Book by Larry Becker.

"Business professionals, managers, IT departments, sales pros, teachers, students, home makers, and the rest of the world could use a Palm book that isn't another 'manual replacement.' -- There's a chapter for just about everyone.

If you don't want to figure everything out by reading manuals and you just want to get straight to the bottom line of Palm productivity without techno-jargon, then you need The Palm Business Book."

Related Story - Book Review: Lose The Laptop by Larry Becker.

06:51 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Portable Design is reporting that we are potentially approaching the one billion mark for cell phone shipments this year after the strong start seen so far.

"According to IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, 470.7 million units have shipped so far in 2006, which suggests that the industry may be close to shipping 1 billion units for the full year.

'The industry has been eyeing the milestone of 1 billion handsets shipped in a single year for some time, and many believe 2006 will be the year it happens. However, while the first half of the year has been impressive, IDC does not see this milestone being surpassed this year,' says Ryan Reith, research analyst for IDC's Mobile Phone Tracker. 'Although the demand for handsets in emerging markets continues to soar, the market's surging growth rate has been balanced by slowing demand in select mature markets.'"

Regardless of whether we just approach a billion, or surpass that number, it's clear that this is a market which is not going away soon. And as phones become more and more intelligent and capable, people are going to start discovering the potential of handheld devices. Especially as phone makers continue to improve usability.

Cell phones have sometimes been considered an obstacle for handheld adoption, especially with regard to highly capable cell phones reducing the need for smartphones. But this may just be the world wide doorway to advanced handheld device adoption.

06:38 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

Matt Miller has written some thoughts on how Robert Scoble's blog posts can be interpreted to mean "it is pretty clear from Scoble's first post that we can almost expect to see an Apple Tablet/UMPC device announced [at the upcoming World Wide Developers Conference]."

I've been waiting for a UMPC-like device at less than $1000 with 5 hour battery life and some sort of a case/keyboard combination that I can be happy with. Despite owning several Macintosh computers from the early days of Apple, I've never considered one recently. But if Apple does release a UMPC-like computer, and solves the battery, case and keyboard for me, I just might even be willing to go with a new platform. This is one rumor I really hope is true. The price is probably unlikely, but I might just even be willing to stretch that a bit. I just hope that much of the basic software I would need is open source if the device is expensive.

I wonder if such a device would, in general, be interesting to a mass market? I'm not exactly the typical consumer.

And remember... this is just a rumor!

Via jkOnTheRun.

Note:The image shows a "real" UMPC, of course, not the rumored Apple device.

01:03 PM by Stuart Young in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

I'll be upfront an say I'm not sure how accurate this news is. Over at Gearlog there's hands on info about Motorola's "new-age, cutting-edge low-cost fone." Sascha Segan writes, "The strangest thing about it is the e-ink display. It's a field of gray with numbers and characters that appear on it like digital-watch numbers, very sharply." - What I'm wondering is, is this an 'e-ink' display that we know an love, e.g. the same tech found in an iLiad and Librie etc?

Keep an eye on this link as more photo's will be available tomorrow.

Update: TadW has confirmed this is indeed an E Ink display. See the links he found from the official E Ink site: E Ink Partner Info, E Ink Motofone Press Release

04:52 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

There hasn't been much attention paid to Amazon lately, but apparently the giant Internet retailer has decided to reduce its e-books offerings to the Mobipocket format. Remember, last year they bought Mobipocket for a few million bucks, and while no one of us would have believed them to shut down the other formats entirely, we already guessed they would have big plans for the formerly French e-book format.

Our reader mdb139 received word from Amazon earlier this week where they clearly stated their plans to abandon the Microsoft and Adobe formats. Excerpt:

We are working on removing Microsoft and Adobe format e-books from Amazon.com, and soon they will no longer available for purchase. If you previously purchased an e-book on Amazon.com or purchase an available item before the availability changes, you will still have access to it through Your Media Library in Your Account up to 30 days after the purchase date.

Shouldn't we be concerned now about our previously purchased e-books, which may disappear from the Adobe Media Library any day?

Also check out this related entry from David/Teleread who is not exactly excited about Adobe's affection for Mobipocket.

10:23 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Linux Devices asks the question "When will smartphones replace PDAs, laptops?" The article is quite interesting, and they point out that usability obstacles still remain. Those will need to be overcome to a degree before we see an explosion of smartphones used for the typical sorts of pda and laptop activities.

Personally, unless we include a separate "mini terminal" to go with the smartphone, I don't see a typical smartphone form factor replacing a large number of laptops. Many pdas might be replaced, but not all. So the real question might be "When will smartphones dominate pdas and laptops in the marketplace?"

I think that in about 5-10 years when we look back at this question, we will realize that our context and language was insufficient. There will be new categories of device, and some larger devices or small foldable/rollable/multipart devices will come onto the market with phone capabilities. At some point will be a little hard to know what to call a smartphone as opposed to a handheld computer with phone capabilities.

We might even end up with a base computing unit in our pocket or purse or briefcase, accessed with a small and light clamshell with various options for keyboard and display. Sort of a local client server system all on your person, and ultimately connected to the internet also. That would even allow people to potentially leave the terminal pieces of different form factors all over the office and home for different people to use as desired. You get to keep your main computing platform personal (as opposed to trusting the web with all your applications and data). And yet you can still move portions of what you do to the web as appropriate, e.g. for backup or shared activities or when massive horsepower or data storage capabilities are needed.

But that is only one vision of a possible mobile future that I have created out of my imagination. There are many more possibilities that we have yet to imagine. And I'd bet that most scenarios are going to look a bit different than the sort of picture we currently have in our head when we think of smartphones. It might just be a moot point to talk about smartphone dominance if other form factors take over in the future.

As I always say about the future of mobile computing... "time will tell!"

10:10 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Mobile Sites

The Washington Post reports that "Google yesterday unveiled a mobile version of its personalized home page for subscribers to its service and updated its mobile Google Maps feature to include live traffic updates. Yahoo Inc. last week announced that its Yahoo Go for Mobile, a Web application that combines e-mail, search, address book and local information programs, would be preloaded on millions of Motorola handsets."

There's bound to be more and more interest in providing mobile web services as the number of web-enabled phones multiplies. Even more importantly, people will start using those features on the phones they own. That's a huge audience across the world.

Google describes Personalized Home for Mobile this way - "Personalized Home puts information that you care about on your mobile phone. It's a quick way to access your Gmail inbox, news headlines, local weather, stock quotes and RSS feeds when you're on the go."

Google Maps for mobile is pretty neat, but still doesn't support some handsets like the PalmOS Treos.

Yahoo Go for Mobile looks nice, but at first glance I'd have to say it's hard to tell what the advantage is above and beyond WAP access to the previously available Yahoo portal.

All in all, it's exciting to see more interest in the mobile web, and I guarantee that we are only just getting started!