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

Have something interesting to say about mobile computing or reading? Join our forums and share your view on topics like the ones discussed at MobileRead this past week...

Hacks and Development
Unofficial iRex iLiad repository online

In the News
Hitachi adds color to Albirey e-paper
MobileTechRoundup nominated at the PodCast Awards
TCPMP becomes CorePlayer and turns commercial

Lounge
A history of DRM hacking

Mobile Sites
Topix.net for mobile devices

Others
U3.. so what's it all about?

Sony Reader
Sony Reader -- Ask your questions to the Sony team

01:24 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Our friends over at JkOnTheRun (James Kendrick and Kevin C. Tofel, who are also joined by Matt Miller) have been nominated for the Best Mobile Podcast category of the Podcast Awards.

Voting is open through August 11, 2006. If you have a moment, how about making a quick visit and place your vote to help push them to victory! You can place your vote here.

Update: It appears that you can vote once per day if you really feel enthusiatic toward their podcast!

09:15 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

There's quite a buzz about the new generation of E Ink devices coming to market. This is especially true for the Sony Reader PRS-500 which made its full debut at the CES show in Las Vegas earlier this year and was originally scheduled to be rolled-out in Borders and SonyStyle stores for spring. Being the geeks that we are, we continue to gather here at MobileRead looking for the latest information and rumors as the excitement grows.

Now is your chance to cut right past the rumors and speculation and get some straight answers from the Sony Reader team. They were particularly kind to contact us with an offer to answer questions from the MobileRead community.

This is your big chance to hear what you want to know, right from the source. To participate, please post your burning questions about the Sony Reader in this thread and we will route the best of them to the Sony folks next week.

PS: If you are looking for some base information about the reader, be sure to check out our Sony Reader forum.

04:47 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

We were already pretty jazzed to hear about Hitachi's entry into e-paper displays, but now they top themselves by showcasing a 4096-color version of the Albirey display. They succeeded by using a power-saving color filter with a high-brightness layout (RGBW) that preserves the paper-like whiteness of the background page while enabling deep blacks for text and a range of colors and tones for images.

The catch (why must there always be one?): Due to the nature of the color filter, the resolution of the 13.1" display is effectively halved to an extremely low 512x384 pixels. I cannot think of any other use than for signage areas at the moment. In any case, we won't see this display in the wild before 2007.

[via Tech-On]

04:57 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

It's been setting geeky hearts aflutter for some time now, but it seems the guys from CoreCodec are getting ready for the release of CorePlayer, the commercial derivate of TCPMP. In its first incarnation the player is rumored to include the following features:

• Skinning
• Advanced streaming (HTTP/MMS/UDP/RTP/RTSP)
• New splitter/rendering features (e.g. TS streams)
• IPTV ready (EPG is tbd per solution)
• Codecs: CoreMP3, CoreASPm CoreAVC, CoreAAC v2.0; to be added later: CoreAC3, CorePIX, CoreSVG, NSV support, Matroska DRM, Microsoft's Plays for Sure DRM, ON2 codecs
• Visualization engine

Handheld enthusiast will be happy to hear that CorePlayer Mobile supports H.264/AVC and is optimized for various platforms such as Intel XScale, ARM, and Freescale processors (with support for Windows Mobile, CE, UMPC, Symbian, Linux, Palm, and Java). We are not exactly sure what it means in terms of the future development of open-source TCPMP (or BetaPlayer, as it is rumord to be renamed to again), but one cannot blame the programmers for trying to make some money out of their hard efforts.

03:47 AM by TadW in Archive | Mobile Sites

You can now get local news via your mobile phone through Topix.net. Simply enter Topix.net/ZIP, where ZIP is your zip code. For instance,

http://topix.net/10025

If you access this URL from a cell phone you will get a compressed page of headlines and news with good-sized summaries and clickable links to the full story.

Of course, there is also a hidden short-cut to display the mobile version with *any* browser. Simply add &lw=1 behind the resulting URL, for instance,

http://www.topix.net/city/manhattan-ny?lw=1

06:31 PM by Stuart Young in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

My latest gizmo is a SanDisk U3 Cruzer. I've been meaning to upgrade my 256 meg PenDrive for months now. Having one is like cell-phone syndrome, once you've used one life is never quite the same.

So what is U3? It looks like a regular memory stick with a standard USB connector on it. However the beauty is it's designed to have applications such as Skype and Firefox installed and executed directly on it. All you need do is insert the device into a PC and the inbuilt app launcher kicks into life. The applications then run directly from the U3 drive. No PC installation needed. - It's worth pointing out the apps are not the regular versions. Each has to be packaged to run within a U3 environment.

For me one of the great things about these drives is you can share common apps between multiple PC's - work and home for example. Useful if you don't want to lug you work computer home each night. The main downside is that it's Windows only right now (I'm XP by day Mac by night). Although, there are rumours in the wild of projects which might change this soon.

U3 resources:

• Official U3 Website
• Wikipedia U3 Primer
• U3 community site

11:31 AM by Alexander Turcic in iRex | iRex Developer's Corner

Update (OS 2.5): We'll have to put this on ice until there's a way again for mere mortals to access the innards of the iLiad

We finally have our unofficial (aka not supported by iRex company) repository to feed binary files which are or might be compatible with the iRex iLiad device. It's meant as a playground for iLiad hackers and adventurous iRex user who actively follow our hacking discussions. Beware though: there is currently no way to revive your device in case of severe hacking damages, except for sending it back to the iRex headquarters.

The repository can be accessed directly at the following URL: http://iliad.mobileread.com/feed/

Please reply to this thread if you can provide iLiad hacks or tools and still need upload access.

Thanks to arivero for assisting me to set this thing up.