01:03 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

TreoCentral user Perry Holden spills the beans about the rumored launch date of the Treo 700p (see attachment). Does this mean the new Sprint Treo will absolutely, positively beyond any shadow of a doubt be released on May 28th, 2006? Seeing as this date happens to fall on a Sunday, the scan could just as well be a sham. But then again, the specs look real and underline what we've heard on the Net before: the 700p is Palm OS-powered, with EVDO, a 1.3 mexapixels camera, a DUN modem, Bluetooth, 128MB of memory, an SD card slot, and with support for Sprint 's PowerVision and TV.

Well, it doesn't really matter since the rumored launch date is still far in the future, and it hasn't exactly been a secret that Palm plans to release the 700p sometime in late Spring 2006.

[via Palm Addicts]

01:07 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Mobile Sites

There are a number of solutions for viewing Wikipedia from mobile devices, either connected or unconnected. One I've not heard of before is a mobile Wikipedia for connected devices. "Apparently you're getting all of the regular Wiki-goodness, including links both inside and outside the site- it's only the multimedia and editing functions that are left out for bandwidth's sake." Not sure how it compares to Wapipedia.

A few other options for reading the Wikipedia on mobile devices include Quickipedia or by RSS feed or TomeRaider or a Plucker version (in the works?) or Wapedia or German Wikipedia for Mobipocket or Wikipedia on your iPod. I'm sure there are more.

One of the current problems is that most people have 1gig cards available, and the size is growing to and past that boundary. I'm not sure of the size of the above solutions, or when they were last updated, but even an older version to fit on a 1gig card is a pretty amazing option. Especially considering that 1gig cards are often showing deals in the $30-$40 range.

From EngadgetMobile.

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

Gaming is alive and well on the PalmOS platform. Some of the more interesting applications are the game emulators that let you play old console games on your pda or smartphone.

Henry Kong provides a very nice overview of the various game emulation options you have over at Palm Addicts. If you are interested in getting started with emulators on PalmOS, it's definitely worth a look.

02:23 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

There are a lot of reasons why DRM is hated. It enables content providers to control how and when the customer views the content. It means that the customer must repurchase the content if technology changes. It often prevents backups. You can't loan content. You can't even view content on multiple devices. You are tied to the viewers allowed by the provider, so in many cases it rules out Linux or mobile devices.

True, not all DRM implementations cause all these troubles, but these are not out of the norm. It's really a headache for the consumer. Why is it so prevalent? Especially, when it's generally agreed that mass piracy can't be stopped with DRM? The answer is that it sticks around because content providers are afraid of widespread copying, because content providers want a long ongoing stream of revenues from customers for a given song or movie or game, and because legislation currently supports it with a strong hand.

Well, as if that isn't enough, we now discover another problem with DRM that is very intuitive. "... according to tests conducted by CNET, they found that while many players met or exceeded their claims, one feature that has a drastic affect on battery life is the infamous DRM." There was a drop in one test from 16hrs battery playback to 12 hrs playback just changing from mp3 files to WMA 10 DRM files. True, the test doesn't seem to take into account the effects of non-DRM'd mp3 versus non-DRM'd WMA, but one would suspect that the extra processing required for DRM unencoding. And if you have purchased a particular content in a DRM'd form, you don't exactly have the option of switching to mp3 anyway, do you?

Before I sound like I think DRM is never a good idea, let me say that it does seem to make sense in some circumstances to implement DRM, and that DRM has the potential to allow more content owners to bring content to the market. However, in it's current forms, with little in the way of standards or consumer friendliness, I think it would be fair to say that it is more often called "pure evil" by users than "a helpful hand."

Via Digg and CD Freaks.

04:50 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

One of the problems e-book fans encounter on a daily basis is the conversion of messy e-book formats (such as MS Word or Adobe PDF) into clean formats (such as HTML or XML). Docvert 2.0 builds upon desktop word processors such as OpenOffice and Abiword to deal with the vagaries of the Word documents.

The resulting OpenDocument XML is then optionally converted to HTML or any XML. This is done with XML Pipelines, an approach that supports XSLT, breaking up content over headings or sections, and saving those results to multiple files (e.g., chapter1.html, chapter2.html…).

Docvert is a server-side application which requires that you've PHP 5.0 and OpenOffice or Abiword installed. As such, it offers a simple REST-style interface that can be used to integrate Docvert for instance into a public Web service.

[via Lifehacker]

04:31 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Here's a way to pass the time while you're bored on the subway or waiting for the movie to start: fire up Agile Messenger and chat with your friends. Agile Messenger is a free instant messenger for Windows Mobile devices with support for popular messaging services such as ICQ, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, QQ and Jabber.

If you've a Pocket PC (smartphones not supported yet) running Windows Mobile 5.0, you can try out the latest alpha version, downloadable from here. For more information how to get in contact with the developers, check out this thread over at XDA Developers.

03:26 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Right now and today, you can watch good quality streaming television shows on your broadband internet connected PC! This is no longer just a promise, but it's available this very moment from AOL. And no, you don't have to be an AOL member. It's for everyone.

The service does show an ad in the beginning of your tv show. And selection is limited to a fixed set of shows. On the other hand, many episodes are available. Included are shows like La Femme Nikita, Babylon5, Wonder Woman, Eight is Enough, Lois and Clark, Chico and the Man, F-Troop, Maverick, The FBI, and the list goes on and on.

I've been waiting months for this to go from a splash page promising early 2006 to a full online service. So just to give it a try I picked the pilot of Babylon 5. I like scifi, but never really gave that show a look. Turns out that when I tried to view the show in FireFox, it objected. It asked me to download an ActiveX extension. I caved in and allowed it. Than I got an error saying that I needed a security upgrade for WMP. I said yes. Then finally, I got another error saying what they should have told me in the first place - you have to use the special AOL player.

At that point, it took me to IE anyway, so I went with the flow. Maybe someone will get it to work in FireFox, but I settled for IE to make my first attempt. It worked fine. You have to watch a blip about the service, and then a regular 30-sec commercial came on for KIA, and then the show started. At that point, I also had the option to see the program in full screen mode. A little blurry if I stay close to the screen, but if I scoot back a bit it's fine. Not HDTV by any means, but fine.

I did see a couple small blips for buffering hiccups at the beginning, but seems to be fine after that. All in all a great, great looking service even with the requirement to use their viewer.

Now if they would only come up with some pda/smartphone clients! Maybe this is one more reason to go with Origami!

02:36 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

There are many ways to read RSS feeds on a mobile device. Some of this has been discussed previously here, and the situation is improving rapidly as the mobile device RSS tools get better and better.

Well, here's one completely different approach. An RSS news feed that comes to you via your inbox. You will certainly need a cheap data plan for this to be practical on a mobile device, or a mail program that allows you to only upload and download email when you are synching rather than over the air (anyone have a reliable and still-maintained email program like that for the Treo 650?)

But this is also an interesting idea for those who don't have too many RSS feeds, and need a way to keep from spending the whole day checking their feeds. It's pretty addictive and fun to do that, but we all need to put limits on ourselves so we can get some work done.

This free service is called Squeet, and it "can send you new entries as they become available, once every day, or once every week. Squeet also has add-ons for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and the Google Toolbar for easy subscription. If you’ve never felt comfortable using an RSS reader or you’ve found you have trouble controlling how often you check your feeds, sending a daily digest of your favorite RSS feeds to your email inbox might be the solution you’re looking for."

Via LifeHacker.