04:05 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Connexion by Boeing - also known as the ultimate boredom killer on long-haul flights - will begin offering live TV channels through its airline partners. Beginning January 23, you may not only surf the Internet in high-speed but also stream through your notebook any one of four available live TV channels, which include BBC World, CNBC, MSNBC, and EuroNews. In addition, Connexion has "simplified" its pricing options. One hour now costs $9.95, two hours $14.95, three hours $17.95 and 24 hours (including connecting flights) $26.95.

Related:
Connexion continues to conquer the skies
Boeing Connexion in-depth article
Alex speaking from Flight LH 432

[press release]

03:18 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Say what you will about Palm's decision to extend their reach into Windows territority, but the Treo 700w seems to bring home the bacon. I received the following newsfeed today:

Palm demand for VZ 700w is strong so far. The firm said their checks on Palm's VZ 700w were positive, that enterprise demand was above expectations and they have heard that some 700w are sold out so far. The firm said they are at 34c for the quarter, but need to add 50k units which implies EPS of 43c-45c.

Related, in an article from today's MotleyFool, Tim Beyers explains why he favors investing in Palm company:

My guess is that the run-up has as much to do with Palm's product line as its improving fundamentals. That's what makes the new 700 so important to investors. The Windows line could have a dramatic impact on the business over time; shareholders need to get an idea of the odds of that occurring. So I consulted an expert, one the earliest of early adopters: David Gardner. His take: "I think making a Windows version is a good move for Palm, as it opens up the corporate Windows market more -- an enterprise-driven move, as opposed to Treo's past consumer-driven strategy."

02:44 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Ever since the Sony rootkit debacle we know that music played on a connected computer is not safe from data mining. According to Marc at Since1968, the latest incarnation of iTunes sends information to Apple whenever you double-click on a song. Apparently Apple uses this information to find albums and tracks for sale by the artist whose song was presently playing.

This means, of course, that every single time I play a song the information is sent back to Apple. You can turn off the MiniStore at the click of a button, but it's not clear whether turning off the MiniStore is the same as turning off the flow of data (one doubts it). And don't bother looking for a way to turn this "feature" off in the Preference pane: it’s not there.

And as a user at Boing Boing stated:

I just ran a packet trace of the new iTunes - it only connects to Apple if the Mini Store is open. For regular MP3s, it'll run a full text search to find related articles, for purchased music, it searches by the original product ID. Sample query string is: /WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/ministoreMatch?an=Daft% 20Punk&gn=Electronic&kind=song&pn=Discovery

The problem: Apple collects your data without your knowledge or consent. And who knows, perhaps the next iTunes will only support RIAA-approved MP3s.

[via Boing Boing]

06:30 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Imagine a holographic display from your mobile device that allows you to touch it like you would a typical pda. That's the hope of technology from HoloTouch. It would serve very well for places like operating rooms and hospitals where contamination of keyboards is a significant problem, but would also seem to be a nice fit for consumer electronics.

"Holographic interfaces using on our patented technology empower operators to enter commands and data into a wide range of electronic equipment by simply passing a finger through holographic images of what would otherwise be the keys of a keypad or keyboard, appearing to float in the air at a convenient location in front of the equipment. An infrared sensor scans the plane of those images to detect the intrusion of a finger into the desired portion of those images, identifies which number or symbol has been selected and transmits that selection to the equipment's internal software, much the same way pressing a button on any ordinary keypad would."

"Combining holographic images of what would otherwise be the buttons of cell phones, PDAs, laptops, video games or hand-helds with a wave sensor scanning the plane of those images, HoloTouch enhances comfortable, reliable operation, where keypad size has shrunk below normal finger size, and continues to dwindle. With HoloTouch, images of keypads can be larger than the underlying equipment."

I don't see this being effective as a display until it becomes bright, with good resolutions and effecient in power consumption. And it may never be the input method of choice. But we like to keep you informed about the various technologies, and it's alway fun to imagine new ways in which devices could potentially evolve.

(via PDA 24/7)

02:00 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Jeff Mitchell is the owner and Software Engineer for CodeJedi, and author of one of the premier outliner programs for PalmOS - ShadowPlan. He is an amazing developer who also has a passion for game emulators. If you read any of his stuff at all, and especially any of his support or forum writings, you learn in no time that he has not only an amazing clarity of mind with respect to software, but a passion for his work and a generous nature. His ShadowPlan software is a significant software system. It includes support for many PalmOS devices, it includes frequent updates, and has multiple versions of the desktop companion software for multiple platforms. And yet with all that, he continues to give free updates to his customers. I'm proudly a member of that group and enjoy the opportunity to toot his horn when I can.

Due to both a shortage of time for this post and a little concern of the reaction if I put this on the front page without enough time to shape the context under which it is read, this is remaining in the Palm topic category as opposed to the front page. Content is worthy, but presentation is not.

So in brief, let me tell you the heart of the matter I'm presenting...
First of all, I want to let people know that Jeff has a great blog. Secondly, I want to point in particular to a great entry that talks about what it's like to develop for PalmOS. The entry is meant to be a venting of frustration, so you'll see mostly complaints, but he's also a big fan of Palm. It's just that the focus of this entry is about the hard things about developing for Palm devices. He talks about numerous topics, including bugginess of device software that is a headache for developers, too many versions of APIs, lack of good developer tools and even documentation of changes. Certainly he is not alone in his frustrations. We've even seen recently here how we may have lost Fitaly input method on the PalmOS platform (but for now is recovered unofficially thanks to some good work by Alexander Pruss and the original author of Fitaly). Other developers have just left the PalmOS world out of frustration and uncertainty for the future.

But in the midst of all the complaints, there's something great about PalmOS and both developers and users remain remarkably loyal despite uncertainty or frustrations. And Palm still manages to put out some great products, with the latest models being some of the most solid and well-designed ever produced. (From the consumer's point of view at least!)

Jeff also indicated that there are problems on the other side of the fence also, with Microsoft and Windows Mobile for example, so we may see a little venting related to other platforms also.

If you read the article, you can see why I shy away from a front page post. It's a very emotional and candid post from Jeff, and "Palm enemies" or people that are naive about software and development work could very easily twist it into something that he did not intend or even imply. But we've got some really sophisticated and non-judgemental readers here at MR, so I should be able to share this without fear, right!?

Thanks to Jeff for an inside look at some frustrations from a developer's point of view. He is one of my favorite developers and I hope he finds continued success on whatever platforms he chooses to develop on.

Again, sorry if this is a rambling or confusing entry, but I'm short on time, and it was something I really wanted to share. It's good stuff.

BTW, if you check out his blog, you'll also find that he just got one of those new Linux-based GP2X gaming devices. He's got some pics and initial thoughts, but with his skills in gaming I can't wait to see what he does with it and what he thinks of it!

10:03 AM by Laurens in Archive | Sunrise

I'm pleased to announce the second alpha of Sunrise XP.

Sunrise XP is a reworking of Sunrise. For more information, see the thread for the previous alpha.

Changes

The highlight of this release is RSS support. There are also many bugfixes:

• New: RSS feed support.
• New: Feed formatting options.
• New: Ability to save feed items.
• New: Link rewriting scripts.
• New: Monthly schedule.
• New: Attach date stamp to document name.
• New: Plain text conversion.
• New: GZIP decompression of HTTP responses.
• New: HTTP User-Agent preference.
• New: "Update only if sources have changed" setting now implemented. (Did not actually work in the previous release.)
• New: Command-line option for updating documents automatically. (Select "Update -> Shortcut" to create a shortcut.)
• Fixed: Fixed several threading issues in the spidering engine. Cancelling an update could, for instance, result in a crash.
• Fixed: Multiple HTML <br> line breaks are now folded into a single line break.
• Fixed: Parsing invalid HTML would sometimes yield a "Mismatched setting" error.
• Fixed: Invalid HTML with empty paragraphs would cause paragraph breaks to be ignored.
• Fixed: Formatting (alignment, font, colour) are now correctly reset for table cells.
• Fixed: Invalid images are no longer linked to. (These would show up as "[img error: bad image type]" in Plucker.)
• Fixed: PNG/JPEG/GIF image types are now detected by looking for their signature "magic bytes".
• Fixed: "Restrict to domain/host/directory" setting did not work correctly and using it could result in a crash.
• Fixed: Added missing character encoding mapping for Japanese. (shift_jis)
• Fixed: HotSync conduit now aborts properly when the connection to the handheld is lost.
• Fixed: "Store downloads in cache" setting was not saved.
• Fixed: Drop-down lists were not displayed under the Windows "classic" interface.
• Fixed: Numerous minor bugfixes and tweaks in the user interface.

See the full change log for more information. This also includes a roadmap for future releases.

Will post more info later today.

Download:
Version 2.0 alpha 2b (842Kb)

Updated to version 2.0 alpha 2b. See note below.

09:07 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | iSilo/X

Like fine wine, iSilo gets better with age. The latest revision V4.3 improves in the following areas:

• Support for interpreting the external document path as a space delimited list of possibilities when the first non-space character is a double-quote, where each possibility is enclosed within double-quotes.
• Document registration codes can now have a prefix of up to nine characters that can be entered by the user but will be ignored by the validation process. This allows document publishers to add their own custom prefix to document registration codes.
• [Windows Mobile] When in full screen mode with links active, using the action button to attempt to follow the current active link results in exiting of full screen mode.
• [Windows Mobile] On devices with VGA resolution screens, following a link to an external document results in an incorrect display of the toolbar, whereby the right part of the toolbar shifts to the left.
• [Windows Mobile] When selecting a different font to use for the monospace family, a monospace font is still used.
• [Windows Mobile Smartphone] Viewing a document that uses more than eight mixes of font styles and sizes may result in sudden exiting of the application.
• [Windows CE] When selecting a different font to use for the monospace family, a monospace font is still used.
• [Windows] In the case where a user is not logged onto the system, the user ID is incorrectly computed.

iSilo can be downloaded from here and iSiloX from here. You don't know iSilo? Then check out this thread first for more information.

08:44 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

According to research house Canalys, global shipments of smartphones are growing apace. In their latest report, Canalys found that during the third quarter of 2005, volumes grew 75 per cent year-on-year with over 13 million smartphones sold. Other key points:

• Handheld shipments fall 18%, while converged devices more than double in volume
• Leader Nokia ships record 7.1 million smartphones, up 142% year-on-year
• Palm shipments down 2% overall, but Treo smart phones up 71%, overtaking its handhelds for first time
• HP re-enters top five as hw6500 series wireless handhelds perform well

Some further points have been raised regarding Palm company:

• Smartphones represented 53% of its shipments globally, up from 40% in the previous quarter
• The next six months are likely to see more changes in the vendor's product mix
• Its overall shipments fell 2%, despite smartphone growth of 71%, due to a 34% fall in handheld shipments, but it is still the only vendor other than Nokia shipping more than a million smart mobile devices each quarter.