05:32 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Handheld video is the next thing. Need more proof? Check out this article appearing in the Dallas Morning News today.

As legitimate video download services proliferate, and such companies as Diversified make it easier to transfer your own video files to any portable player, experts say, demand for players is set to take off... Peter Winkler, global director in the entertainment and media practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that Apple's splashy entrance into the portable video market will probably accelerate adoption of the devices. "Apple launched their video iPod with a deal already in place, which was a significant step," Winkler said. "Once multiple content owners see that and they see that there is a commercial viability for this model, they're going to want to get in on the action."

Related posts:
Mobile video about to explode, Mobile TV is gaining viewers, And the Emmy for best movie on iPod goes to...

05:19 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Interesting thought by Roland and I cannot agree more:

RSS is the real convergence medium; it's already the transport for multi-media on the web. If you want your audio, video or whatever to get circulated and noticed, the best way to to do this is to put a link to it in an RSS feed with enclosures!

Check out his full post.

05:14 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Check out this Engadget post - in particular the comments part! - for a bunch of tips and tricks related to Palm OS and to the Palm Treo in particular. Examples:

• A must have for every Treo owner: "The Core Pocket Media Player" (TCPMP).. Fantastic way to watch video on your device. I regularly watch full movies or episodes of tv shows:
  http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/about
• Unlocking Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking:
  http://www.shadowmite.com
  Best trick if you have bluetooth on your laptop and no wi-fi connection.
• KeyCaps650 is THE most essential hack for the Treo 650. It enables hold-to-capitalize and double-tap-for-symbols functionality, which makes for a very FAST keyboard interface on this marvelous device.
  http://www.geekandproud.net/software/keycaps650.php

05:08 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Research In Motion's Blackberry E-mail pager service came closer to being blocked in the U.S. after the company lost two rounds in the long-running patent lawsuit. US District Judge James R. Spencer yesterday rejected RIM's argument that a March draft settlement with patent-holder NTP was final. He also refused to delay the suit and told lawyers to prepare arguments on blocking U.S. BlackBerry service and on how much Research In Motion should pay NTP for infringing its patents.

We know Christmas should be a time of love, but it seems unlikely anyone at RIM feels like celebrating this year.

More over at ZDNet

04:34 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Better late than never, thought Ars Technica, and put theirs hands on Palm's LifeDrive Mobile Manager. Their conclusion:

Really, if you're thinking about getting a LifeDrive, you have to ask yourself how much it would benefit you. If you can afford a supplemental computer like this, would having everything in one place make a difference for you? There are also more practical considerations. It's not something you can stick in your pocket, so how will you carry it around with you? If you're going to carry around a backpack or a briefcase to keep it in, why not just carry around a laptop? At its price, it's getting dangerously close to laptop territory anyway. It's a good piece of hardware, but for me, I can think of more effective ways to spend $500.

Pros: Excellent syncing software, everything works like you expect it to, solidly constructed
Cons: Included software should be full-featured, pushes limits of Palm OS, pricey

[Full review]

04:21 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

Immersive, atmospheric, enthralling-pick an affirmative adjective and it'll likely stick to Seiko's "Future Now" watch like a magnet to steel. Wealthy technophiles can now hope to get their hands on one of the limited 500 eInk-based watches which were first demonstrated in Basel, Switzerland earlier this year.

Price tag for the Seiko SVRD001: 1900 EUR

[via Akihabara]

08:10 PM by cbarnett in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Gowerpoint have released a new version of µbook, the excellent multi-format ebook reader (and my personal favourite!).

Fixes and additions in this update include (and there's a few ):

- Added Cursor Moves through arrow keys (in menu, text, links and skin)
- Added Lock Screen mode
- Added Previous Page / Next Page split screen mode
- Added Cursor Mode key loop keys (forward / backward) as Button Mappable on Handlheld units. Tab and Shift Tab on PC version. Loop: Normal Mode -> Skin Mode -> Text Mode -> Links Mode or Image Mode -> Divided Screen Mode -> Lock Screen Mode -> Normal Mode
- Added 'Back' as Button Mappable on Handlheld units
- Added Export to/Import from/Sync with between Annotations and an external file. (*.ubd)
- Added replay of external Annotation file (*.ubd -> i-Book)
- Added Menu on slide-show page, for cell options
- Added Automatic creation of cell, columns and/or strips
- Added Option to enlarge images up to x% (slide show and *.ubd)
- New Windows.usk skin
- Major speed-up of text selection when image(s) on page.
- Major rewrite of stream handling, reducing quantity of code (but not size of executable?!) before code rot starts... stream rewriting is required for exporting/importing of Annotations (especially to images) for allowing access to images inside and outside compressed folders from the same input text. (i.e. IMG="im1.jpg" IMG="a.zip/im2.jpg" IMG="../a.zip/b.zip/im2.jpg" etc...)
- Change boot-up procedure to be faster by removing invisible splash screen -- which in turn brought up a visible splash screen?! and disabling extra load of uBook.ini when getting skin flags
- Replaced Low Quality icons by a higher quality with same memory use (i.e. a quanticized 8 bit palette)
- Do not hide cursor when any dialog is up
- Fixed problem with extracting text for Text Quality Analyzer
- Fixed font height issue(s)
- Fixed bolding problem with Sharp fonts
- Fixed endless paginating of some non-zipped files
- Fixed multiple-redraw of cover while paginating
- Fixed First Image Highlight that didn't draw the drag rectangle
- Fixed table of illustration image labels
- Fixed zoom arrows for handheld versions
- Fixed filtering of tabs by RTF parser
- Fixed bug with last image line truncation
- Fixed uninstall to remove uBook_images.ini
- Updated Francais.ulg
- Updated Help Manual

If you haven't tried µbook before, now might be the time.

06:07 PM by pruss in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

After months and months of testing, PalmBible+ 3.2.0 has been released at http://palmbibleplus.sourceforge.net/

Here are some of the things we put into this release, as compared to 3.0.0:

• Improved text search speed
• Full boolean search
• Improved card search logic and speed
• Text to speech (with external software)
• Many aspects of memory management revamped
• Lightspeed overclocking support for searching
• Prev/next book shared action
• Zlib compression for cross-references and Bibles.
• Faster cross-reference lookup for Bibles in VFS.
• Auto-scroll support.
• Auto-off can be set within Bible+
• Highlighted bookmarks on color devices
• Adjustable maximum number of bibles
• Tapwave rocker support
• Vocalized Hebrew support
• Book picker for more than 74 books
• Lots of bug fixes. This is the most stable release ever, I think.