09:06 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The cool guys from Pocket PC Mag are currently beta testing a dedicated blogging area for their staff members.

Also note that with the next issue, Pocket PC Mag will undergo a subtle name change and be known as "Smartphone and Pocket PC Mag".

08:49 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

If you haven't already heard, like you know, if you've been in a coma for the past two months, some people aren't too amused about Google's plans to digitally copy every work in the collections of various leading research libraries. While Google argues that it would make our planet a better place by effectively producing a digital database that would allow users to search book content of every possible publication online, opponents of the project (most of them who are members of the American Association of Publishers) argue that Google does not have the right to scan a copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder.

If:book has an analysis of a pair of recent op-eds appearing in The Washington Post, one from each side of the Google Print dispute. Neither side seems close to agreement or backing down.

08:24 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Microsoft is evaluating a new tool called VirtualWiFi allowing Windows XP users to simultaneously connect to multiple networks using only one WiFi adapter. Microsoft is citing (PDF) various uses for the technology:

• Concurrent Connectivity: A user can connect her machine to an ad hoc network, while staying on her authorized infrastructure network.
• Network Elasticity: The range of an infrastructure network can be extended by allowing border nodes to act as relays for authorized nodes that are outside the range of the Access Point.
• Gateway Node: A node that is part of a wireless ad hoc network and close to an AP, connected to the Internet, can become a gateway node for the ad hoc network.
• Increased Capacity: The capacity of ad hoc networks can be increased when nodes within interference range can communicate by switching on orthogonal channels.
• Virtual Machines: Users can connect different virtual machines to physically different wireless networks.

For instance, with VirtualWifi users will be able connect to a guest's machine or play games over one wireless network, while surfing the Web on another. In the realm of handheld computing this technology could prove to be very useful (if adopted), given that most handheld devices are restricted to a single physical network adapter.

[via Engadget]

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Once again, our weekly roundup of highlights from the past seven days of MobileRead:

Announcements
Unregistered User Posts Temporarily Disabled

Browsers
AvantGo adds RSS support
Skweezer provides optimized Web access for Orange World portal

Current E-Books Trends
"Concept Readius": rollable electronic paper ready for prime time
E Ink goes color with new advanced electronic paper
Greedy publisher cashes in with e-books
The future of newspapers
World's first tablet-sized flexible E Ink display

General Chat
Are early adopters stupid?
Content providers should use DRM judiciously
Editorial: Where are the intelligent handhelds?
Proposed Solutions for Mobile Computing

iSilo/X
iSilo 4.29 beta 2 available

Other Gadgets
Bill Gates staking his reputation on Tablet PCs

Other Readers
PalmPDF - native PDF Viewer for Palm OS 5.x

Palm
Access spokesman says PalmOS reaching end of life
Blackberry Connect coming to the Treo
Boston Globe says the PDA not dead yet
Mobile Ministry Magazine Adds Forums
PalmOS Software developers interviewed about WinMobile Treo
Put the home back on your Palm T|X

Pocket PC
Restrain from using illicit Windows Mobile ROMs

Portable Audio/Video
20 GB Creative Zen Media Center is $200 at Buy.com
Mobisodes: Mobile Episodes of your favorite TV shows
New personal DVD player from Axion

Smartphones
Nokia bringing KDE to your phone

Sunrise
Sunrise 0.42h released - now on SourceForge

02:21 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

DigiTimes had the opportunity to talk with Philips Polymer Vision about Concept Readius, a monochrome 5-inch QVGA display which can be rolled back into a pocket-size device and which offers all the benefits of electronic paper including high contrast and low power consumption.

• Concept Readius: designed for a pocket e-reader application; can be bigger than the device itself (usually the display is a maximum 70% of the device size); uses an electrophoretic display effect (electronic paper) that only uses power when the screen is refreshed.
• Development roadmap: Mass manufacturing will start in 2006 in cooperation with a manufacturing partner.
• Introduction schedule: Philips Polymer Vision will work with handheld device manufacturers to bring this rollable display to market. Products could be in the market as early as 2007.

Related: A mobile screen to drool over, The future of newspapers

01:24 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The Windows Mobile Team warns us of the risks inherent when upgrading a Pocket PC device with an illicit Windows Mobile 5.0 ROM image.

Most ROM files which leak on the Net these days are from internal test builds where specific features of a device were being tested either by the Windows Mobile Team or the OEM who made the device. The joy of running your device with the latest Windows version at any cost may only be short-lived: The beta ROMs are prone to severe bugs and make production use often impossible. One example of what could happen:

We needed to test some aspects of our software that our existing dogfood devices couldn't support, so we bought a bunch of devices from them and asked them to give us that test build. It leaked out, and I've heard that it's available on the web. But, in that build, the camera barely works at all, the battery life is terrible, and the cell radio frequently crashes. These things didn't matter to us, because we were able to test our features and release WM5. But a real user wouldn't want to use it.

Not to mention that installing an unofficial ROM may void your warranty and cause you many sleepless nights where you'd lie awake and await the reckoning for your sins.

11:27 AM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

There are a few blind spots in mobile technology. It's a very young technology which needs creative nurturing. Every now and then, I get a little fired up about the ways in which we should already be able to use our mobile devices, but can't. Usually, the thought passes and I just accept our restrictions, but as an experiment this time, I plan to share my thoughts and see if anyone else also cares about it.

By the way, if you just want to find the "good stuff", try scanning all the way down to the section called "What about hardware innovations?" It's sort of a side-topic to the main article's train of thought, but I think it will be worth a read even if the main topic here doesn't interest you. It proposes a whole new category of mobile computing. And it's one that might be superior to every approach considered or proposed so far.

But back to the main discussion of this article. What I am proposing is presented as a word processing solution, but is actually much more than a word processing solution. It is a whole new mobile computing paradigm to enhance the ways we might be able to work on mobile devices. It begins to come much closer to doing laptop-like tasks. Word processing is just the most obvious application to consider.

Example Scenario
Here is a real-life situation that currently frustrates me. I bet other have very similar situations themselves.

I need to prepare to teach a class. In this case it happens to be a Bible Study, but this scenario can apply to pretty much any word processing session that is not straight typing of paragraphs.

My computer is upstairs in my office. I want to work on downstairs at my kitchen table, with my reference books spread out around me. I've got this wonderful smartphone device (a Treo 650 in my case) with a powerful word processing program (Word To Go) and an external keyboard. My battery is all charged up, but I have a power cord just in case.

Yes, I could use a laptop, but my work laptop is not available unless I carry it home, and I don't want to buy a laptop (and even worse spend the time to keep it up to date with virus protection, firewall, OS updates, spyware removal, software updates, backups, etc etc) just because I have to do a few word processing sessions.

I want to do it with my handheld device... let's take a look at whether it will do the job for me.

What I Am Trying to Do
The basic process I follow on the desktop is to read the Bible text, paste it into a Word document as Bold text, and add all kinds of information interspersed with the text but in a non-bold font style to distinguish it from the main Bible text.

I add things like my own observations, questions I intend to ask to the group, material from various reference materials like commentaries and Bible dictionaries. I might also, for example, look at things like the words used in the original language, where those words are used elsewhere, other places in the Bible that have related information about the topic, background information about the places and people and subject, etc etc.

So basically I'm digging into portions of the text that I want to understand better, and collecting into my Word document all that supporting information. Some of that additional material is on my smartphone and some is in book form. That means that some of it should be cut and pasted in, and some of it is just typed in. And sometimes various supporting information needs to be moved from place to place.

The main point is that, technology-wise, I am basically doing typical word processing tasks. I am copying material from another source, pasting it into the document in various locations, typing in text in various locations, and rearranging information in new sequences and combinations.

The problem is -- I can do that easily on the desktop and it's nearly impossible on the smartphone even with an external keyboard.

So why doesn't it work?

The Issues Explained

Handheld software is basically set up to do only three things with regard to documents... view them, make various short editing changes, or add text sequentially by typing a continuous flow of text.

What you can't really do are tasks that involve moving around large chunks of text, or navigating easily across portions of the document that encompass more than what fits on a screen.

For example, have you ever tried even just highlighting a large section of text in a large Word document on a handheld? It's not so easy to tap and drag when you are trying to highlight 12 (tiny) screens of info. On the desktop, you have the option of clicking at the start, scrolling to the end and SHIFT-Clicking to highlight what you want. I could be wrong, but I don't think there's an equivalent on your smartphone or pda.

In addition, some programs may limit how much you can select or copy, but that's a minor issue and whether or not it's an issue now, I'm sure it will not be a problem soon.

You certainly don't have a lot of options for easily getting around in a document either. Not to mention that the controls you do have are not necesssarily the most responsive.

And even worse, consider the nightmare it is when you want to copy from one document or program into another document. On PalmOS, you pretty much just want to give up before you try. On Windows Mobile, at least you have a chance if you have a nice task switching utility.

Scattered Answers
How about trying move around in your document? Here's a revolutionary thought... if you want a reasonable user experience, you must make up for the tiny screen size with faster, more responsive and more flexible ways of navigating through the document.

I don't think people are trying very hard to solve this problem. I'm no expert, but here are some ideas to get you thinking...
* Put a mini trackball or touchpad on the folding keyboard to make it easier to navigate and highlight text.
* When you drag the scroll bar it should show text real time.
* When you tap and hold you should be able to add or go to a bookmark location, or return to a previous location.
* How about another control along side the scroll bar that is used to selectively tap forward or backward 1,2,3,4 or 5 screens easily - it would have a set of numbers in boxes from top down that are 5,4,3,2,1,-1,-2,-3,-4,-5. You tap the box and the document scrolls exactly that many pages. Or to get really fancy, how about if you use a gesture to navigate in multiples? (Tap and drag left from the 5 box to go 10 pages instead of the 5 if you just tapped. Or maybe just have 1-10, where the gesture direction determines if you move forward or backwards.) On this new control, instead of the arrows at the end of a scroll bar, you could have "paragraph arrows" that move you one paragraph up or down every time you tap them. In fact the whole control bar I described could move you up or down by either screens or paragraphs depending on how options are set up by the user. And you might even allow tap and hold repeated scrolling as you watch the text to see where you are.
* Simpler and more friendly bookmarking. When you don't see everything on one large screen, you need a way to get back and forth among locations you have found. But there's no way to do that easily now. How about changing how bookmarks work? Instead of typing in the name of a bookmark or having to call up something complicated to set one, how about tap and hold on a word (not even forcing the user to highlight the word first) and then one of the popup menu items is an option to bookmark the spot using the word (and maybe a few more words after it) as the name of the bookmark. Then when you want to find it again, you just call up the bookmark list and look for the text you want to go to, and tap it. The list itself should make it easy to delete items so it doesn't get too cluttered. Maybe even allow multiple lists of bookmarks so the user can get around by subject or topic thread.

What about hardware innovations?

We want to have our smartphone in our pocket, but we want to have a fuller laptop experience available also. If we have a device based on Linux, it naturally cries out for a better interface option. Why can't we have our cake and eat it too?

Suppose we had a folding keyboard device that did more? Instead of leaning that smartphone or pda up on the keyboard support, how about making the folding keyboard into a clamshell terminal? Give it a decent sized lcd screen along with a keyboard and a mini trackball or touchpad or IBM-like touch dot (those dots weren't so perfect for laptops, but wouldn't they be great for folding pda keyboards!?) And of course an a/c option. This would be incredible for on-the-go computing on a linux environment. You have everything with you in your pocket, and if you want a laptop-like experience, you just add that clamshell terminal to make it perfect for "full" computing.

More expensive? Yes and no. Yes, it's more expensive than a typical folding keyboard. But compared to a laptop or tablet pc, you have a really inexpensive full computing environment on the road without a full laptop, and with no synching or backup issues (the data stays on your pda/SD cards and gets backed up with the pda you backup anyway). And over the years, the capabilities will grow and grow, especially related to speed and storage.

What's the key innovation? A new member in the spectrum of mobile devices. So far, we have had ideas like SoulPad that is a computer that goes with you and attached to desktops to be used as terminals, but it neither works as a mobile device by itself, nor is it pocketable, nor can you do much if you are not at a desktop PC. We have smartphones and pdas, of course. And Tablet PCs, and handtops, and notebooks/laptops.

But no one has ever suggested a way to really get the best of full mobile computing together with pocket computing until now. I'm suggesting that with a Linux smartphone or pda combined with a portable terminal that is essentially a folding keyboard plus integrated pointer/clicker device and integrated screen, you can have the best of both worlds. The pocket device is completely self-sufficient, and when you choose to carry the portable terminal you essentially have a laptop with no data synching issues. That portable terminal could, of course, also have things like hard drives or extra flash memory in them if you desired.

Concluding Thoughts

Surely we all think about these sorts of issues when we are working with handheld devices. But most people probably haven't quite put into words what the real issues are, because they are so numerous and complicated. It's hard to get to the root of what matters. My hope is that hearing topics like this will help us think through some possibilities or where handheld computing might be headed. And maybe it will even help us to realize that some of the limitations we've accepted as a necessary because of the form factor can still be overcome without star trek technological advances.

I have to apologize for this very unprofessional approach to presenting what I think are some important ideas worthy of careful writing and an well thought out presentation. But just getting all this down in first draft form has taken up too much of my morning already and it's a busy day for me. So I'm going to let you see this in it's rawest of raw forms which is essentially a brain dump. I am not even going to bother to read it over once now that it's down, so if there's sections that have my to-do list for today or diary entries or something equally crazy, please forgive me. If I'm lucky, the only problems will have to do with rambling disjoint and unorganized thoughts and incomplete sentences.

And if I'm really fortunate, you'll have found some exciting new ideas for mobile computing that inspire new ways of thinking about the future of our software and hardware.

At the very least, you might be entertained with an inside view at what my editorials look like before they get cleaned up!

So tell me.... What do you think?

02:20 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Palm is dead. How many times have we heard that? It almost rings completely hollow after so many false alarms. But now we hear it said by Access, the company that owns PalmOS. The hardware company Palm, Inc may be okay, but our beloved PalmOS is in trouble.

From Computer Business Review,
"A spokesperson for Access told Computer Business Review that a logical end-of-life is expected for the Palm operating system (OS) and that the company anticipates being able to offer an integrated OS solution "sitting on top of a Linux kernel".

These statements confirm the impression garnered at the time of the acquisition that Access's strategic interest in acquiring PalmSource was in getting its hands on the Linux development capabilities PalmSource acquired at the end of last year when it bought China Mobilesoft."

The article concludes that "...while the Access spokesperson pointed out that Palm had also renewed its deal with PalmSource for supply of the OS through 2009 just prior to the acquisition by Access, the writing is clearly on the wall for what was once the last word in mobile device operating systems."

It sounds like it's almost time to put the nail in coffin, doesn't it? There are still some long shot possibilities....
1) Access is going to produce a pda/smartphone platform called by another name, so even though it's basically PalmOS for Linux, they want to distance themselves from the Palm name which is owned by Palm, Inc anyway. I don't think this is the case, though, because if they were planning to do a continuation of PalmOS, they probably would have unveiled a new name and said it continues the great PalmOS tradition. This approach doesn't make any sense if PalmOS is living on over Linux.
2) Palm, Inc could probably still purchase the rights to PalmOS outright and maintain it themselves. But I don't see that happening either. They have a contract for PalmOS through 2009, and that's more than enough time to dump it altogether. Even if they wanted to continue development on PalmOS, they probably only would do that if they could hire on the development team, which would probably be ruled out in any purchase agreement with Access. Just doesn't look likely.
3) PalmOS is "given" to the development community to live on as open source. This is not likely either, as it would be handing over too much intellectual property.
4) PalmOS is sold to another competitor. I doubt it, but it is possible.
5) The story could be misleading. Yeah, and I might win the lottery tomorrow also.

I still hope that PalmOS has a bright future, but with this news for the owner of PalmOS, I think it's time for me to keep an eye out for a Linux or Win Mobile device. While I won't say "RIP" yet, it sure doesn't look good.

Still, as Jeff Kirvin has said in the past, no matter what happens, and no matter how fast PalmOS dies in terms of new products, the Palm device you have in your hand will continue to work. The PalmOS community is here to stay for a long long time.

Thanks to Lindsey Dyson from Palm Addicts for this important scoop. If you want evidence of the strength of the ongoing PalmOS community, be sure to stop over and visit them.

Update: According to one of the comments at the Engadget post, Ed Hardy of Brighthand wrote the following:

I consider Ed to be a very reliable and very thorough reporter of these things, so this is probably all just a mistake. Phwew!