10:44 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The PDA Portal directory of mobile friendly sites is about to be sold.

Seems that the owner is planning to put it for sale on eBay in a few days.
In terms of usage, he reports the following at the time of this post...

Last 24 Hrs -
Home page 1,519
Other pages 3,018
PDA links 2,195
pdaPortal total 6,732

Wanna buy a web site?

09:57 PM by Brian in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

If you've been eagerly awaiting the release of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, you'll have to wait a bit longer. Internet Tablet Talk.com is reporting that Nokia has pushed the release from the third quarter of 2005 to October, "to enable more mature software at launch. A decision that we hope that people will recognize as a good move, ultimately benefiting all Nokia 770 users."

A number of developers have already announced their plans to port their applications to the Nokia 770's Linux-based Internet Tablet 2005 platform, including SharpMusique and FBReader. The Maemo ports of AbiWord and Plucker have already been completed.

Related: First Nokia 770 review, Does the Nokia 770 have sex appeal?

[via Internet Tablet Talk]

07:25 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

There's an excellent article at Mobile Pipeline that has a lot of information about energy harvesting and beaming power wirelessly.

"Today’s much touted wireless gadgets could be more properly called wireless 'communication' devices since, at some point, a wire is still needed to convey power from the wall to the appliance. On the other hand, hundreds of kilowatts (kW) of power have been successfully transmitted wirelessly across long distances for quite some time. While the focus of wireless power transmission has been so far in the megawatts (MW) , such as in solar energy harvesting or milliwatts (mW)as in RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), the time should be ripe for porting this technology into many different portable wireless applications."

I just hope that my internal organs don't become the receiver! Read the full article here.

11:59 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Fujitsu made available a short flash movie in Japanese demonstrating the world's first film substrate-based bendable color electronic paper. The company is still conducting test marketing and practical-use testing, and targets commercialization of its new paper sometime between April 2006 and March 2007.

Related: Fujitsu's new color E-Paper in perpetuity, A Librie for the rest of us

11:11 AM by Brian in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

In a recent interview of Jeff Hawkins by Janet Rae-Dupree, technology editor for the San Jose Business Journal, Jeff Hawkins spoke about a secret third business that Palm is working on:

There is a third business that I've been working on but I'm not going to tell you what it is. It's in mobile computing. It's something different and it's in its early stage. We have three businesses at PalmOne. One you don't even know about, which is just a child. Another is the teenager and the other one is the mature 45-year-old.

Later in the interview he offers these hints:

I'll give you a couple clues. I always think of mobile computing as personal computing. This long-term vision has led us through everything -- first the organizers and now through the smart phone space. It's like everything a personal computer is. Continue down that path. What are the implications of a world where everyone has a super high-speed Internet connection in their pocket and many gigabytes of storage, super-fast processors, audio, visual and multimedia? What are the consequences of that? How will that change computing when you have all that stuff available to you all the time? I try to think into the future. That's how we come up with new products. So I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it's following the consequences of mobile computing.

This interview caused a lot of speculation about this "third business", with many people concluding that Mr. Hawkins was talking about the LifeDrive, not another device still under development. I never bought into this conclusion, however, and now it appears that Palm is in fact working on something, and it isn't the LifeDrive.

Michael Ducker of Treocentral.com attended an Analyst event at Palm this past Monday, at which time Jeff Hawkins offered this tease, as detailed in this article:

Hawkins could not leave without a tease, and so he explained how the the original Palm and the Treo were revolutionary devices, and how everything else released by Palm were sustaining devices. Now, he claims that Palm is working on a 3rd revolutionary device that will keep the company going over the next half decade. Lastly, the Windows Mobile Treo is not the only device Palm will announce this year, and I quote "We'll be announcing more products before the years end".

So, now the two part question is: What is this revolutionary new device, and does it have anything to do with his work at Numenta?

09:48 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Update: Engadget thinks it's a fake (thanks Laurens)
Update 2: Now I also believe it's a fake. See Colin's "proof" further down this thread.

Daniel had a chance to play with a pre-release of iTunes for Windows Mobile 5.0 and he posted some nice screenshots for us on his blog Schrankmonster (which translates to "monster in your closet"). First Palm, and now Apple making the jump to WM 5.0. What better could've happened to Microsoft?

I did not have the time for an in-depth test yet but it seems that it is not limited in the way the Motorola ROKR is. Nevertheless I was not able to sync it with a PC/Mac iTunes yet since there are no drivers (and I haven't got any) I successfully copied 1 GB of MP3/AAC files onto a SD Card and I could play it all. When I inserted the SD Card iTunes automatically searched for media files and rebuilt it's library. After some seconds I could start listening.

09:37 AM by sUnShInE in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

SanDisk took a step it hopes will transform both the mobile media and music industries by unveiling their new grūvi™ storage technology.

At a news conference at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show in San Francisco on Tuesday, SanDisk, EMI Group and Virgin Records America announced that a version of the Rolling Stones' album "A Bigger Bang" will be released on a new TransFlash microSD or miniSD card set to go on sale in select retail stores in November for US$39.99. It will include band images and links to other Rolling Stones goods and music that the consumer could opt to buy.

SanDisk also showed off the 4Gb embedded flash memory component with TrustedFlash technology, which will be integrated into mobile phones, music players, PDAs, personal media players and GPS devices. It takes up less than 4 percent of the space that a microdrive would take up. TrustedFlash integrates digital rights management (DRM) into a flash memory card. It will be rolled out in the fourth quarter of this year, but is available now to original equipment manufacturers in miniSD, microSD and SD card formats, according to SanDisk.

Consumers will be able to move content on TrustedFlash cards from one mobile device to another because the DRM is built in to the card. Depending on the DRM settings defined by the content provider, consumers also will be able to copy the content to a PC hard drive or other storage as backup a certain number of times, the company said.

More here.

09:01 PM by Brian in More E-Book Readers | HanLin eBook

Hong Kong-based Tianjin Jinke Electronics Co., LTD will be releasing their Sony Librie-like Hanlin V8 e-book reader. This device has a 6 inch 800X600 pixel E-Ink display just like the Librie, 64MB of internal memory, SD/MMC memory card expansion up to 1GB, a 254X96 auxiliary display, and supports TXT, HTML, PDF, DOC, PPT and Excel formats.

No word yet on pricing, English language support, or availability. You can drool over more photos here. Considering the fact that a Sony Librie converted to English by Dynamism will currently set you back about $479 USD, an affordably priced V8 could be the first dedicated e-book reader for the masses with the exceptional readability E-Ink provides. While it remains to be seen whether or not dedicated e-book devices will appeal to mass markets or will be limited to education, libraries and e-book enthusiasts, a platform like the V8 will mean more devices that could create the incentive for publishers to offer their content in friendly, open, electronic formats.

David Rothman at TeleRead has more details.

[via TeleRead]