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

My goodness, is it Sunday again? Well, for those of you who've missed the highs and lows of MobileRead over the past seven days, this is your one-way ticket to catch up:

Announcements
Welcome Brian to Mobileread

Current E-Books Trends
E-books worm into reference book market
Newspapers feeling the heat in the digital age
Reminder: Public e-book event Wednesday 9/21

General Chat
Authors Guild alleges Google's Library Project violates copyrights
Doom RPG for mobile phones
Free file hosting service offers 1GB of storage
Google to tap the wisdom of crowds?
In memory of Lu’wen Monahan
Is technology making us less intelligent?
Long life mobile battery 'vital'
Podcasts are a waste of time
Reuters to offer podcasts
Track Yahoo Finance message boards via RSS
Why should students pay $150 for one textbook?

Link Swap
Daily Rotation - More Tech headlines than you can imagine!
Mobile James Bond Site

Other Gadgets
BlackBerry 8700 aka Electron leaked photos
Tattoo video display - Technology concept
What do we do if we don't want a WM-based device?

Palm
Open letter to Palm: Fix the LifeDrive
Palm attempted to buy PalmSource
Palm is getting sued over lousy Treo quality
Palm shares tumble over disappointing earnings
Treo 700w aka Treo 670 - Engadget has it!
Treo 700w announcement coming Monday 9/26
Win a PDA or iPod at PalmAddicts

Pocket PC
Acer n300 Pocket PC with WM 5.0 and Wide-VGA
Dell Axim X51v first review (update)
Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox N500 series unveiled
HTC 2006 roadmap for Asia revealed
JasJar i-mate aka HTC Universal reviewed
Minimo CE 0.009 released
Minimo incompatible with Axim X50v - here's why
Windows Mobile 5 on your USB stick

Portable Audio/Video
GP2X: new linux based portable everything!
iPod nano turns into an e-book reader

Smartphones
Device makes the Treo 650 heart smart
HarperCollins sends book samples to mobile phones

Sunrise
Sunrise 0.42f released

03:03 AM by Chaos in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

With recent devices of the non-WM variety becoming more and more bland and failure-prone, where can people like myself (who don't touch Windows if at all possible) turn?

The reason this has become a point of interest for me recently is my NX70V is beginning to show it's age, in the lack of built-in bluetooth, wifi, and only 16 MB of memory. Considering how much of what I do is web-based, it's becoming near-useless to me at the moment, unfortunately (while I have a wireless card for it, it eats battery too fast to be really useful).

So, to start, look at recent Palm devices...

Tungsten T5: Software problems, no wifi.
Lifedrive: HD lag, hardware failure, some software issues. I considered looking at one for a while, but I've read many complaints about the hardware failing multiple times for some people, even after several replacement devices. Not to mention the reported software flaws.
Treo 650: It's a phone. What about people who don't want a phone? No wifi as well.

(You may ask why I'm noting the lack of wifi built-in, when Palm has a SD wifi card. It's because of the battery life. Using an external wifi card draws much more power than a built-in one ever does. And of course it also ties up the memory slot.)

What about Linux? Nothing seriously interesting from Sharp in the Zauri, with the lack of wifi and bluetooth totally. The C3000 was interesting for it's microdrive, but that was more than a year ago now... And (aside from Nokia with it's 'internet tablet') no one else seems terribly interested in Linux for the present (Palm, possibly, in the future - but that's bound to be at least a year away).

Looking at the (rumoured/semi-confirmed) upcoming devices...
Tungsten X: Looks interesting, from the wifi/bluetooth rumours... But will it have the same software problems as the last Tungsten? Or the hardware issues of the Lifedrive? Palm doesn't have a confidence-inspiring record recently.
Zire 22: Low-end... Nothing too special for someone who wants more 'bells-and-whistles'. Although it looks like a solid low-end device, as the other Zire 2xes have been said to be.
New Lifedrive: Not really much known. Maybe a larger hard drive? Maybe they'll not have the hardware and software problems that the original is said to have...

And then you have the Windows Mobile camp, where wifi and bluetooth are standard, as is compact flash and SD. But of course you have the wonderful stability and compatibility of Windows under the hood, not to mention a monopolist company behind the wheel... A company seemingly-dedicated to DRM in the future, as well, who look to be in a prime position to become a near-monopoly on the PDA market - the same position they're currently occupying in 'desktop-land'. Although with my Windows dislike firmly entrenched, I have to confess to, however briefly, considering looking at a WM device in the future... VGA + >600 Mhz + wifi/bluetooth + dual expansion... Very tempting, however ashamed I am to admit to such a thing as being tempted by Windows-based devices.

But, my question is simple... Where do PDAs stand if one doesn't want to consider Windows Mobile? The only hope I can see are the possibility of Palm catching up quickly with their 'next generation', in the TX, or the Nokia 770, which unfortunately still has no concrete release date...

09:12 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

From EContentMag , "Back in 2000 when it looked as though the entire world's content would soon be digitized, a myth developed that in the not-too-distant future, paper books would be supplanted by electronic books (ebooks). In this scenario, we would all be carrying ebook readers, and the bookstore as we know it would become a thing of the past. That vision (thankfully) has not come to fruition, but ebooks are making a comeback in a different guise. Today's ebooks are more likely to be online reference books than the latest bestseller. In the reference model, users can search across a database of books and find answers to queries in a variety of sources, rather than reading the entire book."

Follow the link for the rest of the story.

08:44 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

If you're a tech junkie, where can you get lots and lots of news headlines? The most common approach is with an RSS reader. But there's another less well-known way... customize your own Daily Rotation page.

From the site itself,
"Quick Loading Headlines From 300+ Tech Sites
You Pick The Sites. We Snag The Headlines"

08:31 PM by Brian in Miscellaneous | Lounge

In James Surowieki's book The Wisdom of Crowds, he explores the concept that large groups of people are smarter than the most brilliant individuals when it comes to solving problems, making wise decisions, and predicting the future. Several examples that support this notion are discussed in the book, which I highly recommend as it's one of my favorites. In one example, Surowieki tells how in 1906, a crowd of almost 800 people at an English county fair guessed the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. The average guess of the crowd was off by only one pound, closer than any individual guess.

In another example cited in the book, the author tells how in 1968 the USS Scorpion disappeared in the North Atlantic. With only a few pieces of information that might help to locate the lost sub, a number of people in different fields were asked to individually make their best guess at the sub's exact location. When their answers were combined to form a collective guess, the location was a mere 220 yards from the submarine, closer than any single individual guess, allowing the Navy recover the submarine.

Following the "wisdom of crowds" concept, Google has created their own predictive market within the company, and their early results show surprising accuracy.

"The markets were designed to forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance to Google."

I think this is one of Google's most intriguing projects yet, and it begs the question: What exactly are they up to at the Googleplex? How and when will they roll a "Google Wisdom" service out to the public, and what would they use it for? Please vote in the poll to show how much wisdom there is in the MobileRead crowd, and please don't view the results before voting.

[via Official Google Blog]

06:27 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

So you always seem to forget to bring your pda or smartphone? No problem. Just build the display and electronics into smart nanobots that flow throughout your body, and you'll never leave it behind. When it's time to watch that latest movie, you give them the command, and they all assemble into the perfect display device in your skin. One thing's for sure... when you use this display, you won't be typing with two thumbs!

Here's Engadget's own clever take on the technology ...

"Note to Hart and Huntington tattoo shop: you guys so need to hook up with Gina Miller, a designer and animator who is looking to make your business totally obsolete. Obviously seeing a bright future in implanted devices, Seattle-based Miller, with help from nanotech author Robert A. Freitas Jr., has finished her concept-animation project that envisions a dermal display system consisting of billions of nanobots that can self-assemble and emit photons to form text and graphics directly on the skin. While user-changeable tattoos are the most obvious implementation of this technology, Freitas proposes the more “practical” deployment of using pixelbots to display info gathered from the army of healthbots that will one day run amok in our bloodstreams. The futuristic system also promises to be touch sensitive, allowing you to send a message back to your nano-friends telling them to get the hell out of your prostate."

04:29 PM by Brian in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

It looks like the official announcement of the Palm Treo 700w running the Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system will be coming next week. Palm just posted this press release on the Palm.com website:

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 23, 2005--Ed Colligan, Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq:PALM) president and chief executive officer; Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect; and Denny Strigl, president and chief executive officer of Verizon Wireless, invite the news media to join them for a press conference on Monday, Sept. 26, at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco beginning at 9 a.m. PDT.

The press conference will be accessible via live webcast at links below beginning at 9 a.m. A replay, podcast and written transcript of the press conference also will be available starting at approximately 12 p.m. and listed in Monday's news release.

Related: Treo 700w aka Treo 670 - Engadget has it!

12:22 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Palm's fiscal first-quarter earnings dropped 7% as higher costs and stronger competition undercut stronger sales of its hand-held computing products. Meanwhile Palm CEO Ed Colligan gave a lower-than expected guidance for the second quarter. As a result, Palm shares dropped over 17 percent today in early trading.

Leading analysts to question whether the Treo — Palm's high-flying smartphone — is strong enough to carry the company while it moves focus away from digital organizers... Mr. Colligan said that sales of Treo smartphones —the hybrid device that acts as a cell phone and digital organizer — rose 163 per cent while sales for personal digital assistants fell 22 per cent. He added that Palm could see a deferred-tax asset valuation allowance in the second quarter, which may lead to earnings of between 60 cents and 66 cents per share. Without it, the company may report earnings per share in the range of 38 cents to 43 cents, far lower than analysts' forecast of 66 cents.

Related: PalmSource, recently acquired by Japan's Access, had a disappointing quarter as well. Revenues slid 13 percent and Net losses widened to nearly $2 million. More.

[via AP Wire]