07:49 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

If you think your voice may be music to someone's ears, you can now use Slawesome to add it to your e-mails. The service's currently free and in alpha testing. Obviously the next step would be to add some software that turns our voice back into text.

07:41 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Tapwave may rest in peace, but the Zodiac PDA/gaming hybrid lives on through a die-hard fanbase. One fine example is Zodiacs Around The World, a photo journal where Zodiac owners can submit their photos and share them with the Zodiac community. Even more Zodiac photos in the Flickr archive.

[via PalmAddicts]

07:19 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

What would you call a device that has a screen, a keyboard, storage for personal information such as contacts, email, documents, the ability to play audio and video files, some games, a spreadsheet program, and a communications capability? Sound like a personal computer? How about "mobile phone"?

Sounds utopian? Read here why it's not unreasonable to think now is a good time for the mobile phone to replace our old unhandy PC.

07:02 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Sammy of PalmAddicts has decided to ditch his love affair with the Palm LifeDrive and go back to his Tungsten C. No doubt the LifeDrive is a great PDA with many useful functions and connectivity, but in regard to productivity the Tungsten may also have its advantages. Read here why Sam made the switch.

Some initial reactions and comments:

• Old becomes new
• TC for Productivity
• Catching up on the weekend
• One of the first things I did

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"