08:59 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

PocketCenter.de has posted what we think are the first photos of the forthcoming Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox N500 series.

Specs:

• WM 5.0 powered
• built-in GPS (!)
• Bluetooth and WiFi
• VGA at least for the top model

More rumored specs:

• 256Mb of ROM and 64Mb/128Mb of RAM depending on the model
• WiFi 802.11g (!)
• Quadband GSM/GRPS

Sounds like the perfect Pocket PC, doesn't it?

08:33 AM by Brian in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Professor Jonathan, an associate writer at PalmAddicts and a LifeDrive owner, has posted an open letter to Palm urging them to fix memory issues with the LifeDrive that he feels are holding back its success.

"I will never understand, Palm, why you felt the need to make the main memory of the LifeDrive a dedicated partition of the hard drive. Not only does it affect battery life, but it's slower than physical RAM.""

You can read the full text of Jonathan's open letter to Palm at PalmAddicts here.

Do other LifeDrive owners share Jonathan's criticisms of the LifeDrive's memory structure, and is it a major turn off for prospective buyers?

08:14 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

If you're a college student and don't have the luxury of charging your purchases to daddy's credit card, you probably know the sudden onset of depression upon entering a campus bookstore. The price of textbooks is just out of hand. According to this sobering government report (PDF), over the past two decades, "college textbook prices have risen at double the rate of inflation."

Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres notes in a recent NYT article that professors receive royalties for textbooks that they author and then assign to their students. In addition, he draws an analogy to prescription drugs:

Indeed, the pricing problems with textbooks are eerily analogous to those affecting prescription drugs. In both cases you have doctors (Ph.D.'s or M.D.'s) prescribing products. In neither case does the doctor pay for the product prescribed - in many cases, he or she doesn't even know what it costs. And the clincher is that in both cases, the manufacturers sell the same product at substantially reduced prices abroad.

So it's easy to understand why publishers have been hesitant to release electronic textbooks at substantially lower prices than regular textbooks. As long as students have no choice in the textbooks they buy, publishers won't see a need to offer lower-priced alternatives that could potentially cannibalize their lucrative monopolistic market.

07:27 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Taken straight from the newly launched DoomRPG.com website:

Doom RPG is a first-person turn-based role playing game set in the Doom universe. Developed specifically for your mobile device, you reprise the role of the Doom Marine made famous in the groundbreaking id Software titles Doom, Doom II, and Doom 3. Say goodbye to humdrum mobile gaming and prepare yourself for the return to Mars in a showdown with the legions of Hell!

Features include smooth-scrolling 3D gameplay from a first person perspective, a brutal aresenal of 9 weapons, 10 action packed levels filled with dangerous and ugly monsters, incredible power-ups, and secret areas to explore.

Doom RGP requires a J2ME-capable cell phone (MIDP or BREW 2.0). No release date has been set yet.

10:25 PM by Brian in E-Book General | News

HarperCollins Publishers in Australia and Legion Interactive have teamed up to launch the MobileReader service, sending chapter samples of new books to customers' mobile phones.

MobileReader allows booklovers to read chapter samplers of the latest new release books on their mobile phone simply by logging onto the MobileReader website. Once you've signed up for MobileReader, you'll receive our new release pack each month.

You'll also receive our genre pack, depending on the genres you selected when you signed up. We'll let you know what the genre pack is each month, and if you didn't select that genre when you joined, you'll have the option of sending an SMS to request the genre pack anyway. You'll also have the option to unsubscribe from the service.

Excerpts from new releases by authors Dean Koontz, Paulo Coelho, and Janine Allis will be among the first sent to subscribers of the service. This won't be the first time HarperCollins have used mobile phones to reach customers. In August, HarperCollins Children's Books UK launched the Meg Cabot Mobile Club where fans can get messages from the author, news, polls, and special offers sent directly to their phones.

Instead of fighting mobile technology, HarperCollins appears to be embracing it in unique and novel ways to promote their books.

Let the comments on the name begin! MobileReader?

[via textually.org and MocoNews]

06:33 PM by Brian in E-Book General | News

In an post on the Rebuilding Media blog at Corante.com, Bob Cauthorn tells the tale of large newspapers announcing major layoffs as their circulation continues to decline at an accelerated rate. The author makes a very compelling argument that the newspapers have only themselves to blame. Readers are getting more of their news content online, and while many newspapers are offering online editions for subscribers, they aren't presenting a compelling multimedia experience to their readers, who will go elsewhere to get it. Newspapers are clinging to a model that has served them well in the past, but if they fail to adapt, they will quickly become extinct in the digital age.

In an ironic twist, MSNBC is running a story from the September 26, 2005 issue of Newsweek International Edition about how reading is declining as visual media takes off.

Visual media are, if anything, a more natural mode for humans than the written word, at least according to neuroscientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

David Rothman from TeleRead weighs in:

Digitizing books isn’t enough; we need linking, multimedia, you name it, to keep books popular in a Net-oriented era. P-publishers and authors should spend less time whining and more time adjusting to the new realities.

I myself am an old-time text guy and will do all I can to encourage reading. But to ignore multimedia, in 2005, to the extent that most newspapers have, is sheer folly. Book publishers should heed the lesson.

Is reading text on paper, as these two articles would suggest, a dying form of media in the digital age? Is visual digital media a better, more natural way to tell a story and provide information?

Related: E-books could be more than just type

03:56 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

There isn't much to say except that we congratulate Peter from Engadget for holding in his hands the first Palm device to be powered with Windows Mobile: the Palm Treo 700w aka Treo 670. Specs:

• Windows Mobile 5.0
• 1 megapixel camera
• EV-DO
• Bluetooth
• 64MB
• 240 x 240 resolution (unconfirmed)

Thanks to Laurens for the find of the day!

04:35 AM by Laurens in Archive | Sunrise

This release fixes a serious bug introduced in version 0.42e. Embedded images with an alternate full-size version would not be properly included in the Plucker documents. The result was that many images would appear to be missing from the documents.

Download Windows version (PalmGear)

Download Linux/GTK version (Sunrise weblog)

If you are new to Sunrise, click here to find out more about its top-notch features for website offline conversion.