12:19 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

We've all heard that "Time is money." I'm not sure that my time is money, but I do considerate important. Even the time I spend unwinding or wasting in the name of frivilous activities. You know, like things associated with mobile computing. I'm starting wonder if podcasts are the very worst way to pass information, or if it's just that it's hard to put together a really good podcast that justifies the choice of media.

What's the biggest weakness of the podcasting paradigm for information exchange? Plain and simple, it's time.

Think about it. When you read material, do you get stuck reading the parts that don't interest you? Not really, you can adjust your reading speed to match your interest in the material. And when you finish skimming the material, you are satisfied because for the most part you basically know what you missed.

But not so for podcasting. There are no indicators of when a topic changes, nor chapter marks or anything else that helps you skim materials other than a skip mechanism on your audio player. Some podcasts come with very nifty guides, like Tech Addiction or Engadget so if you are looking at the podcast agenda, it's a little easier to navigate and decide what to listen to. Some even have time indicators of when topics start and end. I like that, even though I don't have a screen in front of me when I listen to a podcast in my car.

So, do I really think that podcasting is a complete waste of time? No, of course not. And I listen to some, although not nearly as many as I did when I first tried them. There is something nice about podcasts, especially for car listening or material that you like hearing discussions about, or that are put together by people you enjoy hearing.

My plea is for a better podcast, and one that is considerate of my time.

Here's a few ideas that should make a podcast worthy of the listener:

* A summary of topics in the beginning of the podcast
* Constant and reasonable volume levels, including for music and sound effects and ads.
* Minimal background noise or whistles and pops and clicks
* Edit out the time wasting portions when there are long technology failures, etc, unless they have special interest to the listener.
* If you must have ads, keep them short and not at a higher volume level.
* Something worth listening to!

Surprisingly, most podcasters have something interesting to say. Maybe not interesting to everybody, or even as interesting as other podcasts that we could listen to instead, but it's good to have a lot of material out there. With the internet, the very best stuff will usually get found.

You would think my list is full of no-brainers, but that's apparently not true. I wrote earlier that podcasts hurt my ears, and I meant it. It's often not pleasant at all when sudden loud noises hit you and the volume is already high to hear over road noise. Or you turn up the volume because one podcast is barely audible, and then the next podcast almost shatters your windows with nightmarishly loud intro music.

Just think about almost any podcast not coming from a mainstream media outlet, and you'll see what kind of difference audio and production quality can make. I can understand that not everyone has the skills, equipment or even the desire to make a top-notch podcast like from BBC news, but after half a dozen podcasts from a source, I guess I hope for a little consideration for the listener on sound levels, background noise, and announcement of topics.

Do I still listen to the podcasts I'm most interested in despite these issues? Yes. But it could be so much better, with some simple consideration for the listener.

10:11 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

HTC doesn't seem to bother too much about insider leaks considering that msmobiles.com has just managed to reveal a full chart and roadmap of existing and upcoming models of phones made by the company - including interesting new names such as HTC Wallaby, HTC Falcon, HTC Star Trek.

10:02 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The Pocket PC-based browser Minimo turned 0.009 today. Major items addressed:

• 8.5% reduction in Minimo executable on-disk binary size.
• Added Social Bookmark support.
• Initial Preference Dialog landed.
• Support for external protocols (for example, callto://).
• Adding small screen PKI dialogs.
• Made improvements to font rendering and unicode support.
• Adding user ability to dump js console to aide in problem diagnostics.

Also fixed:

• 283409 URL Suggestion Mechanism Does Not Work
• 283264 Drop down menu's do not work as expected
• 305537 "about:" not working
• 305974 Close tab button.
• 305714 A Windows CE installer
• 305712 SNAV - When focused in a popup, do not navigate

Download link

09:41 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

It's a long shot, but the iPod nano might actually replace your current e-book reader device. That is of course only if you're a 100/100 vision sharpshooter. Tokyo-based company Voyager added support for the nano in the latest update of its reader software "azur". Babelfish translation is a bit unclear about it, but from what I could gather it's currently only working if you also have an Apple Mac.

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.