12:24 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

According to the class action lawsuit (PDF, 37 pages) which has been filed in the state of California against Palm, the company has knowingly misrepresented the Treo 600 and 650 handsets as being "quick, dependable and reliable" devices. The suit claims that Treo devices fail at unacceptably high rates, are inherently defective and that Palm has not warned customers about the risks inherent in purchasing and relying upon a Treo as a mobile telephone and organizer.

In fact, these phones suffered from extremely poor sound quality and buzzing, choppiness, speakerphone problems, poor and broken screens, phone crashes, software crashes and electrical surges. When Palm replaced phones in response to these problems they replicated the problems by providing consumers refurbished phones subject to identical issues.

In short some people are very unhappy now and they want Palm to pay back five times the purchase price to each of them for punitive damages.

Palm stock price went down by a good 3% today.

[via PalmAddicts]

10:20 AM by Laurens in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

So, Palm did bid for Palmsource after all. The question remains: should we be happy now that Access won out? -Alex

PalmInfoCenter - Palm Attempted to Buy PalmSource:

BusinessWeek is reporting that Palm put a bid in to buy PalmSource. However, Palm was outbid by other companies and ultimately decided that the deal didn't make sense.

BusinessWeek - Palm Taps Microsoft:

The PDA makers plans to unveil a Treo powered not by the Palm OS software but by Microsoft's Windows Mobile 5. Could be a good move
...
As the only significant licensee of Palm OS, Palm Inc. was widely expected to buy back the software business -- and it tried. But major U.S. and European handset makers jumped into the bidding and drove the price too high.

Related: Q1 FY 2006 Palm Earnings Conference Call (live tomorrow at 5:00 pm ET)

08:53 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Reuters Labs is testing Audio News, a new free service turning Reuters news content into podcasts. Quality is quite good despite the fact that the podcasts consist of speech-synthesized rendering of the original text. Well, except for longer phrases, which occasionally give rise to some weird and warbly enunciations.

[via Scobleizer]

04:58 AM by Laurens in Miscellaneous | Lounge

BBC News - Long life mobile battery 'vital':

Top of the list for the most desirable feature of a next generation mobile device is not some fancy new function, but a battery that lasts much longer.

Two-thirds of mobile and personal digital assistant owners in a marketing survey across 15 countries said two days' active battery life was vital.

08:21 PM by Brian in E-Book General | News

If you enjoy mystery novels and e-books, you might not want to miss tomorrow's free online discussion. Online Programming for All Libraries (OPAL) will be hosting a free online public event titled A History of the Mystery: An Exploration in Project Gutenberg on Wednesday 21, 2005 beginning at 2 p.m Eastern Daylight Time, 1 p.m Central, noon Mountain, 11 a.m Pacific, and 6 p.m. GMT.

Description:
This program will explore the roots of the mystery novel, with emphasis on the free, downloadable e-mysteries available at Project Gutenberg. Presented by Melora Norman of the Outreach Services of the Maine State Library. This OPAL event will be held in the Auditorium.

This event is free to the public and open to all library users worldwide. You can find out more information and a list of other upcoming programs here.

Related: Kansas library offers free podcasts, online programs

06:32 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

I am extremely happy to welcome Brian (brian[at]mobileread[dot]com) as a new member of our editorial team.

Brian has been visiting us since the very beginning of Mobileread and he comes with many years of experience in handheld computing. Brian is from the Massachusetts area and currently owns a Tapwave Zodiac 2 and a Palm Treo 600 device. Being a true Zodiac addict, he is also the smart mind behind ZodiacsAroundTheWorld, a well-known photo journal dedicated to Tapwave Zodiac owners.

Some of Brian's frontpage postings of last week:

• Draft telecom bill could limit Walled Gardens
• Scan documents with your camera phone
• FreeTechBooks.com: Free as in beer
• E-books: Man's second-best friend
• iPodcast: Simple podcast creation and syndication on the way?
• Portable video isn't quite ready for prime time
• Zinio launches "global newsstand" for digital magazines

Beyond any doubt, Brian makes an invaluable addition to our team and I am really looking forward to working with him!

01:04 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Have you ever tried to run Minimo on a Dell Axim X50v? At best the browser pops up a cryptic error message, at worst nothing at all happens. Project leader Doug Turner tracked down the problem to the particular address space layout of the X50v:

The core of the problem is that on this device we run out of address space for some reason. Minimo (including support libraries) today is a bit over 10mb of code, data, text... The way I understand this failure is that executables and dll's load after (below) the last XIP ROM-based DLL. On the Dell Axim, the lowest such dll is apicore.dll which loads at 0x009d0000. This is about 9.8mb of address space. On the Imate Jam, this same library which is also lowest loads at 0x00F3000. This is about 15.19 mb of address space. So, clearly we can't load anything bigger then 9.8mb on the Dell.

Related:

• Minimo CE Roadmap
• Device matrix

10:56 AM by ignatz in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

[from boingboing]

There is a new mobile device from the manufacturers of the GP32 (yah I hadn't heard of it either). This is the GP2X, a linux-based portable game console, music and video player, ebook reader, and more. It's firmware is completely open, allowing you to change it to your heart's content. It comes out of the box playing mp3s, Divx, avi, and lots more. The screen is 320 x 240, it's powered by twin 200 MHz processors, carries 64 meg internal RAM and one SD card slot. You get the idea.

Because the firmware is open linux, you can run anything that you can run on linux, including nearly every old emulator. You can add a keyboard and add text handling. Wouldn't take much to add some linux PIM applications and turn it into a PDA (though I do not think that the screen is a touch screen). I didn't see any information on wifi or bluetooth, so perhaps they are not available?

It's cheap: £130 or about US$225. I would love to hear the experiences of anyone who has seen the earlier model.