09:26 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

VGA demystified is an amazing tutorial put together by Menneisyys, who this time teaches us step by step how to enable and configure the 640x480 mode on VGA-capable Pocket PCs. Although it's very technical, I recommend every proud owner of a VGA device (e.g. the Axim X50v) to digest his lessons in full! I am sure there's this or that bit even the geekiest among us didn't know about before.

09:20 AM by Brian in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

According to an article at the NewScientist.com, NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan have created new software for camera phones that will allow entire documents to be captured by simply sweeping the phone across the page.

Using the new software with a 1-megapixel camera held at least 20 centimetres away, an A4 sized page takes about 3 to 5 seconds to scan. This produces between 21 and 35 images which the software merges together to extract the text and record any images.

In Japan, camera phones with less powerful capabilities are already creating problems for bookstore owners as users grab pages from books and magazines to read later on the train, according to the article. With the new technology which won't be commercialized for the next three years, perfect digital copies will be possible, leading to copyright issues. In order to alleviate this problem, whenever a document is captured the software will sound an audible alarm that can't be overridden.

08:45 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

At least according to this BargainPDA editorial, despite shrinking sales numbers the handheld market isn't dying yet.

Any smartphone worth the name is far more a handheld computer than it is a cellular phone. To say that smartphones will replace handhelds is like saying that two-door sedans will replace cars. Even if, tomorrow morning, every device shipped with a cellular radio, the handheld computing market would still exist. It might look a little different. But then again, it might not.

And it would be so easy: to "rescue" handhelds all we'd have to do is to abolish all artificial categorizations differentiating between handhelds and smartphones.

08:34 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Whoever came up with that name should have their head examined. For $99 you can now fetch the Dell DJ Ditty, a tiny MP3 player with 512MB flash memory. No whistles or bells, but it comes with an integrated FM tuner and a minuscule screen.

[via Engadget]

08:19 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group has released the first Public Working Draft of Scope of Mobile Web Best Practices. This document outlines guidelines for content delivery and display on mobile and small-screen devices, sets out requirements for the "mobileOK" trustmark, and identifies the goal of one Web.

08:16 PM by Brian in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

FreeTechBooks.com is a directory of free computer science books and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available for download (free as in beer). From the site:

What's the Catch?

These authors publish their books for free to give you a chance to review their books, to get as much good information distributed as possible. So, if you like what you read online, you can always support the authors by buying the paperback at your local or online bookstores.

A quick check of the site revealed that several free books are offered in Adobe PDF, PostScript, and HTML formats. If you're looking for some free technical reference material in electronic format, give FreeTechBooks.com a look.

[via Lifehacker]

01:21 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

After years of promises about long lasting portable devices with fuel cell technology, maybe it's almost here with this fuel cell powered Toshiba MP3 player that has a luxurious 60hrs reported play time.

Probably not. It will still likely take some time before it's on the market. In fact, haven't we been hearing this from Toshiba for more than a year? We also heard recently that Toshiba's fuel cells for laptops is being delayed until at least 2007.

It does appear to be refillable without expensive gadgets, if you can believe the picture. Just don't spill it on your brand new device! And I realize this is not very important when you are talking about a fuel cell device, but I wonder if the sound quality is any good.

Anyone else out there tired of waiting for all these promising battery and display technologies to show up in our pockets instead of remote secret labs and press releases?

12:15 PM by Brian in E-Book General | News

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." -- Groucho Marx

In an interesting article about e-books by Joshua Fruhlinger on the IBM developerWorks website, he uses this quote to start a discussion about how e-books are currently being accepted only by the early adopters, compares paper books with their digital equivalents, and raises several common criticisms of e-books:

• E-books can be physically uncomfortable to read (whether you're sitting at a desk looking at a monitor or squinting at a tiny PDA screen).
• They're not portable if you have to read them on a desktop computer; if you read them on a laptop or PDA, you can't read if you run out of power.
• There's a number of often incompatible formats that the files come in.
• And the user's ability to access the book's content is often restricted by various digital rights management technologies. (It's notable that the Baen Free Library, one of the more successful e-book outfits, gives away books that are DRM-free -- and, for that matter, free as in beer. I guess it's easy to be successful when you don't expect anyone to pay you!)

You can read the full article here.

While I agree with many of his points, I would argue that as people become more accustomed to consuming digital content online, a trend that is leading to declining newspaper and magazine circulation, e-books and digital magazines are on the verge of going mainstream.