12:14 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Engadget brought the complete scoop on the Motorola ROKR E1 also dubbed the "iTunes phone". We now know it'll sell for something around $250, with tri-band, a 172x220 color display, VGA camera and Bluetooth. But what makes this phone really special, yes we dare to say unique, is the fact that it would only allow you to hold up to 100 songs. Quoting Playlist:

iTunes 5 keeps track of the number of tracks authorized for playback on the phone so even if your 100 tracks have used only 350MB of the card’s capacity, you can’t add more. Similarly, although you can swap in a new card that contains new tracks, those tracks won’t play until they’ve been approved for playback by iTunes.

11:53 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

If you are looking for file sharing on your Pocket PC, check out Pocket G2, a new Gnutella client currently in Alpha testing. Some of its main features:

• Support for the Gnutella2 Peer-to-Peer protocol
• A fully decentralized network
• Multi-Source downloads
• Real-time file verification
• Queuing

Download from here.

06:33 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The Japanese firm ACCESS, makers of the Netfront browser software, has paid a little over $300 million to aquire PalmSource. PalmSource is, of course, the maker of PalmOS. This purchase reflects a premium price of about $18.50 per share, so those who had enough faith recently in PalmSource to keep stock were rewarded. It also would seem to be a bargain price for the acquisition.

According to the press release, "Ed Colligan, Palm, Inc. president and chief executive officer said, 'Palm's award-winning user experience and application expertise, combined with ACCESS' leading software development capabilities, will allow us to continue to deliver great products for our customers. ACCESS is currently a software technology partner and we look forward to continuing our strong working relationship to advance the Palm OS platform.'"

The $64,000 question -- What will this mean for PalmOS and Palm, Inc?

01:54 PM by Pride Of Lions in Archive | iSilo/X

Darren has just posted the final release of iSilo and iSiloX V4.28. Among the highlights:

iSilo 4.28:

• Added handling of minimum line height.
• On supported devices, disable automatic turning off of backlight when in autoscroll mode.
• Increased default maximum settings size limit from 100KB to 250KB.
• Added Full Screen command to "iSilo for Windows Mobile Smartphone".
• Addressing of miscellaneous issues.

iSiloX 4.28:

• Added support for interpretation of percentage line height styles.
• Added support for GZIP compressed content in iSiloX Clipper.
• Addressing of miscellaneous issues.

If you are new to iSilo make sure to visit this thread for more information.

10:16 AM by sUnShInE in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

According to Linux News, TCL Mobile Communications (TMC), China's largest phone manufacturer, has successfully used Linux to build a high-end dual-band GSM/GPRS smartphone. The e787 features a 2MP camera, Bluetooth, multimedia players (MP3, AVI, WMV, MPEG4, and Flash), an Internet phonebook feature, PC synchronization, and a document viewer. The phone is available from Chinese retailer 139shop.com (site is Chinese).

Call background music sounds like a great bonus. It's unclear whether you're stuck with Chinese font sets.

PalmSource is expected to release a Linux phone next year.

11:43 PM by cbarnett in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Gowerpoint have released a new version of the fantastic µbook reader available for PocketPC and Windows.

This is my favourite ebook reader, partly because it reads many open format file types (text, html, rtf), as well as other formats (palm doc, ereader, mobipocket and pdf, though not if they are encrypted). It's good looking thanks to the many skins, has good built in dictionary support, and is very configurable. Did I mention is looks absolutely beautiful in VGA???

Licences cost $12US, and get rid of nag screens (and it's good value).

Enhancements to this version include (courtesy of the Gowerpoint website):
- Added Separate Zoom and Annotations for each images
- Re-organized Annotations/Table of Content page and Added Illustration Table.
- Added Menu item to look-up user entered word in current dictionary (not just through selected word...) (Thanks Peter)
- Added User controlable Image color filters for better contrast, gamma correction and yellow reduction.
- Added Rotation of buttons/arrow keys with display
- Changed slide-show to expand smaller image to fill the page
- Improved PML parser
- Added Hiding of cursor (PC version) when not moved for 5 seconds
- Lotsa fixes and new goodies:
- G&B, Grey Paper and Tundracel Skins (thanks to respective artists)
- Francais, Hungarian, Italiano and Spanish UI update (thanks to the respective authors)

Craig.

09:59 PM by Brian in E-Book General | News

The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet is joining the growing number of newspapers around the world that are offering online digital editions to subscribers as an alternative to paper. In an apparent effort to attract younger readers and grow their circulation of approximately 183,000 subscribers, Dagbladet recently launched a special digital edition with text and photos optimized for the Sony PSP's stunning screen.

Will all traditional print publications eventually have to offer digital versions or face the prospect of losing subscribers to alternative online content?

[via PaidContent and Kotaku]

04:37 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

With all the fuss around the latest Harry Potter novel and the fact that Mrs Rowling has always spoken against the release of an electronic Potter release, it comes to us as a surprise that Apple now managed to secure exclusive rights for the official audiobooks on iTunes. That's definitely cool; but where is my e-book?

[via Yahoo and DigitalTechLife]