04:16 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Oh happy joy, Dell is working on the Axim X51/X51v Pocket PC series. It recently received Bluetooth approval. This is the first time official information leaked on the successor of the popular Axim X50/X50v series, and we can only pray that Dell has listened to their customers who cried for more memory and a better battery.

[via BargainPDA]

03:33 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Mobile Magazine has compiled a list of eight technologies which, to put it in their words, "are so dumb that they slow the forward march of progress." And the winners are:

• MP3 - there're better alternatives, but people stick to MP3 for compatibility
• Bluetooth - security issues
• Cell phone service - decrease in quality
• Microsoft Windows - it's around everywhere yet lacks innovation and suffers from stability/security issues
• Internal Combustion Engine - inefficient
• Batteries - slow increase in battery life and still very toxic
• Spam - no sigh of relief
• QWERTY Keyboard - inefficient and unnatural

02:51 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

The TomeRaider contest is over. Congrats to our three lucky winners: volwrath, Gadgetguru and Mattoquai. Please send me the details of your operation system (TomeRaider is available for Windows, Palm, Pocket PC, and Psion).

Everyone, thanks for participating. And of course thanks to our member NewsRaider and his company for their generosity which made this contest possible.

08:00 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

As cell phone carriers try to sell customers on video that fits in the palm of a hand, MobiTV is already beta testing its live video streaming service of popular TV channels such as ESPN 3, MSNBC, and ABC News on the Palm Treo device. Check out Jimmie's positive first hands experience of the service over at PalmAddicts.

07:35 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Shaun of PDA247 is running a great contest where you can win an unlocked Motorola RAZR V3 device. Details over at PDA247.

07:28 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

TIVR Communications promises to deliver one of the fastest H.264 software decoder for mobile platforms. H.264, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10, is poised to replace several popular formats such as MPEG-2 and DivX due to its better compression efficiency. TIVR claims to achieve real-time decoding on a 220 MHz ARM9 device for H.264 BP videos encoded in 320x200 at 256 kbps. Mobile platforms currently supported are Symbian and Windows Mobile; a Linux and Palm OS version of the software decoder are planned for mid-September 2005.

Related: Alex's account on TCPMP playing H.264-encoded movies on the Axim X50v.

05:27 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

What better way to kill time than playing games on your Pocket PC? I have to admit I am not a big gamer, mainly because I don't have the time left to kill. But with Arvale II: Ocean of Time, PDAMill easily knocked off my socks. Yes yes, had I known better before, Arvale II wouldn't be on my PDA now. For the past two nights, I've been killing orcs and ogres with a trusty sword and a silver hammer, while nothing has been more important to me than raising DeMenchev's character level to new unimagined highs. Being all sleep deprived now, I cannot concentrate at work, cannot even find relief in having a lunch break. And my colleagues know better to stay away from me today. So PDAMill, when you'll release Arvale III, don't miss to put a warning label on your game: "Beware, addictive!"

Some reviews: mobiletechreview.com, pocketnow.com, x50v.it, bostonpocketpc.com, PocketGamer.org

08:34 PM by Chaos in Miscellaneous | Lounge

After much speculation, Google has launched a new IM service... Apparently it's not 'supposed' to be public quite yet, but it works perfectly for me. And it's Jabber-based. Could this help the adoption of Jabber a great deal? Maybe. Unfortunately I have, as of yet, been unable to figure out how to talk with, for example, a jabber.org server account (when Jabber, generally, works for talking to any client on any server).

Smashworld has some details on how to use it.

As a note, using SSL and changing the port to 5223 works fine for me (in iChat), instead of port 5222 mentioned in the article. (However, in Adium - libgaim based IM client for OSX - using 5222, with TLS turned on works - YMMV.)

If you want to test it out, I'm currently on Google Talk (on the name, I personally think Google IM sounds better than Google Talk...) at jsnelgrove AT gmail.com (replace "AT" with the usual @ - don't feel like getting spam to that e-mail account).

[Via Slashdot]