10:36 AM by doctorow in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

AvantGo announced a planned outage for next week: There will be a planned service outage Friday 08/26/2005 18:00 PDT - Sunday 8/28/05 23:59 PDT as we move the service to a larger hosting space to keep ahead of our customers needs so AvantGo can provide the best mobile experience possible. During this time you will not be able to sync to or access the AvantGo website. We hope this alert will alleviate any inconvenience this planned outage may cause.

10:03 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Hardly a weekend passes without Fictionwise offering some kind of discount. Starting this weekend and only for a limited time, the e-book store has discounts and/or Micropay rebates ranging from 20% to 40% on titles in Education (including SparkNotes and CliffsNotes), Reference, History, and Classic Literature.

08:03 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

If you are looking for a free solution to access Wikipedia information on your cellphone device, check out the Java-based tool JOCA by German company InteracT!V GmbH, which uses GPRS to access updated information from Wikipedia. Besides Wikipedia, JOCA also offers other (however mostly German-related) media services, including a TV guide, radio playlists and traffic information.

Alternatively, you could also use Wapipedia or Wapedia, which both work with any mobile browser; then there is the WAP solution Maxipedia; and finally you could download the entire 1GB+ Wikipedia database, put it on an SD card and view it with TomeRaider. A beautiful Plucker version is also rumored to exist, but Hacker hasn't decided to make it public yet

[via press release]

07:23 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

MobHappy has teamed up with FreeRange Inc. to preload a stripped-down version of their Java-based FreeNews reader with what they consider 14 "essential mobile blogs". Among the blogs you find classics such as Om Malik, Russell Beattie, Textually and TechDirt. Too bad they forgot to put Mobileread on the list. Maybe next time, guys?

Thanks to Mattoquai for sending this in!

07:30 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Sammy at Palm Addicts has produced another one of his nifty mini-podcasts. You can find it here. Unfortunately, it's not clear to me how to download, so I'm listening to them online. If you like these podcasts, drop Sammy a line and let him know. Hopefully they will be an ongoing feature of the site.

Interesting side effect... I think that if I listen often, I'm liable to adopt his accent unconsciously. It's quite hard not to pick up a bit. Sort of addict-ive, you might say!

06:33 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

From PDA247, "[size=-1]LDW are looking for beta testers for Fish Tycoon for Windows which should look great on the big screen. If you want to be considered just complete this support form and include details of your Windows PC and operating system.[/size]"

06:27 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

An interesting series of articles over at NewsFactor.com talks about the personal data that Google has access to, and where you might have concerns. It seems that we are quite trusting with online services.

Check out the articles here...
Part I
Part II
Part III

And, btw, what sort of information is stored in all those crazy urls that we pass back and forth to each other with things like session ids included... wouldn't those urls be another source of concern?

04:31 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

My knee-jerk reaction without knowing the facts yet is that Sony's high handed DRM approaches will kill the future of this device also, despite its traditionally excellent engineering. But I'll hold off on judgement till the facts are in.

The device is actually available for pre-order at the Sony site.

Read more here at Yahoo News from NewsFactor.com.