06:40 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Over at PDA24/7 today is a nice exclusive article about the next version of Trip Boss, which is a leading travel planner software. Worth checking out if you have a palm and travel often.

02:26 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Palm CFO Andrew J. Brown held yesterday the first presentation of PalmOne being Palm again and talked about the future of his company. He shared his views on the company's solid financials, previous supply constraints, increase in carrier relationships, partnership with MS' Exchange 2003, and of course the recent name change.

Andy, who joined the company only in December 2004, seemed overall confident that in future mobile broadband devices will taking advantage of faster networks, leaving enough room for multiple players to create new value. He is certain that Palm holds the innovative leadership in the smartphone industry with the Treo 650, which continues to get rave reviews.

He acknowledged that the handheld market is in decline, partly because of the cannibalizing effect of the Treo. Regarding the all-in-one LifeDrive device, while it was initially targeted for the business and consumer market (Powerpoint presentation vs. playing MP3s), Palm now finds it to be more a consumer gadget.

In future, Palm will invest more in R&D to increase the velocity and quality of products coming out, and it will build on the "extraordinary opportunities" of the smartphone business.

You can listen to the full 25mins webcast by clicking here (Windows Media).

01:13 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Sammy of PalmAddicts stumbled over a scary post at Tekguru today who is quoting BBC that in London a man was fined 500 British pounds and 12 months' conditional discharge for hijacking a wireless broadband connection. According to computer forensics specialist Simon Janes:

"Gaining unauthorised access to someone else's network is an offence and people have to take responsibility for their actions. Some people might argue that taking a joy-ride in someone else's car is not an offence either."

I know that my neighbor would never notice me borrowing a bit of his bandwidth, he passed 80, but what if his son finds out about my misbehavior? Perhaps it's time to pay for the Internet.

12:50 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Marc Orchant of The Office Weblog talks about all the useful applications he's got on his Palm Treo 650 and why many of them are his "long-time favorites."

Do you think there's anything important he left out? One item definitely missing in the list is DateBk5.

12:33 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

In collaboration with two German universities, ciando GmbH recently concluded that e-book lending is hip among students. On average, e-books were lent three times more often than the equivalent paper book editions. Ciando, who is a provider of e-book lending platforms, attributes the success to the fact that students can search, borrow, read and return over the Internet, even when library doors are closed.

Note that Ciando did not reveal whether the fact that students borrowed more also implied that they'd read more.

11:06 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

ReadManiac is a free e-book reader for Java-enabled cell phones. You can use it either as "Standalone" for reading any e-book installed on your device, or as "Lite" where one e-book is pre-embedded in the reader software.

Other features include custom small fonts, text formatting, bookmarks, search, filebrowser, and support for various e-book formats (including TXT and PDB).

10:50 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Although I have my doubts that Apple's ingenious iTunes service will make the iTunes cell phone as successful as the iPod, I'll probably not resist the urge to get one myself when it's available. And this could be very soon, if you want to believe a small USA Today commentary which states that the Motorola E790 iTunes phone will be launched this month.

[via Mozongo]

09:19 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Although mobile Web browing is still in its infancy and usually causing more headache than satisfaction, we are thankful to Menneisyys for his mammoth task of comparing the pros and cons of current Web browser solutions for the Pocket PC platform.

Unfortunately, all the current Pocket PC browsing solutions have severe flaws. They are all far dumber than any decent desktop browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari etc) and have sometimes totally diffuse capabilities (for example, one may be great at running Java applets, another is the only browser capable of in-page text search, the third excels at running your favourite JavaScript-based game etc). It's highly possible you end up using three or four different browsers because of this. Enough already with the talk! Let's get to the browsers.

Agreed. Let's jump straight to the article.