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.

08:45 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

A nice and simple tracking program is now a few dollars off. From TraxItAll's PR machine, we have the following info:

"We'd like all our users to know TraxItAll is on sale until Aug. 10! Regular price: $20. Sale price: $17 (15% off) FREE 30-DAY-TRIAL."

08:31 AM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Philips of Make Blog strikes back with a painless tutorial on how to make from your own text files DRM-free e-books for the Sony Librie e-book reader. Although it doesn't in theory offer any new insights, it's a great place to start with if you are interested in reading your own e-books on the Librie device.

[via Boing Boing]

09:12 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Note: We received a note today by Dell's legal department demanding Mobileread remove all references related to their sales techniques. The note suggested that this post contained proprietary Dell business information and violated the company's trade secret rights and copyrights. Although we strongely believe that we didn't reveal any secret knowledge and only made information available found elsewhere on the Web, we decided to remove this content until further investigation.

We're a small site that heavily depends on user support, and we realize that this was a popular post. Thanks for your understanding while we address this issue.

If you think you always get the best deals online you are very mistaken. I stumbled over a Slickdeals post today where a user describes how you can convince any Dell representative to give you 20-30% discounts off from the best prices you find on the Web. Some folks who already had the knowledge are not be too amused about this news spreading the Net because it could quickly force to Dell to change its sales tactics.