06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Welcome to another digest entry of MobileRead, where we transform the profound into the bite-sized.

Current E-Books Trends
Mobile Mag reviews Rapid-Fire Reading for your cell
Overview of current e-Paper technology
Pirate translation of Harry Potter also hits Russia

E-Book Conversion
PrimoPDF, free PDF converter for Windows

E-Book Webstores
eReader 10% and 20% Discount Codes

General Chat
Big Apple interactive tours on your handheld
BlogPulse2RSS tracks your blog trends via RSS
Gorgeous Windows Vista fonts for your handheld
How many people buy mobile software?
Mobile Mag's Mobile Game Top 50
NewsRaider scrapes sites for news
Nokia is hiring Linux developers
PC World's Top 10 PDA in Fall 2005
PDA247 is running a user survey
Risks of losing a portable device (poll)

New Links
AOL Mobile Search in public beta test
Shopping at Amazon.com with your handheld
Technorati goes Mobile

Other E-Book Resources
Free e-book: "The Escapist" converted for iSilo and Plucker

Other Readers
Dual Column Ebook Reading for TabletPC

Palm
KMaps brings Google Maps to your Treo 650
O'Reilly's 'Palm and Treo Hacks' pre-order with 34% discount
Palm CFO to hold presentation on August 2nd
Palm podcasts from PalmAddicts and 1Src
Palm Treo and Internet Connection Sharing
Tapwave Zodiac is no more

Pocket PC
BackupBuddy for Windows Mobile goes Beta (initial findings)
HTC Wizard aka Qtek 9100 real photos leaked
Minimo CE V0.007 adds tabbed browsing
Moto Q makes raves on the Net (link digest)
Pocket PC Magazine Joins the Podcast Revolution
vBar 2.0 with VGA support released

Portable Audio/Video
HP kisses Apple iPod goodbye

Smartphones
Smartphones still surging and no end in sight

08:52 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Bruce Schneier (mastermind of the Blowfish cipher) is quoting the Washington Post regarding the risks involved of losing a portable device nowadays.

I've noticed this in my own life. If I didn't make a special effort to limit the amount of information on my Treo, it would include detailed scheduling information from the past six years. My small laptop would include every e-mail I've sent and received in the past dozen years. And so on. A lot of us are carrying around an enormous amount of very personal data.

Which leads me to our poll. Have you ever lost a portable device such as your beloved PDA? And have you taken special precautions, such as encrypting your sensitive data? I've never lost any data, but I have also never bothered to use any encryption.

07:55 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

After a relationship between Steve Jobs and former HP-CEO Carly Fiorina that lasted just a little over a year and a half, HP has decided to stop reselling Apple branded iPods. According to an Apple spokeswoman, it "doesn't fit with their [HP] company's current digital media strategy. HP declined to say what their strategy is, but confirmed that the company will remain comitted to digital entertainment, which includes selling televisions and multimedia digital entertainment centers. According to HP's original agreement with Apple, it cannot sell another player that competes with the iPod until August 2006.

HP on average accounted for about 5% of iPod sales, which totaled about 6.2 million of the devices, worth more than $1.1 billion in revenue, for Apple last quarter. Consequently, shares of Apple fell $1.15, or 2.6 percent, to close at $42.65 in Friday trading. HP shares gained 13 cents, $24.62.

[via WSJ]

07:10 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

From Shaun today: The 247 User Survey will be running for a couple more days. If you get a chance to complete please do- your views would be appreciated. Some of the results so far are a surprise, especially the number of Palm users compared to Windows Mobile visitors. 90% of the emails I receive offering news items etc. are Windows Mobile related?

The poll seems to allow anonymous voters. Shaun, aren't you worried about people voting multiple times?

06:44 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

With this week's release of the first beta of Windows Vista, a guy named ZoRoNaX quickly put up a zip file with the six new typefaces that were commissioned for Longhorn Vista. I am sure there is some kind of copyright violation by offering those fonts for download, so it's only a matter of time before the zip will disappear. Of course I went ahead and installed them on my handheld

See attached screenshots displaying each font when used with iSilo. The fonts can also be installed on Windows XP AND Mac systems.

Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel - according to Poynter Online, the new ClearType Font Collection incorporates improved ClearType and OpenType technologies, and a boatload of research, to improve the structure and the clarity of the letter forms. Basically, that means a story will be easier to read because the letters and words won't be as soft and mushy looking.

• Calibri - sans serif, suitable for documents, e-mail, Web design, and magazines
• Cambria - serif, a formal type for business documents, e-mail, and Web design
• Candara - sans serif, with vertical strokes not as reader-friendly perhaps
• Consolas - monospaced, suitable for displaying programming code
• Constantina - serif, very clean and readable, created for use in print or on the screen
• Corbel - sans serif, clean and works as an alternative to Arial, Trebuchet or Verdana

Reading comfort on e-book readers is a big issue, and whatever your opinions about Microsoft, I think you have to acknowledge that the company has done a great job here in making on-screen reading more enjoyable!

04:34 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

It's time for all you Palm fans to pump up your MP3 player again with the latest podcasts from PalmAddicts and 1Src. PalmAddict's podcast #5 talks about Palm, LG, Treo 700, Launchers, and comes with a shout back to Jeff and Alan, while 1Src's podcast #34 talks about Tech Talk 19, the end of the Zodiac, why the Sony Clie is dead, and why Moto Q won't be a threat to the Treo.

03:51 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Ever since Google unleashed their APIs for Google Maps last month, imaginative developers are digging deep into experimentation to dream up new uses for the maps. Ivan just released KMaps, a tool for the Palm Treo 650 (and perhaps other Palm OS devices supporting Java), which uses Google Maps to display search results, directions and images. And best of all, it's free!

Related: Another third party utility, GMaps, works with any Java/J2ME-compatible cell phone.

01:50 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

If you are interested in the future of Palm company, don't miss Palm CFO Andrew J. Brown's presentation that he'll hold for finance analysts on Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2005 at 3pm (PDT). You can enjoy the show via webcast on Palm's investor relations website at http://ir.palm.com.

[via Palm Addicts]