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

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's time for our weekly roundup of what's new and interesting in the world of mobile gadgets.

Current E-Books Trends
Harry Potter e-books for $1.99 on eBay
Pirate translation of Harry Potter in record time
Wired.com on Harry Potter e-book piracy

E-Book Conversion
PDFOnline converts to PDF and back

E-Book Readers
Hitachi's e-paper goes wireless
Root console on Sony Librie with USBPD

E-Book Webstores
20% eReader Discount Code
eReader Pro software reduced in price

General Chat
Cell phone sales predicted to surpass 1b by 2009
Cute Story: How Bob The Millionaire Became a Pirate
First bans of mobiles during movie shows
Mobile-friendly Web pages in two minutes
Skype could serve as videophone software
Windows Vista To Be The Official Name of Longhorn

Link Swap
MSN Virtual Earth Beta opens to public

Other E-Book Resources
Free e-book: "Free Software for Busy People"
Free e-book: "Maelstrom" converted for iSilo and Plucker
Free e-book: "Starfish" converted for iSilo and Plucker

Other Gadgets
Magpie Linux PDA from Unication
Nokia 770 / Maemo Wiki launched
Nokia Online Calculator unlocks your Nokia for free
Review of SD Card Readers

Palm
All About Palm recommendation
DataViz releases RoadSync for Palm OS
If I were Palm's CEO
Palm offers $50 off selected handhelds
PalmOS DateBk5 Tip -- Keep Your Location Data
PalmSource on its way of becoming a penny stock?
PalmSource patents fault-tolerant Flash ROM update
Stream Napster to your Palm
We Already Have All The Gadgets We Need...

Pocket PC
Resco Radio V1.0 for PPC released
The Core Pocket Media Player V0.66c test-version
WM 05's Persistent Storage from the Inside Out
WM Mobile 5.0 a "significant upgrade" says PPC Mag

Portable Audio/Video
Apple Video iPod in September (rumor)

Smartphones
Will Nokia dump Symbian in favor of Linux?

04:48 AM by TadW in Miscellaneous | Lounge

If you are familiar with Google Maps, I don't have to explain to you what MSN Virtual Earth is all about. For those who are new to the whole mapping thing: MSN Virtual Earth combines mapping and local search to put the answers to your search questions in a geographical context.

I found the aerial/satellite imagery inferior to Google Maps. Still, give it a spin, it is a lot of fun to pan/zoom around the US!

04:40 AM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Marko Bolowski, the chap behind the Sony Librie translation project, gave in to our desire to explore the Librie's internals and released a tool which allows us to open a root console via USB to the Sony device.

USBPD consists of a console program (that runs on the USBPD host device, i.e. any Linux computer) and a server program (that runs on the USBPD target device, i.e. our Sony Librie); the precompiled binaries (including sources, of course) can be downloaded here.

06:52 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

While we are all anticipating the release of the Linux-powered Nokia 770 device, rumors are spreading that Nokia might dump Symbian and port its Series 60 user interface to a Linux platform.

PalmAddicts writes: ARCchart, a website affiliated to the investment banking and advisory group ARC associates, has recently published a report suggesting that Nokia might consider dumping Symbian altogether, porting its Series 60 user interface to a Linux platform. Their reasons basically center around the fact that Symbian Ltd. has striven to assert it's independence by projecting a a vendor agnostic stance, and Nokia's recent failure to take complete control of Symbian. (Nokia has 47.9% ownership.)

I've always been partial to Symbian. My Nokia 9500 Communicator does a good job when I need to write a quick SMS or check my e-mail. But for more sophisticated tasks such as surfing the Web or reading e-books, I prefer my Dell Axim. What do you think? Could Linux make a difference to Nokia smartphones?

06:32 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Peter Watts' Maelstrom is the sequel to Starfish and the second book of the Rifters Trilogy. Because it's released under a Creative Commons license (Peter follows Cory's steps, and I like it!!), I converted and attached the e-book for you to this thread in HTML, iSilo and Plucker formats. In an older BoingBoing article I found a reference to a review by SciFi.com, saying about Maelstrom:

Like the endlessly mutating and recombinant digital/wetware entities that live in Peter Watts' online Maelstrom, his fiction itself exhibits a wonderful Darwinian adaptability. Internalizing the lessons and modes taught by cyberpunk and fusing them with the Bear/Benford pedigree of hard SF, Watts has bred a robust, streamlined, snarling kind of science fiction which achieves both a sharp-edged verisimilitude and visionary exuberance.

[thanks for the e-mail, Peter!]

10:50 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Update: The second book of the Rifter triology is also available for download.

Sci-Fi author Peter Watts has released Starfish, the first book in his Rifter series, under a Creative Commons license. Since the author doesn't mind the redistribution and transformation of his work, I attached HTML, iSilo and Plucker versions (updated!) of the book to this post for your convenience. From Publishers Weekly:

Set in the early 21st century, Watts's debut describes a future when the search for energy leads to the tapping of geothermal sources deep in the ocean, as in the Pacific's Juan de Fuca Rift, near Canada's Northwest coast. The maintenance workers of the dangerous underwater power plants are selected for their psychotic tendencies, which enable them to forget their previous lives on dry land, and are then surgically altered to survive the intense pressure of the sea's abyssal depths. These changes, which render the workers amphibious, also leave them less than well equipped to face the threat of powerful, archaic bacterialike creatures that proliferate at the ocean bottom and use human hosts to carry them upward to dry land, where their superior DNA could render our species obsolete...The novel's pacing is excellent, making this, overall, a good bet for beach reading.

[via SFSignal]

09:30 AM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Hitachi presented at a private show their idea of future e-paper technology. Expecting to hit markets by April 2006, the 13.1 100dpi monochrome display will feature 802.11b WLAN technology and enough space for a secondary battery. Although valuable treats to equip a e-book reader with, the technology has one caveat: it takes about 10 seconds to switch from one screen image to the next.

09:11 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Rather than wait for the official translated version, hundreds of eager Harry Potter fans from Germany have bought an English copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and translated the book into German themselves.

Only 45 hours and 22 minutes after the English book had hit stores, the "Blitzübersetzung", or draft translation, of Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz was complete. Under the rules of the collective, only those who contribute by translating or proofreading may see the final translated version. The official German edition of the sixth Harry Potter is due to be published by Carlsen Verlag on 01 October.

The community site has managed to avoid being shut down by the publishers because it claims a "private" status as a member forum and promises not to sell or distribute the translations beyond its circle. Clearly, this does not guarantee that one member could potentially leak the translated book onto a new Internet site - as if by magic.