09:00 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Are the colors of your LCD screen rather murky at times? Chances are that you suffer from a wide-spread phenomena: dust caught on your screen. I simply hate it! Little dust particles attracted by static electricity. A quite irritating, almost every day experience. And I am not even talking about dust trapped under the screen, which would drive me completely nuts. Moosberg from WSJ has some good advises how to clean a laptop-, or more generally any LCD screen:

It's best to avoid household cleaners and common rags or cloths or paper products. I advise using a commercial product that includes a liquid cleaning solution and special soft cloths specifically designed for the LCD screens laptops use. These cleaners can also be used on flat-panel TV screens and flat-panel desktop monitors. There are a number of brands, but I've had good success with one called Klear Screen, available in stores or at www.klearscreen.com.

The same company makes a product called iKlear, which is for Apple laptops, and a Dell version for Dell laptops, but I assume the products are all basically the same, and this is just a marketing ploy. I don't believe the screens Apple and Dell use are any different from most others. They all come from a handful of suppliers in Asia.

I am curious to know how you take care of your LCD screens. Do you actually use special equipment as advised by Mossberg?

04:04 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

I received an e-mail from Lufthansa this morning. Connexion by Boeing customers can now enter sweepstakes and win prizes such as roundtrip tickets, laptops, Sony PSPs, and $10 iTune cards. All sponsered, of course, by Boeing.

Sweepstakes runs from 12:00 a.m. (GMT) on 15 June 2005 to 11:59 p.m. (GMT) on 31 July 2005.

02:23 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Just received the following note from Mike Browne from www.bigredshoes.com . They are producing shorts for watching on a Palm device, with weekly animated comedy feature that seem to include such topics as poking fun at celebrity interviews. They will cost $1.99 each. No indication of DRM constraints, and it seems like they may be simple mpeg4 encodings without burdensome restrictions.

I'm sending you this note to announce the launch of DinkyTV.com.
We offer 2-3 minute animated mini shows specifically designed for the Palm device. Here is the DinkyMovie line-up.

Check out this article on ConsumerElectronicsnet.com. There is a full description and a demo.

09:19 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The Washington Post is looking into the future of rechargeable batteries and has some promising things to say. If scientists are to be believed we can hope to see laptops using Intel battery technology to run eight straight hours without recharging. The bad news: not before 2008. Quote from PalmOne:

"Battery life is one of the most important things for our customers," said Raj Doshi, product line manager for handhelds at PalmOne Inc., which in April released the Tungsten E2 handheld, lighter and with double the battery life of the previous version. The new handheld is 4.7 ounces, compared with its five-ounce predecessor. "I tell the engineers I want the most battery in a smaller battery size," Doshi said, but that simple request requires huge technological advances.

09:09 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Three Palm-related podcasts for today ready for listening on your iPod or PDA:

1. PalmAddics' second podcast, again put together by Tyler, maker of the P1 LifeDrive app SharkCache;
2. PalmLoyal's first podcast, in which Carl Brooks discusses the importance of HotSync, 3rd party backup applications, and the recent Treo 650 updates;
3. 1Src's 29th podcast, which among other things discusses how to hard reset a LifeDrive without clearing the 3.8GB partition.

05:46 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Tired of Pocket Internet Explorer and unable to afford NetFront 3.2 released earlier today? Perhaps you should then try Mini-Mozilla aka Minimo, which is the trimmed down version of the Mozilla web browser.

You can now download the ARM binary of version 0.006 (yes, looks like a long way to go for 1.0).

Some other useful links:
Minimo Project site
MozillaZine Minimo forum
Minimo Bug list

05:17 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

PDA24/7 is reporting today on an interesting use of PDAs...

I was just watching Greg Rusedski lose again and noticed that the umpires at Winbledon are using PDAs to note down the scores - they look like Tungsten T3's to me but I'm not sure. First person to spot the exact model wins a free copy of Escape.

01:43 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Sammy from PalmAddicts informs us that British Airways is fine with the use of Bluetooth devices during flights, but they do not permit WiFi. I have never understood how different flight carriers can have different - sometimes even contradicting - security rules. For instance, on flights equipped with Connexion by Boeing, not only can you turn on your WiFi signal, but you can actually use it for accessing broadband Internet. Does that mean WiFi is less 'harmful' in this case? If you guys have some more insight, please share!