04:45 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Today I stumbled on PDA Fiction, an interesting and current blog dedicated to reading e-books on a PDA. Another e-book blog I regularly visit is Teleread, which has a strong focus on advocating e-book standards. Both sites are valuable resources for every e-book fan so make sure to check them out!

03:50 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

From Pride Of Lions this morning: It's just like technology; the big gets bigger and the small gets smaller. Laptop drives capacity is set to dwarf what we're now used to, yet maintain their standard 2.5" footprint. Internal hard drives capacity is inching ever-closer to that "t" word: terabyte. One-half terabyte drives announced.

Techworld reported yesterday that Seagate has claimed a world first with a new 160GB, 2.5in laptop hard drive. The drive is one of a series of new products, including new 500GB drives.

It works by standing the magnetic fields that represent data bits upright. In today's commercially available drives, the fields lay flat on the disk surface, but standing them upright takes up less space, so more can be packed onto the disk.

Seagate's drive is the first to hit the market, at least according to Seagate. Hitachi is field-testing 100GB drives, but has yet to announce a sale date. In April, Fujitsu announced 200GB drives using perpendicular technology, but not until 2007.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Seagate is also going to offer new 1" and CF card form-factor drives in 4Gb and 8GB versions.

03:21 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

From Pride Of Lions: As a Safari guy, I've been digging tabbed browsing for a while, but the PC crowd should rejoice that Microsoft is willing to be flexible (even if it's only in response to their losing marketshare, mindshare, installshare, and/or money). From webpronews: Late yesterday evening, Microsoft let out an updated MSN Search Toolbar for download with the added feature of tabbed browsing for Internet Explorer 6. The echoes of "why didn't we think of this earlier?" were still ripe in the Redmond campus hallways. Mozilla was reported to have snickered.

05:25 PM by pruss in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

My easy converter that lets you convert Windows TrueType (and Type 1 if you have ATM) fonts to FontSmoother smooth fonts so you can use your favorite Windows font on your PDA is now released.

http://www.palmgear.com/index.cfm?xyz=104888

02:08 PM by Pride Of Lions in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

http://www.smartdisk.com/eWeb/smartd...FlashTrax1.asp

There's a lot to like here. It's not intended to replace anyone's PIM abilities, but as a media manager, it's pretty cool.

Things I like:

3.5" LCD
Hard drive (80GB!, WOW!)
Plays music, videos, reads .TXT files (eBook reader?), displays different photo formats
USB 2.0
Swappable battery
Software upgradable
Video-out capability
Adequate user-interface
Remote (!)

Things I didn't like:

Compact Flash (and Microdrives) only, no SD card support without media adapter
Kinda bulky looking (but since it's not intended as a PDA replacement, but rather a DVD player replacement, it's actually OK)
The implied geekiness involved with actually getting your money's worth in this product and ripping your DVD's to load up the hard drive. I can do it (now), but the normal end-user doesn't know how and thus won't truly see this product's value.

True technology here, big things getting bigger and small things getting smaller.
POL9A

via Tapland.

11:47 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

BBHub has a quick write up of the first BlackBerry-only store to open in New York City next week:

BreakThrough Wireless will open a branded New York's BlackBerry Center on June 16. The store will offer BlackBerry handhelds from Nextel, T-Mobile and Cingular, presumably the BlackBerry 7520, BlackBerry 7100t and BlackBerry 7100g. The location will also carryBlackBerry Enterprise Server, third-party BlackBerry applications, and BlackBerry accessories. They'll even help with BlackBerry Internet Service set-up.

The store is located in Manhattan at 109 West 39th Street, near Sixth Avenue and across the street from Bryant Park.

04:41 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Circuitcity.com has the palmOne Tungsten T5 for a low $279.99 including free shipping! To qualify for the great deal, you need to fill out this mail-in rebate. Offer expires on 07/16/05.

03:11 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Is Microsoft trying to redefine the meaning of push e-mail? A few days ago the company's chief Steve Ballmer announced an Exchange Server feature pack to include "Direct Push Technology" - the delivery of e-mail to mobile devices without any action on the part of the user. At least one analyst, Yankee Group's John Jackson, has reason to doubt that Microsoft's new push email technology is really push at all.

In the case of Windows Mobile, the user's device checks back with the server at specified intervals to receive any pending e-mail deliveries. I digged a bit further and found this technical explanation from the Microsoft Exchange team:

The [mobile] device issues an HTTP request to Exchange, which asks Exchange to report any changes that occur in the mailbox of the requesting user within a specified time limit. The URL of this HTTP request is the same as that of other AirSync commands ("/Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync") with some differing query string parameters. The body of the HTTP request allows the client to specify those folders that Exchange should monitor for changes. Typically, these will be the Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks folders. Upon receiving this request, Exchange will monitor the specified folders until either the time limit expires or a change (such as the arrival of a piece of email) occurs in one of those folders, whichever comes first. Exchange will then issue a response to this request that notes in which folders the changes occurred. Of course, this will be empty if the time limit elapsed before any changes occurred. Upon receiving an empty response, the device simply re-issues the request. This loop of issuing a request for change notifications, receiving an empty response, and re-issuing the request for change notifications is called "the heartbeat." Upon receiving a non-empty response, the device issues a synchronization request against each folder in the response. When those complete, it re-issues the request for change notifications.

In the case of RIM (Blackberry), on the other hand, the network server is continually checking with the device -- which remains essentially inactive -- to see where it is. Obviously RIM's approach is less battery-intensive and faster to respond to new incoming e-mail since it is only reacting when the server initiates a connection.

[via News Factor and BBHub]