05:24 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Dale Coffing managed to get his hands on a pre-production unit of the HTC Universal, one of the first Pocket PC devices that will run Microsoft's recently announced Windows Mobile 5 software. It's most distinguishing feature is definitely the clamshell mode which offers landscape display above the keyboard, ideal for surfing the Web or writing long e-mails.

10:17 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

SirOops informed us today that image support in TomeRaider 3 is stable now. You can download English and German Wikipedias with images for PPC and Palm. File sizes for the English version range from 1 Gb to 2.6 Gb, depending on size and number of images.

More on this site.

10:10 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Interested in what software works and what doesn't with the LifeDrive, PalmOne's latest handheld? PalmAddicts has posted a link to a Brighthand forum thread where people are collecting their compatibility findings.

10:04 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

MyUAE is a working Commodore Amiga emulator based on UAE specifically written for the Palm OS 5 platform. The most important enhancement of version 0.8 are:

• smaller emulator core, allows work on T5 and Treo 650 with UMDH
• less need of dynamic memory
• auto save/restore of emulator state
• packed state files, saves some space on your memory card
• faster virtual disk access
• gfx polished
• bug fixes

Download from Sourceforge.

[via PDAArcade]

09:42 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

A new hacking technique may allow evil doers to hack into any Bluetooth-enabled device, even when security features are switched on. New Scientits reports that two cryptographers, Avishai Wool and Yaniv Shaked of Tel Aviv University in Israel have worked out how to force devices to pair whenever they want. The pairing process is the first communication between two Bluetooth devices where a secret encryption key is exchanged. Once pairing succeeded, one person could theoratically, for instance, make phone calls on another person's phone.

Shaked and Wool will present their findings at the MobiSys 2005 conference next Monday. Update: Here is a link to the actual presentation. Thanks Alex!

09:29 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

By now Apple has sold more than 10 million iPod MP3 players, and the company's stock has surged 270 percent since the iPod was first introduced in October 2001. But these days analysts are wary of the player's future success.

An AP article appearing at BusinessWeek online yesterday reports that unlike in the past, when Apple has always shipped more iPods to retailers than expected, Goldman Sachs analysts now predict that Apple would likely only meet expectations and iPod shipments to be flat this quarter. The AP article is also quoting an AppleInsider report saying that shipments of most iPod models are "flat or declining" for the first time since the device was launched in 2001 and that, as a consequence Apple is overstocked on most of its MP3 players.

After these news Apple stock fell $1.80, or 4.5 percent to close at $38.24 last Friday.

07:41 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Taiwan-based E-Ten displayed the E-Ten M600 at Computex Taipei, a Pocket PC-based smartphone with WiFi capability and powered by Windows Mobile 5.0. It is further equipped with quad-band GSM, a 1.3mp camera, 128MB ROM and 64MB RAM, and a 400MHz processor.

The Inquirer was informed that the release date for this device is in September 2005.

07:28 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Via Teleread I found out today that someone already started a dedicated blog on the forthcoming Nokia 770, the mini-tablet device that made the news recently by being the first Nokia device that is fully powered by open-source Linux.

Good luck with the blog to whoever you are you, though next time you may want to be more careful with the choice of domain name. Nokia may not be amused.