11:11 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

It's only in alpha release right now, but there's an interesting tool called FeederReader for viewing RSS feeds and listening to podcasts on your Pocket PC.

FeederReader is a full-featured RSS Aggregator with podcast listening ("podcasting" or "podcatching") and enclosure support, running on Windows Mobile.

Major Features

• Podcast listening
• Enclosure support
• Installation and Storage on Flash Card.
• Easy Message Reading, one-handed.
• Handles large Number of feeds.
• Read while updating.
• Update multiple feeds at the same time.
• Message Lock.
• OPML Import and Export.
• Flexible viewing of Feed Data: view all
  message elements and raw files.
• Integrated Error Display.
• Flexible message handling.
• Messages retained even when removed
  from original feed.
• Detailed statistics on loaded messages.

A review is also available from Podcasting.com here.

05:48 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Tanker Bob reviewed the SanDisk 1GB Extreme III SD card, which according to specs offers a minimum of 20MB/sec sequential write and read speed. That is fast. Regular SD cards offer a speed of only 1.1 to 1.6MB/sec. The reviewer concludes:

Objective numbers are great, but what do they mean in daily life? The Extreme III proved extremely quick during normal use. Hotsyncing large files to the card especially showcase this card's pace-setting write performance. During Hotsync, files on the order of 200KB flash by so fast you barely have time to read their names on the screen. Transferring large files from RAM to the card and visa versa also proved speedy. Music proceeds uninterrupted in background play even while accessing the card in another application on the 400MHz T3. Overall, the Extreme III subjectively feels a tad faster than my Panasonic 512MB SD card. In this case, performance backs the advertising hype.

05:23 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Remember our discussion a few days ago in which anti-virus company McAfee claimed that mobile viruses are now on the move? McAfee said it had detected around 50 different mobile viruses by now. Wireless company WDSGlobal describes these statements as pure scaremongering tactic:

"If you look at the viruses out there, currently there are about 14 core viruses, the majority of which are fairly benign. They are mostly developed as 'proof of concept' to warn manufacturers of handsets and operating systems or the antivirus industry about potential vulnerabilities," Doug Overton, head of communications for WDSGlobal said.

In fact, mobile phone viruses are so infrequent that when the BBC wanted to film one executing, it took Overton and his colleagues three days of searching the Internet just to find the code for one such virus.

Isn't it sad enough that we have to constantly worry about the threat of new viruses? We don't need companies such as McAfee and Symantec to create a myth of viruses hyping the general public with unnecessary fear of "mobile virus diseases."

[via Slashdot]

05:14 AM by Chaos in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

According to this press release at PalmOne's website, they're planning a new type of mobile device called a "mobile manager", which apparently is intended to be used by the type of person who likes "digital everything".

Mobile managers are designed for customers who are eager to take full advantage of the trend toward "digital everything" -- from documents and email to music, images and video, as standalone files or in organized folders

Apparently, they're planning on announcing the first device in this category later this month.

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

Feast your eyes on some of the discussions from this week at MobileRead...

E-Book Conversion
Free as in Freedom (in Plucker format)

E-Book Readers
Broken dreams of the perfect e-book reader
Hunt for a suitable e-book reading device
Japanese Sony Librie turns Anglo-Saxon

General Chat
BuddyBuzz - social network for mobile speed reading
eBook Article in Make Magazine
Google Co-Founder Speaks at Univ of Michigan
Google Offering Broadband WebAccelerator Beta
Paper Books or eBooks?
PDA sales up? down? whatever
Rmail - Feed your E-Mail Inbox

iSilo/X
iSilo/X 4.26 beta 4 available

New Links
Reuters Mobile wholly dissected

Other E-Book Resources
"How We Got Here" free e-book in PDF

Other Gadgets
Read eBooks on a GameBoy!!

Palm
Amazon leaks palmOne LifeDrive - available May 18, 2005
Andre Dahan joins PalmSource Board of Directors
FontSmoother 1.30 released
Future of Zodiac
palmOne LifeDrive original accessories at Amazon
TCPMP 0.65b multimedia player for PalmOS released

Pocket PC
Making the move from Palm to PocketPC Part III
palmOne Treo 650 Custom Roms
TI develops DSP media processor for Pocket PCs

Sci-Fi & Fantasy
2005 Nebula Awards winners

Smartphones
Game Developers Talk About SmartPhones
Skype not for the Symbian platform?

Sunrise
Sunrise 0.41l released

WiFi / Bluetooth Technologies
JAL offering discount on in-flight broadband Internet

03:54 PM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Thanks to Teleread for informing us that a couple of Sony Librie hackers under Marko Bolowski are planning to translate the firmware of the Librie, which embedds NSC Linux 1.2, from Japanese to other languages (primarily English).

The CVS repository of the project is still empty, but I am in good hope that this is going to change soon.

08:59 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab claims to have developed the fastest method for reading text on your mobile phone. BuddyBuzz, a small Java MIDlet, combines RSVP, captology, social networking (people can rate content), and mobility. According to SiliconBeat:

Even with newer mobile devices with larger screens, the amount of text that can be displayed at any one time is limited, forcing people to scroll or tab from paragraph to paragraph or page to page. BuddyBuzz's technology largely avoids those issues. RSVP - for rapid fire serial presentation - quickly flashes words on a screen one at a time. The streaming process lets you stare at the screen and just absorb the text, without having to shift your eyes back and forth. The technology also allows the typeface size of text to be larger because just word at a time is on the screen.

For the research phase, BuddyBuzz has partnered with Reuters and CNET, who are providing them with ~700 news stories each day, as well as articles about culture, technology, health, science, sports, and more. Once you have an account, you can also add your own content to the BuddyBuzz system.

Make sure to give it a try. BuddyBuzz is currently free to sign up for and free to use. You can also click here for a 5-minutes video presentation (in Real Video).

07:10 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

From PDA247 I found out today that TankerBob wrote the third part of his essay "Moving from Palm to PocketPC" (part one, part two) in which he compares stability, 3rd party PIM applications, alarm handling, registry management and more in his move to Pocket PC. His third week bottom line:

After speeding through program trials involving literally dozens of installs/uninstalls last week, this week proved to be a maintenance learning experience. Although the tools on a PPC differ from those on the Palm, the basic idea remains the same. Leftover preferences on the Palm or spurious registry entries on the PPC both negatively affect their respective platforms. On all handhelds, regular (I recommend daily) full backups provide priceless recovery capability should the worst come to pass.

If you are willing to make the transition, remember to also check out Bob's related essays (I Took The Plunge, PalmOS to Pocket PC: Part I - Intro and PalmOS to Pocket PC: Part II - Conversion).