10:06 AM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

This can best be described as "Oops!" Atlantic broadband has been displaying (actually, is currently displaying) a familiar error message to Windows users. The infamous "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." I suppose that their local bulletin board channel feed is generated by a Windows PC with video out!

Reminds me of a tech conference with Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems in its best days, when there was a lot of teasing back and forth between Microsoft and Sun. McNealy showed a video of a scuba diver with a wrist control unit. Suddenly, at the bottom of the ocean, the diver can't breathe anymore. He looks at the wrest watch controller (running Windows, of course) and sees an error message something like the following... "WinSock Error. Fatal exception!"

But, gee, I'm just glad not to see any more of the old blue screens of death, or the dasterdly "Dr Watson"!

BTW, for those of you with eagle eyes, the screenshot is not from a video capture, so don't bother trying to deduce anything from the title bar of the error message window.

08:30 AM by Michael in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Sent in by Michael for Bookeen...

Bookeen's mission has always been to democratize the access to digital content by proposing the optimal e-reading platform. This new price is a great step for us and we are very happy to reach the PDA price range.

The Cybook has been designed to provide the best e-reading experience. Thanks to its bright and contrasted page size display and its sleek design, the Cybook is the ideal companion to discover the pleasure of digital reading.
The Cybook is a Windows CE dedicated ebook reader which supports Mobipocket encrypted ebooks but also TXT, HTML or RTF using uBook reader.

You can connect your device to your computer using USB, IR or network to exchange data or synchronize your Mobipocket enews. You can easily carry with you thousands of ebooks on a CF storage card.

The PDF format support is being actively worked on and a beta version should be released in the next few weeks. We hope we will be able to give you screenshots in a near future.

For more information, we invite you to visit www.bookeen.com and our ebook store www.ubibooks.com

Best regards to all,

Michael for Bookeen

11:19 PM by ignatz in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Nearly since I first got my Tungsten E, perhaps a year now, I have been using it as my poor man's iPod. But with just 256 meg SD cards, constantly loading music or audio books is a real pain. And though PocketTunes is a good program, it's certainly got its weak spots.

I suffer from these problems no longer. I recently purchased the 20 gig version of Cowon's awkwardly named iAUDIO M3, henceforth referred to as the M3. I did a lot of research and I felt that the M3 addressed my needs better than the others out there. I did not want to be limited to iTunes, like the iPod is. I also wanted a good remote, as I don't like taking my expensive toy in and out of my pocket. And I wanted some of the extras: voice recorder, line in recording, and the ability to play as many different formats as I could. I satisfied all these needs.

Click here to see the rest of the review.

11:41 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The world's most popular mobile Internet service for smartphones and PDAs - well at least in the eyes of AvantGo - is now available for Blackberry as a preview edition. AvantGo for Blackberry is a wireless-only service accessible from the RIM web browser (v3.7 and above). So in order to use it, you must have HTML Web browsing enabled through your service provider or your company's BlackBerry server.

Click here to read the installation instruction.

[via BBHub]

05:36 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Books We Like (BWL) is the result of a smart idea to combine the latest trend of "tagging" with Amazon's Web Services. From Librarystuff (via del.icio.us):

Use this site to discover books that others love, to recommend your own favorites, and to keep a reading list of books you want to remember. Use it to buy books through Amazon, Powells, etc. and contribute the commission to fund independent media. The system uses your existing accounts at those sites. Use it to psychoanalyze other users based on what books they like.

How is the site funded? Well, BWL is an Amazon Associate, so all purchases in an Amazon (or other) session that starts from BWL (by clicking on a book title for instance) are credited to BWL (usually Amazon Associates receive ~5% revenue of each purchase).

09:11 PM by cbarnett in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Gowerpoint have released a new version of their excellent reader µbook

The new version (0.9d) includes the following changes:

- Added Next/Previous Book overloaded over Next/Previous page when the beginning or end of current book is reached.
- Changed Maximum font height to 256 (which will software expand above 64 to save memory)
- Added missing handling of add extra line between paragraph for PML parser
- Fixed problem with empty <PRE> </PRE> strings
- Fixed problem with advancing in TOC for PDF files
- Fixed memory leak in file scanning code
- Fixed crash with RTF parser
- Fixed inverse state of link to image or file option
- Fixed problem with finding accented words in text
- Lotsa new goodies:
- xNight skin by Peter Olson
- English to French Dictionary compiled by Patrice Couté
- German UI and Manual by Frank Küpper
- Polish UI by Mariusz Przysliwski
- Spanish UI by Juan Munyoz Rodriguez, revised by Marcos Godo

µbook is my favourite book reader. Check it out!

Craig.

08:45 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Here you are, the quintescential nerd with a PDA that can do everything, and an MP3 collection to listen to wherever you please, and you didn't even have to spend the big bucks for an iPod. But anyone can play mp3 music on the run these days and you don't even have to be a techie to do it. So how are you going to distinguish yourself as an early adopter?

How about jumping on a product that doesn't exist yet (to the best of my knowledge), but is surely coming.... a database of music with a Palm or PPC application for mobile access. You may have to wait a while, but I'm sure it's coming, and when it does, you can be the envy of the general public once again, just like you were when you did "iPod" before anyone understood it!

Sure, there are currently products out there that let you store information about your collections, even on your PDA. There's even one that lets you scan CD barcodes to enter the information. But what a about a program that's actually useful?

Here's what I see in my glimpse of the future for MP3 databases:

1. It will contain album art, album and song titles, lyrics and even information about the artist such as discographies. And of course it will have an easy way to purchase those other albums also -- gotta get revenue in this modern day world, right?!
2. You will not have to type almost anything in. You can download the information automaticlly from online databases, just like when you do CD ripping right now, except more info will be included, and eventually almost no album will be missing.
3. Optionally, you can input the artist, album, song title info from existing mp3 directories on your desktop, either from the tags or the directory and file names.
4. A scanner can be used to scan the CD insert with the lyrics if not available online
5. Each MP3 player will be able to access this database (probably limited to your home collection of MP3s, or even just the MP3s on your device, unless you can access the database via wi-fi). That means you can look at all the info about the songs while you are listening to them, including the lyrics so you can sing along! Eventually, maybe there will even be music videos attached, or background images.
6. Windows media player-like graphics that "dance" to the music. I kind of liked the older stuff like the dancing disco sheep, but I suppose the modern stuff is okay also. I like the light shows that move on the screen to music, and one of these days PDAs will plug into TVs (like the Dell VGA PPC can do now) and we can watch it on hi-def movie screens at home.

Nothing here is past our capabilities right now. I'm not sure why it's not here yet. But surely it will be. I may not be able to sing that well, but I'd sure love to have my PPC show me graphics and/or lyrics for the music I'm listening to, whether I'm listening to it on my PPC or on my home stereo!

This description didn't even take a lot of creativity. How about showing me up, and describing something really neat that is even better than this? Surely someone out there has even more imagination than me!

05:06 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Mini-Mozilla aka Minimo, the trimmed down version of the Mozilla web browser for Pocket PC, has a forum at MozillaZine now where users can participate and submit bug reports.

Link to MozillaZine Minimo

You can download the most current compiled ARM version (0.4) of Minimo from here.