12:50 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Last month when I reported on Firefly, a cell phone specially designed for small children, I told you that I wasn't quite convinced that parents would or should jump after this product without considering the potential health risks. Well, here is the news appearing on CNN (via AP) today, a news that the company Firefly Mobile is certainly not happy to see:

In Britain, the chairman of the National Radiological Protection Board advised in January that parents should not give mobile phones to children age 8 or younger as a precaution against the potential harm of radiation from the devices. When you use a cell phone, 70 to 80 percent of the energy emitted from the antenna is absorbed by the head, Lai said. Last week, a federal appeals court in Maryland reinstated five class-action lawsuits claiming that the cell phone industry has failed to protect consumers from unsafe levels of radiation.

Because young skulls are thinner and the growing brain may be more susceptible to radiation, cell phone use could have a worse effect on kids than on adults. What's making the current discussion difficult to comprehend is the fact that a brain tumor takes about 30-40 years to develop, so even if your cell-addicted child is quite happy and healthy right now, noone can tell you what direct damage it could suffer in a couple of years. As a parent would you take the chance?

12:24 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

It is true: Motricity has finally managed to release an update of eReader for Pocket PC. The best news first: eReader 2.61 has native VGA support! Other changes since eReader 2.43 include:

- Added RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation)
- Improved reference book character support
- Dictionary opens with no word selected by default
- Improved Bookshelf scrolling
- VGA and Landscape support
- Updated libpng and zlib libraries to fix security issues
- Improved reference book performance
- Improved Setup program
- Bug fixes

As a small special one, use the Promo Code CLUTTER this week to receive a 10% discount off each book that you purchase at eReader.com

08:29 AM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Who out there can point us to a good source of free textures and images on the web? If you've found a good one, share the wealth with us.

I never really thought about it much before, but I can start things off with the following site which appears very nice on the surface...

http://www.morguefile.com

That page also refers to a few other sites that look interesting...

www.imageafter.com
www.sxc.hu
www.ppdigital.com
www.bigfoto.com

Okay, yes, this is a bit whimsical for a MobileRead post. But, hey, it might just be useful, for example, if you are converting text ebooks into a PDA format and want to add some eye candy.

So join the discussion thread and let us know what photo archive sites you've used.

05:14 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Mobile Sites

Since today Google's Local Search for finding local restaurants, stores and other businesses can be accessed via Web-enabled cell phones and other mobile devices.

To receive useful Google Local results, include the location in your query, for example "pizza 94043" or "taxi san francisco". To receive a definition of a word or a phrase, begin your query with "define".

04:33 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

One of our forum members asked some time ago if there was a hack to enable Graffiti 1 on newer palmOne devices. Igor Nestorov has managed now to patch the Graffiti 1 libraries making them work with palmOne's Treo 650 and Tungsten T5. You can read more about it in this thread at 1src.com.

Download the patched libraries from here.

[via Writing On Your Palm]

04:23 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

This is a great site for people having fun learning physics. Light and Matter offers a series of six excellent introductory physics textbooks available for free download in PDF format. The e-books include: Newtonian Physics, Conservation Laws, Vibration and Waves, Electricity and Magnetism, Optics, and The Modern Revolution in Physics.

04:12 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Interested in finding new online sources for free e-books? Have a look at this Slashdot discussion:

"I recently stumbled upon a collection of online libraries. This was fascinating to me, but too many of them cost money or offer Google Print-like limited functionality. I decided to put together a list of sites that offer free books in a format that would allow a person to actually read through them. As Slashdot readers are known for being well read and for enjoying free things, I figured I'd tap into the knowledge pool here. Any suggestions?"

Although most of the sources in the discussion have been mentioned here at MobileRead already, you might find the one or other unknown to you.

11:45 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Our German visitors can now download the full German WikiPedia DVD Spring 2005 edition from various mirrors. The DVD image is roughly 2.7Gb of size with over 204.000 Wikipedia articles. You can also buy the boxed DVD from Amazon.de for EUR 9.90.

An English DVD version is still in the talks, but there are no final results yet. Unlike the German version which fits quite happily on 1 DVD, the English version would barely fit on 2 DVDs.