06:04 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Our friend TankerBob wrote a wonderful essay explaining how he made the transition from being a dedicated Palm user for seven years to becoming a passionate Dell Axim X50v owner. His first week bottom line:

I've learned an incredible amount in just one week. At this point, I’ve come to the conclusion that Pocket PC isn't the dark side—it's just another side. Hardware advances and hard work by Microsoft and their partners have brought the Pocket PC to a point of roughly equal stability and overall performance with Palm OS devices. Out of the box, their networking capability and built-in WiFi and VGA displays give them a large advantage amongst the growing number of home WiFi networkers and travelers requiring mobile access to the internet and/or home/office networks. On the other hand, if a user only needs to track schedules and contacts, or even work with MS Office-compatible files, a Palm might be a more efficient solution in both cost and complexity.

Other useful guides for making the transition are Bob's following three essays: I Took The Plunge, PalmOS to Pocket PC: Part I - Intro and PalmOS to Pocket PC: Part II - Conversion!

05:42 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Sunrise

Laurens released an updated version of Sunrise this week. Version 0.41i fixes a regression bug introduced in 0.41h.Version 0.41h, which was released last week, contains a fix for a long-standing bug that caused a crash when processing malformed URLs.

Download from Palmgear.

If you are new to Sunrise, click here to find out more about its top-notch features for website offline conversion.

02:31 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Some Palm devices emit this annoying whisteling, squaking, crying, peeping, screeching, singing, whining, hissing screen noise. 17-year old Dmitry Grinberg wrote the overclocking tool WarpSpeed which not only claims to make your Palm faster but also as silent as a rock.

I have no clue how this app works and how it can get rid of the noise, but try it out yourself if you don't believe it.

02:04 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Tam Hanna wrote an application that makes Clie-only applications run also on other Palm OS-based devices (excluding the Zodiac). From his blog, first download the tiny tool MakeClie. Then start a file browser (like McFile), copy MakeClie to RAM, open it and click on one of the buttons. Then run NetFront (which you've extracted -hopefully legally- from a Sony device).

12:16 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

There is a proposal being floated by Congress to mandate a single standard for DRM. That's hard to believe until you realize it's being proposed by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) -- the same individuals who sponsored a bill that would have made it legal for companies to enforce their own contol over downloading by jamming personal PCs.

Predictably, the music industry rejects the concept and feels it can come to it's own resolutions just like other technologies have done. The average consumer might like the idea until they find out which one is chosen, and all the limitations it brings for new technology and products.

Whatever the government gets their hands on is sure to be followed by regulations and taxes. And you know what they say about taxes... "If you want to kill something, tax it!"

More information at the original article from Internet News. (Via Engadget)

05:43 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Formats | Workshop

Paperless Printer 3.0 works as a virtual printer driver for Windows, and according to Rarefind it can convert any document or application data into one of the following formats: PDF, HTML, DOC, XLS, JPEG, and BMP.

Update: Use at your own risk. At least one of our users reported negative experiences with this tool.

Printing and converting PDF content to HTML content can be of special interest to mobile users. Content from the Web is often stored in PDF files and make it difficult to be read on handheld devices. With Paperless Printer, if it works as advertised, a user can now have his favorite text converted into HTML and then use any offline converter tool such as iSilo, Plucker, or Sunrise to transfer it to his PDA.

Download link; the tool is free for noncommercial use.

05:28 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Prabhath Sirisena is yet another web standards evangelist who is giving some thoughts on designing cascade style sheets for handhelds. Check out his article Mobile CSS First Steps if you are interested in styling your web pages for mobile browsers.

05:04 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of BlackBerry-maker RIM, remains confident of his company and is not afraid of Microsoft's forthcoming WM2005 (aka Magneto) release.

This week RIM reported a loss of $2.6 million for the Q4, compared to a profit of $41.5 million for the same period a year ago. The loss was a result of settling its three-year patent dispute with NTP; excluding the $294.2m litigation charge and related $151.6m tax asset write-up, net income for the quarter would have been $140.1m. The number of BlackBerry subscribers in the quarter increased to about 2.5m from 1.1m at the end of RIM's last fiscal year, with RIM adding a higher-than-expected 470,000 new subscribers in the fourth quarter. RIM expects to reach 3m subscribers in May of this quarter and to launch BlackBerry with 100 new carriers this year.

What is RIM's stance on Microsoft's plans to offer push e-mail functionalities in the forthcoming WM2005 release?

"It's pretty hard to comment on something that's not launched," said Balsillie. "As I understand what 'Magneto' is, it's a service pack upgrade of MIS that works with Exchange 2003, and 2003's in … about 22 percent of their Exchange environments, and it will require an upgrade of the Windows Mobile, which is being embedded for … Windows Mobile devices for 2006. I don't know the specifics of the product, and I don't know the timing exactly, but I think it's going to be a while."

Balsille didn't do his home work. He should know that Magneto refers to WM2005 and not to Mobile Information Server or a MS Exchange service pack. And where the heck did he come up with year 2006?

Balsillie suggested that Magneto may not be of great interest to carriers, since carriers "tend to be interested in something that's pan-application, so if you have something that's Notes, Exchange, Groupwise, Prosumer, that's very, very interesting; [whereas] if you're hitting 20 to 25 percent of just Exchange, which is just 40 percent of the enterprise, it may or may not be a key solution, but [regardless] it's maybe not a big part of an addressable market," Balsillie said. "When you talk to CIOs, do you look for [wireless e-mail] to be … a single-app forward integration of an e-mail store or do you look for it to be a generic wireless middleware for a bunch of carriers, for a bunch of apps, and a bunch of devices in a bunch of geographies?" Balsillie said.

Balsille would probably also say boo to a goose, but careful here: you don't want to end up like a second Netscape case, Mr. RIM!