06:05 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Mobile Sites

Mark redesigned my favorite online SciFi magazine Locusmag which is why our Locusmag feed was temporarily down. I am happy to inform you that the feed is back now. As a little bonus, I've also made a feed for Locusmag's Blinks section. Enjoy!

Locusmag RSS 2.0 feed:
https://www.mobileread.com/feeds/locus.xml

Locusmag Blinks RSS 2.0 feed:
https://www.mobileread.com/feeds/locusblinks_rss20.xml

02:52 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Sammy from our favorite Palm blog PalmAddicts revealed that one of his favorite PDA related websites is Mobileread. Personally, this news made my day; what better could you think of than to receive praise from a person you highly regard?

10:20 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

Many modern mobile phones with big color screens have static themes or skins allowing the user to change the graphical appearance of the display. Sony Ericsson is going one step further: they invented a system which - either automatically or semi-controlled by the user - changes the graphics of your mobile device according to its surrounding environment!

Sony Ericsson's system, which received patent status recently, requires three components:
1. a LCD display (or similar technologies such as OLED);
2. a reasonable fast processor controlling the usual operations as well as the graphical interface; and
3. a camera/viewfinder.

Unlike traditional static skinning, the system provides a more dynamic interface trying to make the phone look more "lively". It uses the viewfinder of the built-in camera to create a new context-dependent theme for the device that should resemble the general aspects of the surrounding.

For example, if the user is in a forest the colors could be dark and green, while if the user is at the sea, the dominant color would be blue. Also picture information could be used (either manually or automatically at regular time intervals) to set a background of the display, such as a transparent or semi-transparent still picture. As usual, the user could take a photo and use it as a background image. With the new system, he could also automatically have the background changed at regular time intervals (e.g. every hour, every day). Finally he could choose to have the background changed continuously, or at very small time intervals, to have the display always resemble the viewfinder. In future it should be even possible that if the user moves from one environment to another having e.g. a different light intensity or color scheme, the device would automatically sample a new picture and uses it for affecting overall screen graphics such as color settings, contrast, light intensity, shapes and sizes of icons, animation effects and bitmap shapes.

Unfaithful husbands should better turn off the auto-adaptive system in certain situations, or their cell phone could quickly become their worst treacherous enemy.

09:04 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Samsung Electronics today presented its WM2005-aka-Magneto-based smartphone SCH-i300 at Cebit in Germany. The smartphone could be a real iPod-killer: it features a 3GB hard drive and supports all kind of audio formats (MP3, WMA, AAC, OGG).

Thanks to Telekoms Korea for the hint.

08:47 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Found this interesting app for Pocket PC today:

WinMobile Download Accelerator is an optimized download manager for Windows Mobile 2003/2003 SE (Pocket PC). Multithreaded download accelerate the speed with which you can receive files from HTTP/FTP servers. WMDA is fully integrated into the Pocket Internet Explorer. WMDA will let you take advantage of a faster and more reliable download, optimize your download performance, and help you to recover interrupted downloads. WMDA brings you to the next level of Internet downloading.

06:58 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Mobile Sites

MyYahoo! now allows US cell owners to take MyYahoo! content to mobile phones. In a few simple clicks, you can link your mobile phone to My Yahoo!. From there you'll be able to access the wonderful stuff that lives on your page.

Just enter your mobile phone number on this site and Yahoo will send a text message with instructions right to your phone.

06:48 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

German online book seller Librie.de is finally offering e-books, as the company has announced at Cebit today. It will exclusively offer around 1'000 bestellers in German language and around 20'000 e-books in English.

The catch (why must there always be one?): the e-books will be offered only in Mobipocket format. It seems to me as if Mobipocket is aggressively targeting online stores lately, since Librie.de is already the second e-book newcomer offering e-books in Mobipocket format we talked about these days.

06:05 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Novinit, a French company, has developed Jackito, the world's first TDA or Tactile Digital Assistant. The TDA is based on touch-screen technology and relies entirely on your thumbs for input. Supposedly, on average, when a user presses a touch screen, the finger's contact area is 100 times larger than that of a stylus and the stylus exerts 100 times more pressure on the screen than a finger. Sounds good, but wouldn't you also hate those ugly thumb prints on your gadget screens? You can read more about fingers vs. stylus here.

The Jackito device features 3ACTIL, a fingertip-sensitive 4.5" screen (now that is big!), which doesn't require a stylus and offers an unlimited number of touch-sensitive virtual keyboards, designed for both thumbs. More interestingly, one variant of the device is available with a high-contrast bistable display, something along the lines of the Sony Librie e-book reader! Read more about the specs here.

Now the big bummer: Jackito's printed circuit board also features a silicon chip that provides a unique logical ID number for each PCB, from a billion possible combinations (the same type of chip is used on smart cards in secure payment systems). DRM-fans will love it, others (us) will hate it.

The price: starting at USD $600.