05:48 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.

05:05 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.

04:38 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Hagenuk - what? Hagenuk is a small German telecom provider whose parent is AEG ITM. PalmSource has cut a deal with Hagenuk to launch next month the Palm-powered hagenuk SmartPhone S200 for EUR 499. The phone features:

- a compact form factor;
- Palm OS® Garnet;
- Bluetooth technology for communicating with headsets, car kits, computers and printers equipped with Bluetooth technology;
- MP3 and MPEG4 for audio and video-capturing and playback;
- 1.3 megapixel integrated camera for vibrant photos;
- 32 MB RAM / 64 SDRAM flash memory;
- 2.2-inch D-TFD 64K colors LCD screen;
- SMS, MMS, WAP, email, Java support;
- SD/MMC Card expansion; and
- one-handed navigation five-way jog dial.

Full Press release.

08:50 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Check out the following very tempting deals on a T5 at the PalmOne online store:

SAVE
Get these special offers when you buy direct from palmOne!
* Free Shipping on all new Handhelds!
* Only $349 for Tungsten T5 handheld after $50 Mail-in Rebate!
* Free Universal Wireless Keyboard with Tungsten T5 handheld!
* Trade In / Trade Up - Give us your old handheld or communicator - We'll send you a $50 Gift Certificate!
* Save $100 on a palmOne handheld when you join Audible for 12 months! Click for more

Note: My email from PalmOne says deals are good through Sun, Mar 13, 2005. But the web site details on the free wireless keyboard say:

Orders must be completed and clear credit authorization by February 27, 2005 11:59 PM (Eastern Time) to qualify.

So be sure to check with PalmOne if you are planning to buy one.

10:18 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Powerpage has an interesting article that says Apple is Developing a New Palmtop Mac. This would fit in a pocket, and would be more like tiny laptop than a PDA. The version of Mac OSX would be stripped down. Don't know if that means it is basically the same, or if it's like Windows Mobile in comparison to desktop Windows

Maybe the PDA race is not just about SmartPhone OS options like Linux, PalmOS and Windows Mobile after all!

...And, no, that picture is not what it will look like.

(via Endgadget)

07:50 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

That's what MS Mobiles is reporting today. The "revolution" is smaller size and a slide out querty keyboard in the Samsung i730 and newly added Samsung SCH-i830. The article has links to the FCC site for more info.

05:26 PM by cbarnett in Archive | iSilo/X

iSilo v4.25 has finally finished beta, and is available in it's final form.

Highlights of the new version include:
- Added color themes feature:
- Ability to create color themes with selectable text
and background colors.
- Added ability to use an individual color theme for each
document to force the text and background colors to those
of the color theme.
- Added Options/Color configuration page/panel and dialogs
for managing color themes.
- Addressing of miscellaneous issues.

iSiloX v4.25 has also been released, and has the following features:

- Added ability to specify a maximum link depth for off-site URLs.
- In iSiloX for Windows, added ability to specify the character
set when creating Font Silo fonts.
- Addressing of miscellaneous issues.

To download iSilo, go to http://www.iSilo.com/download/index.htm

To download iSiloX, go to http://www.iSiloX.com/download/index.htm

Craig.

04:06 PM by PaulJManoogian in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The Lenovo ET960 is the latest product from the mid-range market and is the first attempt at the Windows Mobile product line from the company. The device sports connectivity through GPRS, IrDA, and Bluetooth. It also includes a nice 128mb of built-in memory, and a slot for memory cards. A convergent utility included is the 1.3 megapixel swivel camera.

Sounds great, right? Wrong. It would be a fantastic device if it didn't cost $1100! To add insult to injury, the device doesn't support WiFi; a technology that is basically a "given" in most all new mobile devices being released this year.

If the price were half as much, I might even own one. Then again, without WiFi, I don't see the point.

Via: [ Gizmodo ]