05:06 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 ]

04:25 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

PowerVR Racer is a high-speed, white-knuckle car race demo with contestants battling through an entire city. The game demo was specially designed for the Intel 2700 accelerator chip, so don't bother downloading if you don't own an Axim X50v.

Download here.

Although this is a 'canned' demo with no interaction, significant game-like code is executed, with banking, braking and suspension being simulated in real-time by the CPU, and executed entirely with fixed-point arithmetic. The city database is modelled with over 20,000 triangles, and the cars are modelled with multiple levels of detail, with 1,500 triangles in the most detailed version. Accurate reflection-mapping and multi-texturing is used on the cars, PVR-TC 4-bit texture compression is used throughout.

Make sure to also check out PowerVR's older downloads demonstrating what is all possible with the Intel chip.

12:06 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Excellent article at the Teleread blog. David Rothman shares some of his exasperation at the Tower of DRM Babel in the ebook world, and tells us that there are no plans to port MS Reader to the smartphone platform.

(Via JKOnTheRun)

06:50 AM by ignatz in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Jeff makes many good points, effectively summarizing some of the discussions that have been happening here on the oft-foretold "death" of the PDA. However, he also carries over into some new territory. Overall a very insightful must read.

...while I object to the funeral dirge tone to some of the recent articles on the late, lamented PDA, I can't argue with the facts. The standalone PDA, the digital organizer that we all know and love, doesn't have much of a future.

The PDA is dead. Long live Palm OS.

04:46 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

If you sign in to Gmail using a browser that isn't fully supported, like the mobile Pocket Internet Explorer, you'll automatically be directed to a basic HTML version, which is compatible with almost any browser. You might notice that some features aren't available in the basic HTML version, including filter creation, settings, spell checker, keyboard shortcuts, and address auto-complete.

To celebrate this new Gmail feature, Mobileread has 150 more invites for you one - click away. Go here and browse to post #38 for the latest invites.

11:39 PM by Bob Russell in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

A new eBook reader, the SmartBook G168A , is available in Asia. It features an 800x480 7" display.
More at JKOnTheRun and Akihabara and Engadget.

11:29 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

For quite some time now we have been saddened by news of all these gadgets that are Europe only (e.g. all those cool smartphones), or Asia only (like Sony portables and Sharp Zaurus products).

Well, maybe we'll see more emphasis soon from Sony, at least. The new chairman and CEO of Sony is expected to be an American, Howard Stringer.

Check out the story at Engadget and the New York Times.

04:29 PM by Francesco in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Jeff Kirvin explains why Fitaly rocks (and how to master it):
Fitaly Virtual.