11:05 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Deutsche Telekom is collaborating with Deutsche Bahn (DB) to bring high-speed WiFi access to Germany's ICE InterCity Express train. Although perhaps not the same feel like surfing in the sky, it is possible that one or the other person will have a great kick from surfing online at a speed of 300km/h. Details are still kept in the dark; the service with the suspected name "Railnet" will be officially anounced at Cebit 2005 on March 11.

08:14 AM by Team7 in E-Book General | News

I was laying in bed last night trying to fall asleep. I am reading the last book of the Otori series by Lian Hearn and I was thinking how dull eBooks are and how dull paper books are for that matter. But many times eBooks are even denied their covers so all you get is just type. Don't get me wrong this is the best part. It's like getting a monet painting and complaining the frame is dull but just bear with me.

I started thinking about how ebooks could instill some of the feeling and emotion of the stories. I really think that in the future, eBooks should move beyond plain type and start adding animations. For example vines that grow up the margin of the page. Skys the limit as far as simple animations, nothing much, just something that happens evertime you begin a new page lasting maybe 3sec. Maybe authors should spend some money on hiring illustrators. Remember, color doesn't cost any more money in digital. Also I have noticed that games are starting to emulate movies as in that you play some of the game and then you get a long story sequence. How about the same with books you read: at the end of each chapter you get some animation. I think this would be the greatest because many authors like Neil Gaimen already take alot of advantage of the art world. I could just imagine some of his stories like Underworld have cut scenes done by some of those great japanese animators.

I know that many people prefer having no pictures and no movies/voices because they like to imagine things. But it is just an idea of where eBooks could go. I realize that many authors don't have the money to pay for these kind of extras; still, if you want to receive bigger dividens you need to invest more - but these are extreme cases. Just adding some more life to a book wouldn't necessarily increase the price or the expenses for the author, I think. Once this would become main stream like watching movies or such, I expect that eBooks will cost around the same as hard-cover books. Not too bad. Also since many people don't want all extras, maybe there would also be a way to just release a plain-text version. Kinda like some authors do it now: releasing a collector's edition with extra pictures in the book. I think that authors should start adding alot more extras in eBooks, now that they are digital and it can be done.

Sorry for all the rambeling and bad spelling but I just got all these ideas and wanted to know what you guys thought was possible/feasable. This would also probably require a eBook-only reading device

11:10 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Hack A Day found an interesting way to reuse your old, unused PDA for some good purpose. You could use its display as an LCD output for your PC or for some robotics project. All you need is the open-source software palmlorb which runs on any Palm OS device and makes your Palm emulate a Matrix Orbital LK204-25 LCD.

10:44 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

Another great news from the e-book reader department. As thin as paper, this could be the ultimate format for displays: the roll. When it's needed, it's there. When it isn't, it rolls away to almost nothing.

Polymer Vision, a line of business within Philips Electronics, announced today its new 5-inch PV-QML5 rollable display. With a decreased radius of curvature, improved operational and mechanical lifetime and paperlike viewing contrast, the display is expected to go in production within two years.

A couple of specs:
The Polymer Vision PV-QML5 is an ultra-thin (100µm) featherweight QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) active-matrix display with a diagonal of 5 inches. When not actively used, the display can be rolled up into a small housing with a radius of curvature of less than 7.5 mm. With four gray levels, the monochrome display provides paperlike viewing comfort with a high (10:1) contrast ratio for reading-intensive applications. Even in bright daylight, the display is easy to read. Using a bi-stable electrophoretic display effect from E Ink Corp., the display consumes an exceptionally low amount of power.

Sounds definitely better than LCD. Alas, why is it that all my devices are still powered with LCD displays?

10:30 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

This story travelled from a Japanese business site (dead link) to SorobanGeeks and then to Gizmodo where I actually found it:

Sharp has shown a prototype eBook reader with a screen that is only 1mm thick — inside the transparent plastic case that is obviously much thicker. Although they don’t plan to have the technology in saleable form until 2007, they already have one major leg up on Sony (and I’m not just talking about the color screen); since eBooks have already been a major part of Sharp’s Zaurus campaign, their library already has around 7000 titles, compared to Sony’s meager 100 or so.

Who knows, if the recent stories on the demise of the PDA are true (I really don't want to hear about it anymore), a color e-book reader will be exactly what we need in 2007 (you'll never find me reading e-books on smartphone devices with current screen sizes!).

10:05 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

I found these GREAT news in the Netscape Mozilla newsgroup posted by Lead-Mini-Mozilla-developer Doug Turner:

[...]You can download a sneak peak at this build here. Keep in mind, it is basically the second build that I made that actually rendered a page successfully. When you check it out, remember I told you: Lots of work to do; Lots of work to do.

[...]I have written up some notes on how to go about building this stuff. I don't claim the notes are perfect, but they are a start. Ideally, the notes will turn into a "how to build for windows ce" webpage. If someone wants to help on this, please let me know. The notes are here.

[...]If you find bugs, please write them up in bugzilla. For the Operating System, just simply select other. We are working on adding a Windows CE option.

[...]There are a few loose ends such as XPTCall, build and config changes, https, and code reviews. Most of these items have people working on them. If you are interested in any, please let me know. The tracking bug for all things windows ce related is here.

[...]Currently, I am building against the Pocket PC 2003 SDK. We may want to adjust this at some point, but I thought it would be acceptable place to start. The binary is 3.8MB compressed not including security. To run the build I have, you need about 5mb of memory to display www.google.com (this is a pretty soft number. I need a better tool to determine exact rss usage -- if you have a tool in mind, please let me know)

[...]Another thing you will notice is the UI for the application is terrible. I really need your input and windows ce coding skills here. If you want to take a look at the current code for the application, it is here.

11:19 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

A lot of updated PalmOne news from our favorite site PalmAddicts this morning:

ROM upgrade for the Sprint: "It's in the works, but don't have a hard date."
650 long delays solution: PalmOne is working on fixing the long delays with the 650 in the phone app and when switching between apps.
No Cobalt on Treo's: Palm One don't have any plans for Colbalt to ship on Treo's.
P1 looking to expand Treo market: "We've said we are open to looking at lots of ways to grow the market with no specifics."
PalmOne working on wifi card for the Treo 650: "We are looking at it but it's harder than it sounds."

03:42 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

So much news sounds gloomy for Palm, such as the most recent news we see posted about PalmOne's predicted troubles. In fact, it almost feels like mainstream "experts" on the mobile computing market can sell nothing but gloom and doom with a dab of hysteria! Everyone gives Palm a long shot at a smart phone niche market, but thinks all depends on that success. I say that's very short sighted. Why not a successful niche market in traditional PDAs, or something that the traditional PDA evolves into? I, for one, am not ready to count PalmOne out. And I don't think I'm alone because developers are not jumping ship as if they think it's sinking either. If anyone should be able to recognize a sinking ship it's them. But they see a future, and so do I. There's every reason to continue to think PalmOne will survive.

As much as people like to proclaim the PDA market dead and gone, it's not gone. It just may not keep growing like it had been. What about the toaster market? How much is that growing? They've even had to deal with the ubiquitous microwave that slowed down sales of the toaster oven. But did the toaster disappear? What about the market for analog watches? Everyone thought that was going to be gone forever when LED and then LCD display watches came out with all kinds of fancy features. But isn't there plenty of money to be made by lots of analog watch manufacturers? I wear one myself. And one of these days I'll replace it. Those markets may not expand exponentially, but there's enough there to be successful, and keep putting out good products.

If you think about it, it's not so much that it looks like Palm is going under (assuming PalmSource can provide a decent next-generation of it's PalmOS). It's mostly frustration because we think they are missing golden opportunities, and because they're just not giving us any decent PDAs on the market in this dry season.

The T5 was close. I even had one reserved at a PalmOne store when it came out. It would be an awesome PDA if done right. I think it was a great concept. But all you hear about is that it's a great PDA with some problems. Even some of the recent years have hurt Palm because of bad battery life or production quality problems combined with weak customer service. The T5 problems, Sony withdrawal, lack of product news, and all the worries about Cobalt caused me to join the Pocket PC crowd for now. But I would love to see Palm develop some devices that make it worth my while to go back to PalmOS.

I think there's still a lot of market to keep Palm going as long as they can keep the developers from jumping ship. I don't really believe that people are so happy with their current PDAs that they don't want to upgrade or replace. If nothing else, they'll want to buy a new one when the old battery won't hold a charge. A lot of the doom and gloom is just reaction to all the Clies not being sold. And without many new products that are delivering value and capability, I think a lot of people are just waiting.

Some people are happy enough with their PDA to wait on a purchase, but not to the point they will never purchase a PDA again. And there's a lot of hobbyists that are like me. We've jumped ship because we felt forced to make the leap, but really prefer deep down to be on the Palm side of things. I'm not a Microsoft hater, despite having my complaints. I actually appreciate a lot of what they've done for personal computing and PDAs. I want them to succeed. (Sorry folks... I know that's not a popular position on tech sites around the web.) But I just like the Palm approach because it feels good.

I believe PalmOne will get past this bump in the road and be able to find some core competencies that they can use to make great products. They may lose much of the smart phone market, but that doesn't mean they lose the core PIM market. The sales may be falling for PalmOS, but most of that is due to Clie gone and no sign of the basic products people can rely on.

Think about Palm fanatics... we prize the simplicity of the Zen of Palm, and want a product that works well with minimum fuss and a great UI. I don't see that with Treo or T5, but I am convinced PalmOne can get back there. And I if you don't think so, let me prescribe my favorite tonic for the depressed Palm fan... one or more daily readings of Palm Addict. It will be sure to renew your hope!

PalmOne is working on production quality and supplier issues and I'm sure they'll get that right. If they don't, we'll see new leadership that will. PalmSource will eventually have a Cobalt OS that PalmOne will be willing to adopt. I admit that's a bit of a question mark right now, but they might already have reached that point... PalmOne takes so long to produce a product that something might be well on the way already.

So, bottom line, I think Palm will come back. Not like the spectacular hopes we had for it with domination of the portable device market, or a huge piece of the smartphone pie, but with solid basic PDAs. Devices with lots of capacity, and well-executed with the best UI in the market. Eventually, they will move into SmartPhones, but I don't see them dominating there unless they get lucky. The market is too tough, and they don't seem to be taking advantage of opportunities. I just hope they do all this before something else takes over the market. There are certainly enough threats... Windows or Linux-based handheld computers with PIM features. Smartphone alternatives which will become better and better at integrating large screens and more powerful computing capabilities. And even the possibility of a new Palm-like OS to ride on top of another OS (like Windows or Linux.)

Show us proud Palm, and don't let this critical time slip away completely. Some of that momentum is gone, but there's still time. We're gonna have to see something eventually that makes the Palm platform worthwhile. A reason to buy. You don't get a free pass just because you're the sentimental favorite. When desktop OS and hardware become available in a handheld computer at a great price and with good battery life, I'm afraid it's going to be too late.