11:45 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Troy Wolverton from TheStreet.com wrote an in-depth analysis of palmOne's current market position and the continuous difficulties in keeping its momentum in the growing smartphone market.

11:16 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Our friend Brian from Tapland is submitting the following news:

Zodiacs Around The World is giving you a chance to win some free software courtesy of the fine folks at Class Action, GPS Pilot, and Resco. If you're a Zodiac enthusiast and you have a digital camera, take your Zodiac out for a photo shoot around your hometown, at a famous landmark, or far away at an exotic location. The three contestants who send in the most interesting, unique and high quality photos will win some software for their Zodiac with "around the world" and photo themes.

Contest rules and prizes can be seen here. Since starting the site at the beginning of February, the submissions have been coming in at a steady pace with some great photos from Mexico, Germany, and the USA.The USA Map, World Map and Group Photo Pool are starting to get well populated. Please feel free to use any photos from the site in a news item.

Alex: Sounds to me like this contest is going to be a lot of fun. Make sure that you don't miss the deadline, which is Saturday March 12, 2005 11:59PM EST!

07:53 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Have you ever wished you could just buy all the good Pocket PC programs at once instead of buying them one at a time? My guess is probably not, but you might be tempted now if you have lots of extra cash laying around.

Pocket PC Magazine is offering a CD with (almost) all their award winning software titles, which you can register for the full versions for about a year if you buy the whole set for about $429. A boatload of cash, but you get a boatload of software.

I'm thinking that IT departments, software reviewers and rich hobbyists must be the target audience. But it does get me wishing I had it, even if I don't need it or even know exactly how it all works.

Hey, wouldn't you folks at Pocket PC Magazine love to throw me a free copy so I can review it for you?!

But, on a more serious note, they have a great site over there at www.PocketPCMagazine.com, and the list of award winning software has been a constant reference for me. They have had such good stuff, I just signed up for a paper subscription. And with subscriptions, they offer a download with all the info on the software evaluations. You can find summary info for free (which is what hooked me on Pocket PC Magazine in the first place) at http://www.pocketpcmag.com/awards/nominees_2004.asp

05:52 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

A very interesting post in the PocketPC Thoughts forums purports to do just that -- stream tv content from your tuner-equipped desktop PC to your Pocket PC.

The author's own comment is

Use at your own risk, it works but it is not pretty.

but if you're interested in doing something like this it might be a good place to start. Let us know if you give it a try!

01:15 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

I added the promised screenshots to my original thread on my first experience using Boeing's Connexion WLAN service.

10:19 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

According to a very nice and thoughtful article at Brighthand article, sales have fallen off because the killer PDA app is PIM apps. The idea is that the masses of people that wanted a PDA for that purpose are pretty much happy with their devices, so the market is falling off. What is needed is another killer app to create sales.

Ed Hardy tells us that he believes wireless e-mail is just that new killer app. I agree. It's definitely a killer app, but... I'm not so sure that it's going to help PDA sales very much. Unless Palm and PPC get ahead of the curve for both the app and the service contracts that support it, I just see it as another reason for the portable pseudo-PDA devices to leapfrog PDAs. For example smartphones and RIM devices which are already exploding in sales.

At my place of work it's an amazing transformation that has taken place. From a few trial RIM devices, it has grown into a cultural thing. Management as well as staff that needs to be in touch all make use of those devices. And I think all they do is use it for their email and calendar. But it's synched with Lotus Notes, and it pushes email with a vibrate notification, and it is now also a phone.

People have adopted it with a gusto I never would have expected. At every meeting I'm at, you hear those things vibrating and people are sending emails back and forth, and business gets done faster. Jokes and funny observations even go flying around the conference room sometimes at long boring meetings!

So yes, I agree wireless email is the next killer app. But no, unfortunately I don't think it's going to do much to help PDA sales. PDAs are too far behind on the technology, especially in terms of the wireless service providers behind it.

10:07 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

There are rumors of a Pocket PC version of the game Myst. For those of you not familiar with it, it's one of the modern versions of the old "adventure" games. You move from location to location doing things like reading a book or using a key to get in somewhere, etc.

In my mind, the best thing about such games is that it's fun to move around and look at all the cool pictures, and sometimes it's fun to think about the puzzles you have to solve to continue.

What I don't like about these games is that I inevitably find myself wandering around in the same areas I've already covered. A hard-core gamer probably can't relate to this sort of situation. They know what sort of tricks to look for. Like I used to know how to do with games like Defender or Joust that were popular when I was in high school and you couldn't play those sorts of games at home yet!

Fancy new action games are uninteresting to me because of the steep learning curve and time required, and the adventure games get boring because I can't figure out what to do next. Yes, I know there are web sites with walk-thrus and hints, but I guess that requires a little more preparation than I'm ready to do.

It's a shame because games like the Myst series look nice, as well as PocketScumm , which is out for PPC and looks like it would be awesome to play if I wasn't always stuck!

So as someone looking in from the outside of the gaming world, I gotta wonder why nobody creates one of these kinds of games with built-in hint systems. I tried Myst on PS1 once, and gave up. I would probably have loved it if I could have hit a help button and had the computer do the next important thing for me, either in the current location, or moving me to a new location.

Isn't player assistance functionality the key to making a lot of money on these games from a wider audience? If someone would make existing games user-friendly for the average person on the street, I bet sales would explode. Just add a simple cheat button that moves you through pretty scenery (either instantly or scene by scene depending on preferences) to the next important location. Then choose a button again to show you what you have to do at that location. It could also have a walkthrough mode that allows you to interact whenever it looks interesting to you.

Surely someone has noticed this is needed? Is it that hard to code? Is that a market no one cares about? Even better, isn't there someone with an open source mentality will could create something like that for the good of all?! Heck, I'd even love some PPC versions of walkthrough guides that's aren't tied directly into the software. I could use those guides while playing on my PS1. I might even upgrade to a PS2!

And if this kind of gaming gets more popular and easier, it will be one more of the many reasons that portable devices sell.

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Here are the highlights from the past seven days of MobileRead:

Current E-Books Trends
E-books - do YOU read them?

General Chat
Alex speaking from Flight LH 432
Beware of generic batteries
Editorial: Do You Need "Zippiness" in Your PDA?
First Scandinavian newspaper (1749) digitalized for download
Gadget makers ignoring elderly people
Mobile users don't keep backups of important numbers
What in the world is 'Awasu'?

iSilo/X
iSilo 4.25 and iSiloX/C 4.25 enter beta2

New Links
Announcing RSS-to-Memo
Wapedia - Wikipedia for mobile access

Other Gadgets
Paris Hilton's Sidekick hacked yet again
S101/S101K Remote Office Access Device

Palm
News on first Cobalt SmartPhone
Palm May Bundle WiFi Cards With Some PDAs
PalmOne Treo 650 in Europe not before Q2 2005
PalmOne with Steve Jobs mentality?
PalmSource abandoning HotSync
Sony to end Clie production despite all hope
Treo 650 arrives in Mexico in first week of April

Pocket PC
Mini-Mozilla available for Pocket PCs in Summer'05
NewsBreak 1.01 released
Pocket Informant 2005 in public beta soon
Tillanosoft's SmallMenu 3.15 released
WebIS Mail 2.06 out

Portable Audio/Video
Apple boosts storage capacity of iPods

Smartphones
Embedded Linux soon in every mobile device?

Sunrise
Sunrise 0.41f released
Sunrise Viewer - first details

WiFi / Bluetooth Technologies
US is a ready market for aerial Internet