10:06 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Intel has created a port of the ego-shooter game Cube to support their latest mobile cpu & 3d chipset (the Intel 2700 of the Dell Axim X50v). Click here for the download links and click here for some older screenshots.

What is Cube anyways?
Cube is an open source multiplayer and singleplayer first person shooter game built on an entirely new and very unconventional engine. Cube is a landscape-style engine that pretends to be an indoor FPS engine, which combines very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail on most machines

[via PocketGamer]

09:40 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

NewsForce has a quick write up of how open-source Linux could become the most appealing platform choice for mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs, due to low manufacturers' development costs and maintenance requirements.

Everything looks like PalmSource is doing it right by focusing on a linux version of its Palm operation system:

Perhaps even more significantly, in December, PalmSource, whose Palm OS has garnered noteworthy acceptance in the smartphone space, purchased China MobileSoft Ltd., which developed 30 mobile phones for the Asian market, a few of which rely on its variation of Linux. PalmSource's Mace noted that the company plans to support its PalmOS, but views Linux as its principal operating system in the future. The firm has not set a delivery date for its Linux version of PalmOS but expects to make its plans clearer at its developers conference in the spring.

Once that product is available, Linux could become a more attractive option to ISVs. "Linux provides a great deal of flexibility to developers, but some prefer a more packaged operating system where they don't have to make as many design decisions and complete as much integration work," noted Bill Weinberg, Open Source Architecture Specialist at Open Source Development Labs, Inc. "A Linux version of PalmOS could address their concerns."

Because of such changes, the much anticipated union between Linux and smartphones is taking shape and the open source operating system is emerging as a key smartphone platform.

08:51 AM by Colin Dunstan in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Thanks to our friends from Teleread.org for informing us that Bookeen is going to release a downloadable firmware upgrade for its Cybook e-book reader next month. The upgrade adds support for the eReader e-book format, plus adds a reader for displaying unencrypted PDF files.

Bookeen is also considering adding support for the Microsoft Reader format (.LIT) in future.

08:29 AM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Have you ever wanted to explain to someone how to set up a PDA desktop companion program on their PC? A lot of portable devices and PDAs are used in conjunction with a multitude of desktop software titles. And we have all spent a lot of time trying to communicate how to set them up or use them via email or phone. But there's a better way.

It turns out there is an easy and free way to do this. Take a look at this PC Magazine article which describes how to use free Microsoft Windows Media Encoder software to create a video tutorial.

And please add your thoughts to this discussion if you have found alternative ways to do this, or have Mac/Linux solutions.

08:10 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

PDAmill has just released Arvale: Journey of Illusion for Palm OS, an epic role playing game, with over 20 hours of gameplay, six continents with 280 maps to explore, 200 different monsters to fight against, and over a hundred different items, weapons, and magic spells to use.

A free trial version (limited to Level 10) is available from PDAmill Arvale and the full version costs $19.95.

07:28 AM by ignatz in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Palmloyal is carrying an announcement that Texas Instruments (TI) will be showing two devices (presumably smartphones) running Cobalt on TI's OMAP processors. Encouraging news, but there is little mention of the devices themselves in the article. In fact, the only way that one would know they are smartphones is in the headline... They are supposed to be at a demo in France next week, so with luck we'll get some pics after that. [originally posted on PalmAddicts]

UPDATE: Brighthand is carrying a similar article dated two days earlier. Their article makes ita bit clearer to me that these are just reference designs and not actual saleable devices. A reference design is, I suppose, just a proof of concept model that is available for other companies to emulate? A bit less exciting, but at least there's a device out there running Cobalt...

01:15 AM by hacker in E-Book Formats | Workshop

As promised over here, I've taken some time to clean up and cannibalize part of a spider I use daily for Plucker, and modified it to allow you to run it and spider MapQuest to build yourself a World Atlas with images, country data, and lots of other bits.

The whole script is only 87 lines of actual code! (161 with comments and liberal spacing for readibility) I prefer writing clean, tight, well-commented code. My code is my business card, and this is no exception.

The script is written in Perl, my language of choice, but all modules used are either in core, or available via CPAN (perl -MCPAN -e 'install "Module::Name"'). It should be easy to run and figure out. I've commented it where required.

Unfortunately, I cannot redistribute the completed version of the maps in mobile format, because that would violate MapQuest's copyright and Terms of Use, but you can see how good it looks in the screenshots below.

The entire script is attached below. Just grab the script and run it in an empty directory. It will spider and fetch the 238-or-so separate pages from MapQuest's World Atlas pages, strip out the unnecessary HTML, Javascript, stylesheets, and other non-visible bits, and write each country to its own file. All of the external links to country data is rewritten to reference the local copies. The only pieces fetched remotely are the images themselves.

When the spidering is complete, it outputs a top-level index file for you to point your mobile creation tool towards, so you can then spider the content yourself, and convert it to the format of your choice.

Hopefully many users will find this useful. Enjoy!

01:12 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

One of the greatest technological limitations that hinders the adoption and growth of mobile devices is the slow improvements of battery and power technologies. Battery weight and size is a large part of mobile device weight and size. With ever increasing power needs, the batteries are increasingly the weak link in the devices.

Quite a bit of research has been done in this area, and fuel cells are a very promising technology. Now combined with nanotechnology, it seems we may finally be on the verge of a breakthrough that would affect almost every facet of life.

The Washington Times is reporting that

Developments are under way that could wipe batteries off the face of the Earth. Researchers at the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI), a consortium of Oregon educational institutions, say they have made significant breakthroughs in a power source that essentially turns 20 pounds of batteries into 8 ounces of fuel the size of a cigarette lighter.

In the next 3-5 years, a working prototype is expected. It will be a fuel cell that is part of a portable air conditioner for soldiers which should be the size of a paperback book, and weight less than 4lbs!

The full article is available at Teeny, Tiny Tech but requires a free registration.