09:02 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Newegg has a "Weekend Blow Out Sale!" offering the palmOne Tungsten T5 (416MHz, 320x480 TFT, 256MB, Palm OS v5.4 PDA) handheld for USD $353.99 with free FedEx shipping. Ok weekend is over, but the sale is still there. If you want one, hurry up!

[via PalmAddict]

08:32 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

Scott Redford, president of Diesel eBooks and a loyal visitor of MR, speaks out on the need for standards in DRM technology and e-book formats. I fully agree with Scott. There should be only one e-book standard that is well-supported and works well with any e-book reader device. Most importantly, the standard shouldn't restrict ("digital restriction management") the e-reading experience of the paying customer in any way .

Scott, feel free to express your thoughts here as well; we are a very open-minded community and love to hear the opinion of "professionals". I am sure this could lead to some interesting and rewarding discussions!

08:13 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

PDAs, surprise surprise!, are losing ground to smartphone and feature phones. According to analyst firm Canalys, global mobile device sales grew by 51% in the last quarter of 2004 compared to the year before. While the market for smartphones, or "voice-centric devices", increased by a breathtaking 101%, the market for handhelds (including wireless-enabled devices), so-called "data-centric devices", rose just by 5% for the year.

Nokia is the leader in shipped smartphones (4.9m in the quarter), followed by palmOne, whose combined 1.5m handheld and smart phone shipments meant an 8% overall growth. The reports also notes that growth could have been better if the Treo 650 had been more widely available at the time. Still, palmOne remains the leading smart phone vendor in North America.

Research in Motion continues to chase HP for the third place, with increase in sales of 249% on last year compared to HP's 1% growth.

05:07 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Sunrise

Laurens updated Sunrise again, and this time the upgrade includes:

• removed: file change notification (the method used for monitoring external changes made to SDL files turned out not to work reliably in quite a few cases. The problem would result in settings not being saved properly to the SDL or "NoSuchElementException" errors when attempting to delete a document.)
• fixed: local file with links as document source (using a local file with links to websites and/or newsfeeds would produce intermittent NullPointerExceptions. This was due to a cache synchronization issue.)

You can download Sunrise V0.41 from PalmGear.

If you are new to MobileRead and still don't know what Sunrise is about, you should visit this thread for more information.

02:27 PM by Skibum in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

GreenSoftware released an update to its superb open-source MP3 player GSPlayer.

Chancelog only in Japanese (anyone care to translate?); there is a standard and a "high quality" version available for download. Beside MP3 playback, the player also supports Ogg Vorbis, Wave, HTTP streaming, and Shoutcast.

[Edit: moved to the frontpage. Player is highly recommended by the MR team!]

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

Just in case you've missed anything, here is the list of our frontpage news this week.

Announcements
Absence/surgery

Current E-Books Trends
PDA soft and e-book vending machine - soon to replace the kiosk next door?

E-Book Readers
PlayStation Portable - an e-book reader
Sony Librie EBR-1000E on sale - successor soon?

E-Book Webstores
eReader $5 discount on any e-book
Fictionwise 40% on all 2004 bestsellers

General Chat
Handango freebies - this week's
More Rojo invites for our members
Rojo invites for Mobileread members
Should big firms be allowed to censor news content?

Palm
palmOne's house of horror
Recommended: Tam Hanna's Palm OS Blog

Pocket PC
BetaPlayer 0.5 Stable released
Dell Axim X50v A02 ROM update
Pocket Mechanic contains malicious code!
Spb Clone - clone your Pocket PC
SynCE adds support of PPCs on *nix systems
TVGuide for PocketPC 0.6 released

Sunrise
Sunrise 0.41 released

06:25 PM by TadW in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

After reading this thread at Aximsite where users complain about hard resets invoked by Pocket Mechanic I thought to shed some light on Anton Tomov's crude ways of dealing with software pirates.

I understand that Tomov is upset about people using illegal codes for his software. But does this give him the right to forcefully wipe-out someone's PDA? Isn't that highly illegal as well?

That's right. Use a pirated or blacklisted serial with Pocket Mechanic, Pocket Mechanic will detect it, and send your PDA with all its lovely content to Nirvana land. I don't know what Tomov is thinking, but I can only recommend everyone do not buy any of his products. What if a bug sneaks into his code enabling his hardreset routine even if you are a legal buyer? Who is going to pay for your damages? Mr. Tomov, would that be you?

Technicals:
The hardreset routine Tomov uses looks like the following:

#include <windows.h>
#include <winioctl.h>
#define IOCTL_HAL_REBOOT CTL_CODE(FILE_DEVICE_HAL, 15, METHOD_BUFFERED, FILE_ANY_ACCESS)
extern "C" __declspec(dllimport)void SetCleanRebootFlag(void);
extern "C" __declspec(dllimport) BOOL KernelIoControl(
DWORD dwIoControlCode,
LPVOID lpInBuf,
DWORD nInBufSize,
LPVOID lpOutBuf,
DWORD nOutBufSize,
LPDWORD lpBytesReturned);

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
LPTSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
SetCleanRebootFlag();
KernelIoControl(IOCTL_HAL_REBOOT, NULL, 0, NULL, 0, NULL);

return 0;
}

Perhaps someone should write a small utility that traps calls to KernelIoControl when the IOCTL_HAL_REBOOT flag is set. I cannot understand why Microsoft makes it so easy for virus programmers and people like Tomov to hard reset someone's PDA.

03:36 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Dell has finally decided to release a system update for its Axim X50(v) PDAs. The 22-24MB big A02 English ROM image (X50v download, X50 download) includes various fixes and enhancements:

1. Improved SD and CF read performance.
2. Updated wireless button usage scenario to avoid enabling / disabling wireless accidentally.
3. Allow the WLAN auto power-off feature to be enabled and/or disabled in the WLAN utility.
4. Added feature in the power applet to change the color of the battery power bar to reflect the battery capacity.
5. Associated the .dbk files with the Data Backup program.
6. Improved GAPI performance.
7. Improved touch panel performance and sensitivity.
8. Enhanced the video driver to be more robust.

Don't we love it when companies actively support existing products? Two thumbs up, Dell!