09:41 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

PocketPCcity has a great report taking us through all the trojans and viruses that were designed to affect and infect handhelds and smartphones over the last few months.

Among the list you find in reversed chronological order: Cabir.A (including its more dangerous variants Cabir.H and Cabir.I), MetalGear.a, Skulls, Mosquito, WinCE4.Dust, EPOC.Cabir, and WinCE.Dust.

It's not necessary to be a prophet or computer expert to say that the amount of malware will continue to increase. Our mobile phones and PDAs are becoming more attractive targets to a growing stream of worms and virii. New technologies such as 2.5G and 3G networks are becoming part of our everyday life, and it seems just too easy for hackers and virus writers to launch attacks that exploit these new technologies.

Are we ready to face the threat?

09:08 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

Stephanie Schorow from BostonHerald.com writes that readers may finally feel more comfortable reading full-length novels such as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code on electronic reading devices. Strong numbers also indicate this trend:

In the first three quarters of 2004, about 1,231,799 books (or units) were sold, a 14 percent increase over the same period in 2003, according to Open eBook Forum (www.openebook.org), an e-book industry trade organization.

Main driver for the increasing demand is a drop in price and a wider available selection, she quotes. -- Do you think that prices for e-books have dropped enough? Visit our poll and raise your voice!

07:13 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

For a limited time, Fictionwise is offering the Nebula Preliminary Ballot Nominee, Time Ablaze, by Michael A. Burstein, for free.

Thanks to Gatton for mentioning the first nominees freebie at Fictionwise, The Tangled Strings of the Marionettes by Adam Troy-Castro. It's still available for free, so time to fill your PDAs!

04:21 AM by Laurens in Archive | Sunrise

Sunrise 0.40 is now available!

[added by Alex: New in Sunrise 0.40:
- streamlined interface
- conduit for updating documents at HotSync
- tons of improvements and bugfixes (as you probably know if you have followed all the -pre releases before!) ]

10:28 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Steve Sande from PDAntic wrote a nice review of Illum's NewsBreak 1.0, one of the best RSS feed readers for Pocket PC.

Make sure to give NewsBreak a try if you are looking for a flexible mobile RSS solution. I have tried both, NewsBreak and Egress, another great feed aggregator for PPC, and have yet to decide which one to buy.

10:06 AM by TadW in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Yahoo! Finance now offers RSS feeds for the latest news on invididual company stocks. In fact, you can get feeds both for individual stock tickers as well as for a whole "portfolio".

Here is an example how to track news for both PalmSource and palmOne in one feed:
http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=plmo,psrc

If you are new to RSS, jump to this description for all the basics.

(Btw, I am Member of the Day on MR's frontpage today! I think this is my first time, so I feel honored )

09:54 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Sunrise

Sunrise v0.40 is scheduled to be released next Monday (01/17/05). The three prereleases before pre11 were quite unstable and had a few show-stopping bugs. If pre11 is turning out to be fully stable for a few days, another 0.40 prerelease won't be necessary.

If you are new to Sunrise, click here to find out more about its top-notch features for website offline conversion.

[via Sunrise blog]

06:34 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Walter Mossberg is probably one of the first persons on the planet who got to play around with Apple's latest MP3 player, the USD $99 iPod Shuffle. Since WSJ requires online subscription, I share with you the most informative parts of the review here:

I've been testing the new iPod Shuffle for a couple of days, and, in my tests, it fulfilled -- and even exceeded -- Apple's claims for convenience, battery life and song capacity. Sound quality is so good you can barely believe the music is coming from something so small. [...]

The Shuffle uses cheaper, lower-capacity "flash" memory chips to store the music, instead of the small hard disk drives used by the other iPods. This puts it in direct competition with scores of other so-called flash players. But, belying its high-priced reputation, Apple has actually undercut the market. [...]

In my tests, the iPod Shuffle performed well, exceeding Apple's claims. Apple puts the new player's battery life at 12 hours on a single charge. But, in my testing, it did much better than that, lasting 15 hours and 44 minutes. [...]

Similarly, I found that the iPod Shuffle could hold many more songs than Apple claims. By choosing manual mode to load the player, I was able to cram as many as 188 songs onto my 512-megabyte test model, rather than the 120 Apple claims, without reducing the audio quality of the songs. [...]

There are a few design downsides to the iPod Shuffle. The lack of a screen means you can't use playlists of collected songs on it, because you have no way to select such a list. For many people, play lists are a key part of the iPod experience. The Shuffle also lacks many of the extra features of the bigger iPods, such as various equalization settings for music playback, and the ability to display calendar and contact information. And I found the three-way mode button on the back difficult to move. I was forced to press it so tightly that I often tripped the playback controls on the other side.

Convinced?