06:57 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

A follow-up to our recent PalmOne discussions (here and here): David Berlind from ZDNet explains why PalmOne may already have caused a devastating blow to PalmSource:

Since the beginning of this month, when Needham & Co. issued a research report that said PalmOne had "tacitly admitted" it was going to use PocketPC in its Treos, PalmSource's stock has dropped by over 30 percent. I've been hypercritical of PalmSource's failure to fully embrace Java as its primary development platform, thereby giving the more than three million developers that work in Java guaranteed access to the PalmOS market. My commmentary drew a response from PalmSource product marketing vice president Charlie Tritschler who tried to convince me otherwise. I'm still not convinced. Now, with PalmOne on the verge of making its decision, it may be too late.

06:20 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Russel Baettie wrote some interesting bits on "The Mobile Web", in which he argues to push web standards forward to better support mobile web browsers.

Look at the little graphic I made above. I've tried to show how the web is this vast repository of information, and how the mobile phone right now only has access to a small sliver of that information. The big orange blob is the public stuff, the black behind is the private web. The ways to interact with that information on your phone is limited: You can reformat it with Small Screen Rendering, view only the pages meant for mobiles, view the XML in various ways, or somehow see all the information out there in some magic, yet to be determined manner. Or hell, you can just ignore the web as it is now all together and find some alternative way of getting information to the mobile devices (which isn't pictured).

02:02 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Because of lack of recent updates, we first thought that HandStory has been abandoned. We were wrong. Korean SJ Namo Interactive has just released HandStory Suite V3.1. That is new:

Palm OS
- Enhanced Clip management
- Hardware button control
- Seperate Options tabs for each view

Pocket PC
- Convenient Clip Management
- Context-sensitive Options window
- Windows-friendly User Interface

HandStory Media Suite 3.1 for PocketPC
- Video playing
- Screen bookmarks and captures

You can download a 15-days limited trial from here.

It'll be interesting to see how this revived "'Swiss Army Knife of media viewers" compares to Plucker & co.

01:33 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Formats | Workshop

The iPod eBook Creator is a Web-based tool written in PHP to convert books (or any text) to the iPod Notes format that you can add to your iPod for reading on the go.

01:27 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

AFAICS (As Far As Eye Can See) Research published a report called "Developments in e-book, and e-magazine reader technology", which covers the current and future development of e-publication reader technology between now and the end of 2008.

Nick Hampshire and Guy Kewney, the two researchers of the report, maintain that just four years from now e-books will be so well established that a typical price for mobile hardware will be less than US $35. They justify their (rather optimistic!) assumption of a growing need for e-book technology, 1. on simple economic grounds, such as the delivery of up to date text books to every one of China’s 165 million school and university students, and 2. on the need for new revenue sources, as is the case with the consumer electronics industry, or, crucially, the mobile phone companies.

They also looks at how these devices will evolve over the next few years by examining developments in key areas of technology. Interestingly, PDAs don't have a bright future, at least according to the report. Instead, the researchers claim developments in mobile phones to be the future main drive for e-book technology. The following graph depicts their projected growth in annual sales of devices capable of functioning as e-book devices:

04:58 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

French Akihabara News has a small mini-review (with a lot of images) of the new Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000. As a Linux-based PDA, the Zaurus stands out among the PDA crowd, and it looks like a good alternative for those who want to switch from Palm OS to something else but aren't quite ready yet for Windows Mobile

The reviewer appears to like the new Zaurus, and is only complaining about lack of connectivitiy (no BT or WiFi) and lack of USB2.

If you are not fluent in French, you can try the Altavista-translated version.

04:19 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Dina at Pdatopsoft has provided the following information on their new product offering...

3D Air Combat Game Pack (Pocket PC Edition)
Buy two games in one package and save $10 !

http://www.pdatopsoft.com/PocketPC/3...mbat-Game-Pack

3D Air Combat Game Pack (Pocket PC Edition) includes following games:
3D Mini-Dogfight 1.5b - The First Multi-Platform & Multi-Player real time 3D Air Combat Game for PPC features famous WWII fighters! Enjoy exciting air combat with realistic physics simulation and impressive natural sceneries. Dogfight Head-To-Head, Enjoy Together! Please go to product page for more information and download a free trial

3D Mini-Jetfight 1.2b - The Multi-Platform & Multi-Player 3D Modern Air Combat Game features 7 famous jet fighters and A/A missiles. Feel the excitement of high-altitude, high-speed jet fighters and experience the breathtaking air combat with air-to-air missiles! Please go to product page for more information and download a free trial

Pdatopsoft.com - Palm, Pocket PC, Windows CE, EPOC(Symbian), Smartphones and RIM software at www.pdatopsoft.com. New submissions daily!

12:08 PM by sUnShInE in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Just Released: TomeRaider 3

Available for Windows, Pocket PC, Psion, Smartphone, and Palm Powered devices. A few new features include HTML support, filter builder, reference links, search acceleration, image support, and super compression. You can even create your own content using TomeRaidIt ($15US).

TR is primarily designed to allow you to easily read large databases like The Wikipedia, encyclopedias, IMDB, the Bible, dictionaries, and supports external media. There are over 3,000 free files available at Memoware.com, and many more inexpensive ones available there to boot.

Going for $20 to $22.50US, it's been 2 years in the making, and a pretty big overhaul of a great proggie.