11:58 AM by sUnShInE in Archive | Mobile Sites

AT&T Wirelss customers will be fully served during the 2004 Athens Summer Games. Crisp Wireless has developed mobile content management applications for the NBC Olympic Games that will be hosted by AT&T Wireless for its customers.

mMode users will have the ability to set up customized alerts to follow their favorite Olympic sports as well as access videos including interviews, promo videos, chart out medal counts, and in-game video highlights. For those who suffer from severe fantasy sports disease, there will also be Fantasy Olympic Games that will allow users to set up a customized Olympic team to earn as many medals as possible.

Unless otherwise "fine-tuned", let the AT&T-only games....begin!

11:54 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The following code gives you 25% off any purchase over $25 when you shop at Handango. Valid till August 20th, 2004.

Checkout-code: NEWSITE25

07:53 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Handheld PC maker palmOne saw its share of Western Europe's PDA market plummet to 26% of units shipped during the second quarter of 2004, down from its previous market leading position with 37% share a year ago, according to the British institute Context Information Services, which tracks sales of technology hardware throughout Europe.

Context notes that palmOne is in a difficult position in Europe. On the one hand, its traditional low-end PDA market dominance and presence on retail outlet shelves has been undermined by HP's very successful low cost iPaq range, and on the other by companies such as Medion cashing in on the boom for cheap in-car PDA-based navigation devices. At the same time, palmOne's attempt to penetrate HP's corporate heartland with its range of business devices has not been successful.

03:02 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

I admit I am a news junky and I love RSS feeds! Now it is even possible to receive RSS-based news on your PocketPC. Egress by GarishKernels supports all RSS / Atom formats (RSS .09-2.0, RDF 1.0, ATOM 0.3), landscape mode, Today integration, background downloading, and a few other cool features.

You should definitely give it a try and download the free trial. The price ($10.00) sounds very reasonable to me.

04:02 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

South China Morning Post (reprinted) reports that the dream of flexible, powerless displays that can roll up and fit in a pocket is bought closer to reality by major advances in materials and chemicals, with elements of nanotechnology also being employed. The result is super-thin sheets of plastic that have a few key properties:

- they reflect natural light, which means they do not require any added light source to read, much like ink on paper
- they are bi-stable, which means once the power is off, the image remains unchanged. You only need power to change the image
- they are so thin that they can be rolled up like normal paper.

But engineers and developers are being cautious about over-hyping. "People have been using paper for thousands of years. We'll never be cheaper than paper, and we won't meet paper quality any time soon," said Amy Chen, vice-president of business development at SiPix Technologies in Taiwan, one of the developers of the plastic film that will one day make e-paper possible.

Lee Cheng-chung, deputy director of flat-panel display technology at Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (Itri), said his institute was working on e-paper and he predicted it would be eight to 10 years before roll-up displays would be ready for widespread use.

02:42 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Airscanner Research Labs has discovered the first "in the wild" dialer trojan infecting Symbian OS-based cell phones: the Mosquito dialer Trojan.

A dialer Trojan is malware coded to secretly dial phone numbers, leaving the infected victim with a large phone bill. The game that the infected users had installed was called Mosquito v2.0. The game is unique in that it uses the phone's built-in camera. The user walks around shooting mosquitoes in a virtual reality–like atmosphere. This game appeared to be a "cracked" version that appeared on the many cell phone warez and p2p networks that plague the Internet underground. It appeared that 87140 was a UK number costing a hefty £1.50 per text message.

Although the Mosquito Trojan is more of an annoyance than a real threat, it demonstrates that cell phone malware is a growing problem. As we've seen, the 911 virus in Tokyo knocked out the city's public emergency services number. With a growing variety of malware attacking a growing number of mobile devices, future attacks could be worse.

01:46 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Details are still quite sketchy, but according to Digitimes, Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and some local IT firms will soon mass produce a new type of memory card called “μcard”, which will be unveiled during the Taipei International Electronics Show (Taitronics) from October 8-12. Mass production for the new card will begin in early 2005.

The card will support up to 2TB of storage capacity, be able to transfer 120MB of data per second, 10 times faster than Secure Digital (SD) memory cards. Additional features for the new card include USB 2.0 compatibility, low power, fast I/O and a compatible interface with existing memory cards. Sounds too good to be true!

01:04 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

This one is interesting, straight from Engadget:

"Sony execs, who always make the right decision about everything, are thinking about bringing the Clie back to the States, only this time running on the Pocket PC or Symbian operating systems. Not entirely impossible, but with the overall market for PDAs flat (and/or shrinking depend on who you ask) it seems like if they’re gonna get back into the game it’d be with some kind of high-end Sony smartphone (which would make sense if they’re considering the Symbian OS, though how they’d avoid directly competing with Sony Ericsson is beyond us) or maybe some kind of multimedia handheld like the ones HP is currently pimping."

In fact, I am convinced that Sony Ericsson is already squinting at Symbian. It is the currently best OS which offers PDA-capability to mobile phones. On the other hand, I don't think that Sony is really thinking about turning their infamous Clie series into Pocket PCs. Think about the immense R&D expenses this step would require. And from my understanding, Sony abandoned the Clie because it didn't want to compete against its most profitable business unit, Sony Ericsson.