05:21 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

After having failed to persuade Apple to license the iTunes Music Store DRM system, Real Networks has decided to simply reverse engineer the proprietary copy protection. Real will this week issue a beta release of Harmony, a Rosetta Stone for DRM, that promises to allow users to convert one copy-protection mechanism to another.

You can read the full press release here.

Apple has not yet commented on Harmony, and is probably waiting to see exactly what the software can do before responding.

06:49 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

This survey from Wichita State U evaluates the reading habits of Internet users across five document types - journal articles, news, newsletters, literature, and product information. The (not so suprising) results:

- Journal articles were primarily reported to be read in printed form;
- online news, newsletters, and product reviews were reported to be read mainly online;
- users reported that they tend not to use online sources for reading literature. (I am very well aware that MR members still represent a minority group, the 18.5% who read literature online only ) Over 56% of participants reported not reading literature online at all.

06:32 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Symbian BookWorm is an eBook building software and reader for Sony Ericsson P800, P900 and P910 mobile smart phones. It can build from any text document by a simply cut and paste into the book builder software. You can then automatically have the software detect the chapters or enter them yourself manually.

BookWorm currently sells for $19.95 and can be purchase from Handango .

04:10 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

For the first time ever, a Palm chess program is dominating all other
chess software on the Pocket PC (and the Palm). So the developer claims.

After 42 games between Palm chess Hiarcs (the strongest Palm chess
program) and Pocket Fritz 2 (the strongest Pocket PC chess program) with
both running on 400Mhz XScale hardware the score stands at:
Palm Chess Hiarcs 9.41 27.5-14.5 Pocket Fritz 2

And according to the developer, Palm Hiarcs is beating other Palm chess programs like Chess Tiger and Chess Genius by even greater margins.

Does that mean Palm-based PDA's are smarter than PPC?

04:06 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

This is perhaps one of the most anticipated PPC emulator ports. Ismail Khatib has made available the first Commodore Amiga emulator that runs on your small PPC screen. It features everything UAE-based emulators have to offer, such as support for up to 4 Floppy Drives, emulation for 68000/010/020/040 CPU, optionally a 68881 FPU, OCS, ECS and AGA Graphics Chipset (including sprite-playfield collisions, up to 2MB Chip RAM and up to 8MB Fast RAM, or 8MB Chip RAM without Fast RAM, up to 64MB Zorro III Fast RAM, independent of Chip RAM setting (68020+ only), up to 1MB Slow RAM, for extended compatibility with problem software, a hard-disk: either a harddisk image file or part of the native filesystem, and Mouse and Joystick support (Stylus and D-Pad on PocketPC). Keyboard support is still buggy, and a GUI is not available yet (so you cannot change disc images while Pocket UAE is running).

Side fact: the first Amiga (Amiga 1000) was presented in New York City exactly 19 years ago (July 23 1985).

07:08 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Fcc.gov turns out to be one of my favorite "latest geek" news sources Their site now reveals (manuals, photos, specs) some exciting highlights of the new Fujitsu-Siemens Loox 720 PocketPC. Aside from the great 3.6" 640x480 high resolution display, this PPC will have built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, a 1.3 Megapixel camera, USB2.0, and it will be powered by an Intel PXA272 520MHz processor.

02:55 PM by ignatz in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

[Links from Slashdot]
A French company is producing a device they are calling a TDA, tactile digital assistant. It uses no stylus, but simply your thumbs. I haven't made it through the website yet, because it's pretty heavily slashdotted at the moment, but it looks pretty sweet. There are also two columns written about it here and here. Looks like the initial price will be high, around $600. Target release is in 3 months and they are already taking pre-orders (though I don't know anyone gadget crazy enough to buy a product that they've never seen). It runs on ONE AA BATTERY for weeks, they claim. It is available in black and white and color. I'll be very curious to see how this develops...

01:37 PM by ignatz in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

I hadn't been to the Brighthand Palm forums in a long time, so I recently went to peruse. Lo and behold, there is an incredible (and incredibly long) thread on upgrading your Tungsten battery and squeezing a lot more life out of it. A lot is made of the complexity, but if you have any basic soldering and electronics skills, it sounds simple. I am planning to replace my T|E battery (stock at 850 mAh) with a more powerful one (1200 mAh) and will try to document the procedure for the benefit of all. If you have ever cursed your battery length and you've got a steady hand and a brave heart, this is a thread for you!

(BTW, PDAparts.com has a page with instructions for dismantling a wide variety of PDA's. Recommended if you've never been inside yours before!)