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

Handango is giving out for free IM+ Mobile Instant Messenger for Pocket PC this week!

If you are looking for a complete mobile Instant Messaging solution, you should definitely get this free offer. IM+ works with AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! and Jabber, is a Pocket PC Mag Hot Download Pick and a Pocket PC Magazine 2004 Awards Winner.

07:25 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Engadget has announced the winners of its 2004 Awards. Among the winners we find the Apple iPod 4G (who would have thought), the Dell Axim X50v, and the Apple AirPort Express. Interestingly, Engadget's pick for the "Disappointment of the Year" is palmOne's Treo 650!

07:12 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Metacritic has been covering reviews for movies, music, and games for years. Now they are finally also covering books:

We are pleased to launch our new Metacritic Books section with a database of approximately 150 books drawn from the second half of 2004. To start, we plan on adding to our database by, on average, about one new book a day, and if all goes well, we'll pick up the pace a bit next year.

A must-stop for every book and e-book fan!

Let's hope that someone will soon update their mobile-friendly page to also include the book reviews!

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

Lisa Gade from PDA Buyer Guide has benchmarked ATP's next-generation 2GB SD cards.

Clear enough, the 2GB card (VFSMark: 740) tested on a palmOne Tungsten T3 beats out both the 256MB Kingston Elite Pro (VFSMark: 621) and 256MG SanDisk Standard (VFSMark: 229) cards in the test.

On the same page you also find a benchmark test on the ATP 512MB Mini SD card, which is surprisingly just as fast (VFSMark: 742) as its big 2GB brother.

Mrs Gade calls the cards reasonable priced; still, I hope the price for a 2GB SD card will soon be way below the MSRP of $249.

06:40 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Mobile Sites

The news is spreading fast today on almost every PDA-related site:

PalmZone.net's MobileWeb site index of PDA-friendly links has been expanded and now has its own PdaMobileWeb.com address. The new site name better reflects that the content is suitable for all PDA's and cell phones, including Palm, Pocket PC, and other operating systems. Several new site categories and subcategories have been added along with dozens of new sites since its initial release.

If you like the index site by Tim Nicholson of PalmZone, you should also visit Antonio Perrotta's PDAPortal.com, which is still my favorite place (after Mobileread of course!) for finding PDA-friendly sites.

06:10 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Thanks to Diesel eBooks for providing us with an exclusive 20% discount on any e-book purchased at their webstore. The discount is valid until 2/15/05. Just key in the following code at checkout: dieselfat53

Diesel eBooks is a new e-book store providing instant access to over 35,000 mostly commercial book titles in various formats (Microsoft Reader LIT, eReader, and Adobe PDF).

Personal experience: Diesel eBooks support is excellent. Two weeks ago I was contacted by Scott from Diesel eBooks who informed me that they had increased their e-book inventory. I was more than happy to confirm that the particular items I was previously missing (books by George R. R. Martin) are now in stock!

05:28 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

What computer game is more common the good 'ole Solitaire? It's popular because it's just plain fun. But it took me some time to find a version I liked. Now that I've made the discovery here's a little of what I've learned.

There are a bunch of freeware solitaire games out there for Pocket PC. They all seems to have the nearly fatal flaw of ugly cards and a user interface that takes all the fun out of the game. But I've stumbled upon a couple of programs that are pretty amazing, and bring a lot of the fun back. I'll briefly describe them here, but that doesn't mean there are not other good Solitaire packs that have received some attention recently also, such as PDA Mill's Solitaire I and II

King Sol Solitaire 2004 v2.0
This program seems to be quite an award winner... It has been recognized in Pocket PC Magazine each year from 2001 as a best product award winner, through 2004 when it was a finalist in the 2004 Pocket PC card games category. And when you give it a try you will immediately realize that it's a nice piece of software that distinguishes itself well against any freeware offering.

It has a snappy and responsive play, and the cards look recognizable. I only tried out Klondike, because that's really my only interest right now, but it's a very pleasant game to play. The graphics overall are really excellent and the sound effects are a fun addition if you're not playing during a business meeting.

One of its strong points is the way it tracks statistics, where you basically get to see how many games you've played, how many won and lost, etc. and can even produce 3D charts with your results. (I didn't try that, so I'm just going on the features list with that one.)

Another feature that is almost, but not quite delightful, is the way you can choose to tap a card to automatically play it. This is my favorite feature in solitaire game UIs, and something I was used to on Palm solitaire with the excellent freeware program "Patience." But it just doesn't seem to quite work right here, and is inconsistent. And annoyingly, it's limited to playing only a single card, so you can't tap at a card and expect the other cards on it to move along also.

Unlimited redo is another welcome feature, and you can customize the game to your favorite look as well.

A list of King Solitaire features as provided on the website...

# Statistics! View your game statistics with the most complete solitaire statistics database anywhere. View your results in amazing 3D charts, sort tables by any data field, and compare your results against other players.
# Customizable! King Sol Solitaire 2004 is completely customizable! You can set backgrounds, card backs, and sound schemes. You can even create backgrounds and card backs from you own image files. Visit our customization gallery today!
# Unlimited undo/redo
# Save/Restore games
# Bookmark your place in a game
# Auto-playing of cards
# Game timer and scoring
# Pause a game at any time
# Shuffle number (over 2 billion shuffle combinations)
# Create your own "favorite games" list
# Select a random game to play from all games, favorite games, or games you have played.
# Auto-save game and continue later when game is closed

I can heartily recommend this game for purchase, but I do have a few minor complaints.
* The discard pile is on the top left. That means that you have to put your hand over the cards to tap it. A minor annoyance, but when a program is this good, you get picky.
* It only seems to use part of the screen. Not a big deal, but I wonder if maybe that's intentional to provide compatibility with smartphones.
* There's really no indication of when the game is over after there are no (helpful) moves available for you to make.
* My biggest complaint is a personal preference. It looks like you have to play with a set of Klondike rules that do not allow you to take a card from the ace-thru-king pile you are trying to build. Once a card is played there you can't remove it. Unfortunately, in my mind, that strategy makes for the most interesting part of the gameplay. Together with that, it seems that you can't move half of a stack of cards on the main playing area. You can only move the whole stack or the bottom card. That's kind of a dealbreaker for me, but probably not for most people, especially if you are playiog different solitaire varieties.

All in all, it's a really nice program and a lot of fun. If you are in the market for such a game, I highly recommend that you give it a test run. It might be just what you are looking for.

Solitaire City v1.00
This game can be found at Solitaire City and also has a nice trial version. This trial is time based, and I think it gives a few hours of play and a couple of nag screens. [Full disclosure: I was given a copy of the registered software by the author for this review. The program first came to my attention when I won a registered copy for my Palm in a contest, and have kind of had my eye on it ever since because it's well-made, and the author seems very nice and was very helpful when I had a hotsync issue with it (my fault, not his). ]

There are only 8 solitaire games included, but that should be plenty for most people, and they have 37 rules variations all together. All kinds of options make it a very flexible program, and the rules issues that bothered me in King Solitaire were not an issue here because I had my choice of how the game was played.

There is a spectacular training mode to help you learn the games. Maybe the best I've even seen on a Pocket PC program. In fact, I even tried out the training mode for another version of solitaire just because it was so cool. You may want to give this program a try just to see the training mode. And while it tells you what to do next, it really doesn't force you to do anything and seems to play like a live game. Not really sure how he did that, but it's really nice.

The best feature of the program, though, is the actual playability. With really spectacular graphics, smooth action, fun graphic animation, easy to see cards, music and timed scoring you are almost carried away with the whole mood and action. After I tried King Solitaire and saw how nice it was, I kind of felt bad for the Solitaire City programmer, thinking it might be a lost cause to try to compete. Boy was I wrong! This program kind of opened my eyes up to what you can do with a solitaire game. I don't know how much farther you can take it, but I'm starting to think that more creative animations and sounds might continue to add to the experience, so there's probably even more that could be done to add animated sequences that add fun but don't distract or slow down the play.

There's not a whole lot to complain about here, but trying to be picky again, here's a few things I noticed:
* Not a lot of solitaire games are included right now
* It's a little pricey for a handheld card game at about $19.
* The draw stack is top left again, and makes you cover the screen to tap if you're right handed
* The scoring is nice, but you really leave wishing you could choose opponents on the high score ladder to compete against. Maybe as simple as a pre-populated opponent's high scores (which you would choose, unlike the prepopulated high scores that it comes with). Or maybe as fancy as a contest against a player, where you choose that opponent (who would then have a quick animated appearance, and make comments all through the game based on what is happening). The opponent would randomly "win" a certain number out of 10 or out of 25 rounds, which you would have to beat to win. Maybe that's pie in the sky, but I think it would be fun if the comments weren't too lame or unattentive to the game situation.
* There is a message when the program thinks you have lost. It doesn't always seem to know when you've lost and you seem to be able to ignore the message and continue to play, sometimes even winning. But most of the time it's accurate, and it is kind of comforting to get that confirmation you're done.
* It's easy to start a new game with a single tap. That's great, but I wish there was an undo for new game because I accidently hit that in the middle of a particularly interesting game, and I would like to have finished to see what would have happened.
* I don't think it had the option to replay a hand with the same shuffle either. It might have, because there are so many options, but I don't think so, and that would have been nice.

You'll notice though, that my complaints are minor and more like a fantasy wishlist. The program is spectacular, and if I could only recommend one program, that would be it. But since King Solitaire is also very good, I'd say try both. Both are good, and it's going to come down to a matter of personal preferences.

==============================

King Solitaire is $14.95, and it's not clear whether upgrades are included or not. This program can be found at http://www.rapturetech.com/PocketKing/KingSol.htm. The trial gives you 40 hands, but only a couple of the games give you a true random shuffle. Still, it's plenty for a trial run. Instructions are available in the program for all the varieties.

Solitaire City (http://ppc.solitairecity.com) is $18.95, comes with a 30-day money back guarantee, free technical support, and 2 years of free version upgrades. It is currently a fresh release at v1.0, but looks and acts more like a "version 5" of something than an early release.

02:32 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

I wanted to publicly thank Sammy McLoughlin from PalmAddicts for his personal New Year wishes and for the kind words he always has for us.

In case you are a Palm fanatic - or simply into mobile gadgets - and have somehow missed Sammy's popular site, you should head immediately over to check it out.

Alex