10:23 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

According to a recent study at the Mayo Clinic, WiFi-enabled PDAs appear not to affect pacemakers and other heart-assisting devices.

"When new devices are used near a patient with a life-sustaining implantable device, there is a potential of electromagnetic interference, and assessment of potential interactions is critical," said David Hayes, M.D., a Mayo Clinic physician and the lead researcher in the study, which was published in the recent issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings. No such interferences or potential interactions were found with the testing device, a HP Compaq iPAQ fitted with a Cisco Aironet WLAN card.

09:46 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

PocketScumm, the unofficial name of the Windows CE ScummVM port, is now available as a 0.7.

General updates:
- More game data can be compressed - this includes Broken Sword .CLU sound files (speech.clu from 175 Mb to 61 Mb, music.clu from 147 Mb to 36 Mb), Smush .SAN files (opening.san in COMI from 83 Mb to 37 Mb). Check the ScummVM 0.7.0 tools package on your desktop computer for more details.
- Misc bug fixes
- More Humongous Entertainment titles supported

News on the CE front:
- Smartphone support is back (tested on SPV, E100, E200, C500)
- Digital Imuse should sound better (again)
- Broken Sword 2 should be more memory friendly (if the movies are not playing (will happen in VGA mode), you don't have enough memory to play them. This will be fixed in further releases)

Downloads:
PocketPC 2000/2002 ARM and Smartphone 2002 version

Windows Mobile 2003 for PocketPC and Smartphone version

08:49 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

PocketRSS V2.0.15 by HappyJackRoad is a new RSS and Atom feed client for Pocket PCs. Among its impressive feature list you find support for all the different feed formats, Today screen integration, namespace mapping, ability to download full articles for offline viewing, podcasting support, and WM2003SE and VGA support.

I am currently still using Newsbreak, another great RSS reader by Ilium Soft. But if you look at the feature list, PocketRSS seems to be the better alternative. I would definitely give it a try!

05:06 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Laurens, author of Sunrise, explains in his blog why he believes that by moving to Linux, PalmSource will ultimatively loose its competitive advantage and may not even survive in the long run:

Vendors choose Linux because it's free and PalmSource will have a hard time selling their proprietary layer at a profitable level to companies accustomed to paying next to nothing for the OS. As it stands, Linux devices do not have UIs as elegant as that of PalmOS, but that might still change. PalmSource might find themselves blazing the trail for UIs in Linux devices, only to find themselves caught up by an open-source alternative sponsored by device vendors.

One month ago, Palm OS users were confronted with the news that Laurens would not put his energy and resources into developing a Palm OS-based version of his upcoming Sunrise viewer. A few days after his announcement, PalmSource reported that the company intended to port Palm OS to Linux (also see our insider scoop).

There is a lot of speculation about the future of PalmSource and its operation system Palm OS, and I guess speculation will continue until we'll finally see (if we ever will!) a next-generation Palm OS device.

08:22 PM by Colin Dunstan in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Last week I mentioned that I did not entirely agree with Teleread's positive review on the Cybook reader. In response, Michael from Bookeen contacted me; he also gave me the permission to republish his letter:

1)For the time being the dust problem has been reported by Armitag only (Sorry Armitag for this issue).
2)We checked all our screens before shipments and we never noticed any kind of dust under the screen.
3)None of our other customers have complained about this kind of problem.
However we will be very attentive to this potential issue.

Last thing we are porting a PDF reader on the Cybook, in order to read complex documents (datasheets, manuals, technical books...). Have you ever read any "complex" PDF files on your PDA?

The fact that Michael contacted us promptly and that he took the dust issue so seriously shows me that he works for a respectable company. I personally hope that Bookeen will be successful with its Cybook product and that it will have the time and money to develop further e-book reader products!

07:23 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

We've received user submits on two new games available for Pocket PC. One of the games is Naval Ship Warfare, a classic Battleships clone with some extra options. You can play the classical five-ship version, or mix it up by adding an extra ship into your naval fleet, placing mines, and sending out airplanes. The other game is Mario Docker, an arcade Tetris clone, in which the protagonist, Mario the Port Docker, has to unload all the barges coming into port.

Thanks to Ohayden and mariodocker.com for the news.

03:04 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Great news for all emulation fans! After four years of closed-source development, MorphGear, my favorite emulation system for Windows and Pocket PC, is going open-source! This will include the following changes:

- MorphGear is now free for non-commercial use.
- Because some modules were being used with permission under commercial license from Marat Fayzullin, those modules will continue to be available as closed source, commercial products but will now be maintained and supported completely by Marat. This includes GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance, Master System, GameGear, and NES.
- The source code will be moved to an online repository.

MorphGear can emulate the following systems on Pocket PC:

o Nintendo GameBoy Advance (VGBA)
o Nintendo GameBoy Color (VGB)
o Nintendo Entertainment System (iNES)
o SEGA MasterSystem (MasterGear)
o SEGA GameGear (MasterGear)
o SEGA Genesis (Generator)
o Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Snes9x)
o TurboGrafx-16 (Hu-Go)

You can download MorphGear from here.

10:25 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Believe it or not, your future PDA may be able to project images and video onto a wall or screen, and you won't have to lug your car battery around to power it. Engadget is reporting on a story at vnunet which shares a new approach to laser projection that is much more efficient than current methods.

Your local sales rep with a projector hooked up to his or her laptop uses technology that creates the image by blocking light, which is very inefficient because it uses a very bright light bulb, and only a small portion of the light makes it to the image. (And you pay an arm and a leg to replace that little sucker also!)

But the new method, being developed at the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University, will steer laser light. A black and white prototype is already working. It will be practical for consumer color versions only after the price of blue lasers drops, which is expected to happen when the next generation of "Blu-ray" DVDs becomes mainstream in the consumer world.