04:07 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Resco is offering a 30% discount on all of its application till 12/31/04.

This is a great deal considering that its Explorer 2003 is my favorite file manager for Pocket PC!

07:12 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Slipstream 1.0 is a new Mac OS X-only application which allows you to send audio from any application directly to remote speakers attached to Apple's AirPort Express device.

Airport Express officially only supports streaming music from iTunes. With Slipstream you can now listen to your music in any file format from applications like RealPlayer and Windows Media Player.

The program will be available in early 2005 for an introductory price of US $20.

Let's hope someone will hack a similar tool for MS Windows and *nix users. I bought an Airport Express even with the original Monster cables, but so far haven't even tried to use audio streaming because I don't like to have to install iTunes.

Note: This is not the first time someone tried to circumvent the limitations of the Airport Express. In August we reported how "DVD Jon" cracked the private keys that the device uses to protect music streams.

06:53 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

David at Gowerpoint has just released a new version of his wonderful Pocket PC e-book reader ubook - version 0.9b.

Here's what's new:
# New e-book formats supported (eReader, MobiPocket -> if not encrypted, PML, Rocket eBook, CHM, PDF -> if not encrypted)
# Increased (artificial) limit of num words per minutes to 1200.
# Fixed images, nag, tables and stream bugs.
# Updated manual
# New skin: n0de by Marcus Kopp

Click here for a full overview of all ubook features including screenshots.

ubook is a shareware product. A licence costs $12US and works for all versions of the reader. The unlicenced version is not crippled in any way, but pops up an about screen every now and then.

06:04 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

In case you've missed any MobileRead news from this week, here is our usual roundup:

Announcements
A Merry Christmas from Mobileread
Recent Downtime

E-Book Readers
Review: eBookwise EB1150
Teleread excited about Cybook

General Chat
Free Gmail invites available again
New study: Mobile phones signals cause cell damage
Next generation E-Ink displays in the works!

Link Swap
Hack a day

Other E-Book Resources
Digital Library: Making of America
Manybooks now features Sony Librie e-books

Other Gadgets
Fun with Bluetooth at Warp 9.5
Gadget and Cable Management Nightmares

Palm
Free Palm Games!
PalmGear 10% NewYear Discount
See the best of FreewarePalm
Wanted: Palm OS Beta Testers

Pocket PC
FpseCE 0.09.3 free Playstation 1 emulator
Pocket Informant 5 Review at PDA247
See the best of FreewarePPC
WebIS Mail 2.06 for free at Handango this week
WebIS Money free for registered WebIS users

Portable Audio/Video
iPod soon with airbag-like sensor detection?
PodReader e-book converter for iPod

Smartphones
Opera for Windows Mobile Technical Preview 2

06:37 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Mobileread.com was inaccessible for about one to two hours. Sorry about that - it seems that nasty worms and script kiddies don't enjoy their holidays.

09:37 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The book collection currently contains approximately 8,500 books with 19th century imprints.

You can either do a search, or see browse the information in a few places...

http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/moa/moa_browse.html
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/...ge=browsecolls
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/...rnl&cc=moajrnl
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/...l&cc=moa&c=moa

Can't tell if these browsing locations are comprehensive, or if there's overlap between them, but you can always go back to the main site and do searches if there's something in particular you are looking for.

This is a noble effort, and maybe one day soon collections like this will become commonplace.

07:54 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

If you are an owner of any other WebIS software, you can get your copy of WebIS Money for free by just filling in your registered email address, order number, or software registration key. You will then get a download link if you are eligible.

If you are an avid Mobileread reader, you know that there is currently another WebIS promotion, which allows you to get WebIS Mail for free. If you combine the two promotions...

This promotion ends when WebIS Money 2.0 is released.

04:44 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Apple is eyeing a technology that could make the iPod more likely to survive a fall, according to this ZDNet article:

The company has applied for a patent on technology that would allow a portable media player to detect when it is falling and then stop reading or writing to the hard drive. Such technology would work by detecting the acceleration that accompanies a drop.

"The portable-computing device protects its disk drive by monitoring for such accelerations and operating to avoid usage of the disk drive during periods of acceleration," Apple said in the patent application, which was published Dec. 16. "Through such protection, the likelihood of damage to the disk drive or loss of data stored on the disk drive is able to be substantially reduced."

This technology is not new though. My IBM Thinkpad notebook has a similar patented feature called IBM Active Protection system (white paper, flash presentation). In a nutshell, Active Protection automatically parks the hard drive head temporarily when a drop or a similar damage event is predicted by a motherboard-mounted motion detector ("accelerometer").

So since IBM already features such a technology, I am curious to see how Steve Jobs thinks he could re-patent it for himself.