04:19 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

This is bad news for Boeing's exclusive "Connexion" technology, which uses satellites to get air passengers online. Associated Press reports that the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday approved technology giving airlines what could be a cheaper option to provide Internet connections.

Unlike Connexion, which costs roughly USD $500,000 per jet to install the needed equipment, airlines can now offer high-speed Internet connections for 1/5th of the costs through the frequencies used by seatback phones.

The article also mentioned the possible end of the ban on in-flight use of cell phones. Unfortunately, results of an independent study aren't due until 2006.

Update: Here is a link to the official FCC statement on broadband services while in-flight.

[Article first seen at PDA247]

04:06 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Sunrise

Laurens decided to bring out a prerelease of Sunrise V0.40 (the Enhanced Conduit feature is still missing and will be added in the "final" V0.40 due shortly).

Sunrise V0.40 comes with a lot of new enhancements, so make sure you give it a try if you haven't seen Sunrise in action before:
- new spidering engine
- update panel
- SunriseCL command line tool
- support for conditional updates (Laurens: do you also support 304 conditional gets, i.e. Last-Modified/Etag header tags?)
- reduced memory usage
- exact autoupdate
- faster startup
- HttpClient 3.0

12:12 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

What Does "Palm OS for Linux" Mean?
Dianne Hackborn
Manager, Palm OS Platform Frameworks

After the seeming bombshell announcement from PalmSource that there will be future versions of Palm OS Cobalt running on top of Linux, I have seen a lot of confusion over what this actually means, particularly to the end-user. This article will explain what you can expect and provide some technical background on how we expect to accomplish this.

Before digging into the technical details, I should say that, in a nutshell, as a user you can expect the experience of a future Palm OS Linux-based device to be basically the same as what we have now in Palm OS Cobalt. As an analogy, you can look at Mac OS X: though it sits on top of another open-source Unix operating system (in this case Mach/BSD), that is not the part a user directly sees or experiences. Likewise, in the future when Palm OS is running on Linux, the overall platform will still provide the same basic user experience and programmer APIs that we have now.

One reason for the confusion about what this announcement means is that there is just a lot of confusion over what “Linux” means. People commonly use the name “Linux” to refer to the overall platform they experience: this includes the kernel, windowing system, UI framework, multimedia components, applications, etc. However, technically Linux is only the kernel portion of this full platform, and that is the part we are generally referring to as “Palm OS for Linux”.

The kernel itself provides only the basic parts of an overall platform. It is roughly responsible for managing processes and enforcing memory protection and security between them, managing threads and providing synchronization primitives for them, providing basic IO such as “write this byte to the serial port”, providing controlled access to hardware and defining how one writes drivers for that hardware, and defining how persistent storage is structured and accessed. Everything else is the responsibility of software on top of the kernel. For example, to show something on the screen, some software outside of the kernel may ask that kernel for access to the screen, and then it is free to modify the pixels on the screen however it wants. Even a seemingly fundamental thing like the shell is not part of the kernel itself – which is why there are so many different shells available on Linux!

As it turns out, modern kernels share a lot of similarities when viewed from the outside. The kernel we currently use in Palm OS Cobalt (which was written in-house by PalmSource) is itself a modern kernel, and a large amount of our effort in developing Palm OS Cobalt was spent in re-designing and implementing the overall Palm OS platform architecture so that it would work well on top of a kernel with protected memory, threads, and other modern features. The vast majority of that work is directly relevant to Linux as well, and will carry over as-is.

Building “Palm OS for Linux” means, in essence, porting all of our existing platform frameworks from the current Palm OS Cobalt kernel to the Linux kernel. This includes such familiar things as the Exchange Manager, Window Manager, Form Manager, Event Manager, Data Manager, as well as the numerous internal frameworks (Binder, the Media Framework, view hierarchy and graphics system) that they are built on. Some of the lower-level parts of the system (such as Palm OS Cobalt’s new SysThread.h APIs and the low-level parts of the application manager) will need to be rewritten in this port, but that will be the unusual case.

In fact, Palm OS has already been running on three different kernels through its lifetime: a licensed kernel for 68k versions of the system, a new kernel used in 5.x, and finally the kernel we currently use in Palm OS Cobalt. All 68k applications should run as-is on this new platform just as well as they run today on Palm OS Cobalt. However, we have announced that Protein applications (which are written for the native ARM APIs in Palm OS Cobalt) may require a recompile to run on “Palm OS for Linux.” This statement was made because Linux typically uses a different approach to calling platform library APIs than we use in Palm OS Cobalt, and it is too early for us to be able to promise more compatibility than that.

Ultimately what this all means is that our users and developers will still have Palm OS much like it exists today in Palm OS Cobalt. This is a long-term project, and we expect to see a variety of devices using the current version of Palm OS Cobalt out in the market in the coming year. The move to Linux will be a progression of our overall development of the Palm OS Cobalt platform.

One final question I would like to address is if this means one will be able to run Linux applications on Palm OS. In theory, when the underlying Linux kernel is there, basic applications should be able to compile for it with little to no change. You need to aware, however, that the higher-level parts of the platform will be Palm OS. This means, for example, that X Windows will not be running on your handheld device – we will be using the Palm OS graphics and windowing system instead. It will be possible, with various amounts of work, to get these other software components from the open source community to work on our platform, but this is not something in which PalmSource itself will likely invest much time.

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

Editor's note: MobileRead is delighted to present this article by Dianne Hackborn from PalmSource, which is the unexpected benefit of a recent exchange of emails. I first discovered Dianne over at Palm Infocenter where she grabbed my attention with some great information and the sanity she brought into the forum chatter about PalmOS devices and the future of PalmSource. I knew immediately that we all needed to hear more from her, and she was kind enough to respond by providing this information.

BobR
MobileRead Editor

07:56 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

A very interesting item has appeared on one of the best Pocket PC blogs out there (Pocket PC Thoughts)....

Pocket PC Developer Darryl Burling received an interesting email from Handango recently that stated the following:

"Handango is preparing a special marketing program for applications that support the new square screen Pocket PC. Are your Pocket PC applications screen orientation aware? If so, please send a quick email to [deleted] with your company name and a list of your screen orientation aware Pocket PC applications."

This may be preparation for a new Pocket PC Treo. Or all kinds of new form factors. If you look at the thread comments you will find pretty unanimous sentiments that square screens are not very interesting if they are 240x240, but if they are at least 320x320 maybe it's worth a look. I would agree.

12:22 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

The news spreads quickly all over the web: Google plans to keep its highly trained personnel busy by having them soon scan an insane number of dusty paper books. The holdings of the US' leading research libraries (Harvard, U of Michigan, Stanford, New York Public Library) and of Oxford U library are to be converted into digital files that would be freely searchable over the web.

According to Stanford University's head librarian Keller, "within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today."

When we talk about Google, don't we talk about search results that only display small excerpts of the whole? What do you guys think? Is that truly the long-predicted global virtual library that Bill Gates did envision 10 years ago?

04:38 PM by Zire in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Features:
* Turn-based, aim and fire type of game
* Full 3D environment (FASTEST VOXEL GRAPHICS ON PALM OS TO DATE)
* Destructable 3D terrain
* Fully configurable sound, graphics and controls (Including Zodiac controls!)
* Stylus or configurable key controls
* Play against a friend or CPU, with 3 difficulty levels
* Camera follow mode so that you don't miss the action
* Alpha-blended smoke and explosion effects
* Weapon shop with adjustable money reserves, from cheap rocket wars to expensive nuclear wars
* Number of Troopers from 1 to 5
* Wind setting
* 30 Maps to choose from including Earth, Volcano and Space themes
* Game saving/loading to/from external memory cards
* Sounds include explosions, screams and a full music track
* Map technology to save more than 60% storage space per map (Quality 260k maps generated from only 8k of storage data)
* Hires and Hires+ support in both Landscape and Portrait modes
* Zodiac and Tungsten C vibration effects
* Mobile map editor coming soon!

Requirements:
* Palm OS 5.0 or higher with the following:
o 8.6mb of free storage (Before installation, 6.6MB thereafter)
o Minimum 950kb of dynamic heap space (320x320 & 160x160 version)
o Minimum 1.2mb of dynamic heap space (320x480 & 480x320 version)
o Mimimum 700kb of dynamic heap space (Tungsten T & T2 version)
o Color display, 320x320 mimimum recommended
o Optional: External storage card with 1mb free for saving games
o Support for standard palm streaming audio (Sony Clie(tm) without this support will run without sound)
o Optional: Vibration alert

Review:
I have to hand it to the developer. Henco and his team made the low heap version of this game have the same game play as the original, the only difference is that the graphics are a bit pixelated to accomodate for low heap devices. With this version Henco also reduced the price of the game to $9.95 and when you buy the game you buy both versions so that you can register the original when you upgrade to a palm with higher heap memory allocation. I am simply in awe of the graphics and sound. What is surprising is that palm has come so far to support the graphics that this game has. I also give the developer five stars for accomodating us palmers with low heap devices. Frankly other developers should do as cronotech did and reduce the requirements of their high heap games and make low heap versions as well. If you like the game buy it. Its cheap but not cheaply made.

If audio doesn't work for you clie try this http://www.aibohack.com/clie/modclieaud.htm . I tried it on my sister's NX80 and it works fine.

Try it for free or buy it for $9.95!

09:23 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Mobile Sites

Skweezer is a sort of free wireless Web "gateway" that allows you display web sites in a way that's optimized for handheld devices. Images are visible and content is intelligently stacked for easier access. Looks good, give it a try for as long as it is free

05:35 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

Tokyo-based Toppan Printing, who works in collaboration with electronic paper display maker E-Ink, has demonstrated a stunning 400ppi (pixels per inch) high resolution e-paper prototype. Toppan has also manufactured the highly acclaimed 170ppi display of Sony's e-book reader LIBRIé.

Speaking of display resolution: High resolution is as good as the human eye can resolve. Going beyond it would be pointless because the average human eye could not appreciate any finer detail. In a monochromatic image at a normal reading distance, the human eye is not able to perceive more than 250-300ppi. In other words, the 400ppi display prototype easily matches the resolving power of the eye making text as sharp as it can get!

Beside featuring a high resolution, in contrast to traditional display technologies on the market today, E-Ink's e-paper technology also makes text extremely easy to read at virtually any angle and under any lighting condition - including direct sunlight.