10:30 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

I am holding a new x50v in my hands and all I can say so far: it is a totally NEW experience! I am not sure about the Pros and Contras, since I haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet.

Rest assured I will post more about my new journey into the PPC realm in a couple of days!

10:24 AM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Fictionwise eBookwise

Brad has one of the first hands-on reviews of the rebranded eBookwise 1150 hardware e-book reader. Nice job, Brad!

From his MR forum comment:

At first I was kind of disappointed with the low res, half VGA screen, but that quickly changed when I started to read. My reading speed went way up because of the larger screen. I could sort of scan ahead. Also even though it is lower res, I find the 1150's serif font easier to read than the default sans-serif font on my PDA.

I've always maintained that the relatively small screen size of today's PDAs is one of their biggest drawbacks - at least when it comes to reading e-books. The eBookwise's huge paperback screen size outshines conventional PDA screens. The low price ($99) plus the big screen make the eBookwise an interesting alternative to PDAs if you are looking for a dedicated e-book device.

05:44 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

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

Book Links
iPod eBook Creator

Book Reader Hardware
Report: 2005 - turning point in e-book reader technology

Emerging Technologies
Interesting Handango Decision
Movies on Your PhotoPod
RIM: Connectivity is a "must" for PDAs nowadays
Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 mini-reviewed

General Chat
E-Books increase Global Warming, researchers say (satire)
Mobile browsers only use a small sliver of information
Tim O'Reilly Interview

General Palm Discussion
PalmOne, a devastating blow to palmSource
palmOne doesn't accept that it's lagging on the technology curve
P r i n t i s D e a d
Problems with the Treo 650s and T5s

General PPC Discussion
3D Air Combat Game Pack (Pocket PC Edition)
Intel explains why QVGA slow on Axim x50v
Linksys WCF54G - 54 Mbps WiFi card for PPC
New version of ubook available (0.9a)
PDAMill's Arvale: Journey of Illusion released

HandStory
Namo HandStory Suite V3.1 released

Non-Fiction
On intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins

Plucker
Sunrise author explains why Palm OS is unfeasable

01:56 PM by sUnShInE in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The Treo 650 and the Tungsten T5 use a new FAT based nonvolatile file system, which is causing big problems.

Not only is the new system much slower, as the data has to be loaded into a SDRAM chip before running, but in this filesystem PalmOne switched from using directly addressable storage, to storage addressed in 512 Byte blocks. This has caused many files to swell in size - up to 500% in some cases (such as the address book).

Not good for products that only offer a mere 23Mb of memory to play with. These issues are causing many users to cancel their orders to wait until the memory problems are addressed. Given that most of the people who buy new toys as soon as they're released are tech phreaks and developers, this doesn't bode well for a company who has already seen their market share dip below that of the Windows CE market.

Via Slashdot

07:05 PM by Francesco in E-Book General | Reading Recommendations

In a recent thread I got into troubles trying to explain what was "The emperor's new mind" about. Well, it seems it wasn't enough for me, as I try now to review "On intelligence", by Jeff Hawkins.
Ballistic pointed out this book to me. Before reading his post (in that same thread) I hadn't heard anything about Hawkins. This is the man behind the desing of the PalmPilot, Visor and Treo devices. That information sufficed to interest me in that book. I waited and waited until it was available in electronic format and bought it right away. This is the first eBook I ever buy, and I preferred the electronic format for one thing: IMMEDIATE delivery (beat that, paper books! LOL). This was an impulsive buy. I left the DRM concerns aside, I'll deal with that later. Just like with DVDs: as long as the bits are there, someone will find a way.
In this book, Hawkins explains his approach to the way the brain works. His approach, as he mentions right from the beginning, is built upon several previous theories. The objective is to provide a general frame to relate all the disperse works of people studying the brain from different fields in biology. His plan is to understand the brain from a biological point of view, before attempting to simulate its works artificially.
After the prologue, he moves onto explaining why he believes artificial intelligence is doomed and that no matter how fast and powerful a computer might be built, AI in its current approach will never be close to our intelligence. He call his theory "real intelligence". I admire this man.
The most important idea in this book is the concept of intelligence proposed: intelligence is not only the way the mind processes the data received by the senses, but also the ability to predict what will be perceived. The brain constructs the reality around by perceiving and predicting simultaneously. Perception and prediction are very similar phenomena going in opposite directions.
Prediction is built upon memories, or invariant representations, as he calls them. Invariant representations might be compared to Plato's ideals: abstractions of all the forms in the world (cups, staircases, etc.). Forms, situations, words, sounds, etc.
I have to say he convinced me right from chapter one that intelligence can be built. I said it couldn't be done. I guess I'm too easy.
This prediction theory has had a big influence in me, and now I relate every working of my brain to it. It's really funny.
The book is written very clearly, and you don't need any specific background to understand it. Heck, this is a book by the same guy who invented the PalmPilot! It means it's simple and straighforward.
I drifted away many times from the book, thinking about my own experiencies and hypothesis, and that talks very well about a book, I believe. It made me think a lot.
If you want more info about "On intelligence", you might want to check its site: onintelligence.org,it contains an excerpt, bios, a forum to discuss your opinions, and a form you can fill to contact the authors (the book was coauthored by Sandra Blakeslee).
On "The art of seeing", Aldous Huxley proposes an exercise consisting in looking at letters, at various distances and one at a time, trying to "memorize" the way they look. The result is not an increased chance to guess the letters you see, but an actually improved sight. This fits so well into the prediction model I had to tell the author. I did, and am still waiting a reply. Isn't Internet a sweet thing?
One last word, I was ultimately inspired by the Read/Write Web to post this review, whose author recently posted a link to his site. The concept behind Read/Write Web is that recently, the web finally became what it should be: a communication channel not only to receive information, but to publish it as well (from the point of view of the common user, of course). And that's what I just did.

08:38 PM by ricmac in Miscellaneous | Lounge

I did an interview with Tim O'Reilly, which I published in 3 parts over on my personal blog Read/Write Web. MobileRead regulars may be interested especially in Part 3, where Tim discusses eBooks and book publishing in general in the 21st century.

07:28 PM by cbarnett in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Gowerpoint have just released the newest version of ubook - version 0.9a.

Here's what's new (from the website):

# Added Install program for all versions.
# Added Swap Colors option (Back <-> Text; Easy Mode only)
# Added Auto-Scroll as a choice for Hardware Buttons (Pocket PCs)
# Added Support for new VGA screens on Pocket PCs (640x480)
# Added skin scaling control
# Improved Image zooming by allowing to define the zoom-in zone.
# Changed Auto-Open to look for a file with "index" or "toc" sub-string first.
# Fixed rounding errors, crashes, annoyances and corruptions. See download page.

Future features planned:

# i-book - Ability to easily read images-book, i.e. book made of images only, like magazine scans or comic books.
# Images Annotations - Ability to add annotations to images
# Table of Illustrations - Summary of all images in a book and their annotations.
# Export/Import of Annotations to file.
# e-books Catalog - Ability to catalog the content of CDs (or other removeable media)
# CHM compressed HTML support
# Improved PDB/PRC support
# Multiple User support.
# Export/Import of Configurations - Ability to easily carry your configuration, annotations from one machine to another through the internet.
# Multi-Lingual User Interface for Latin-1 languages.

One important point, is that ubook, from this version on, is now 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. Licenced users also get access to other goodies like the larger versions of the 1913 Websters dictionary (> 3MB), more skins, and the promise of more stuff to come.

In my opinion, $12 is pretty reasonable for a product of this quality, and the level of support from David at Gowerpoint is excellent. I've already registered...

Craig.

03:34 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

There's an interesting discussion going on at Pocket PC Thoughts.

As you are probably aware, Handango is one of the top PDA software web stores. It has recently boasted some positive press regarding it's success.

The topic of discussion is a change in the way Handango determines the best selling software. Instead of counting the number of copies sold, they have just converted to counting the most revenue produced by the sales. As a result there is a large bias towards the higher priced software, especially when it's not discounted.

It could be argued that this is a way to avoid some of the problems associated with titles getting too popular due to price cuts that don't last, but one has to think that the primary motivation is to get the biggest revenue producing titles high on the list. That's a powerful marketing tool, so I'm sure they want to get the most profitable titles the best publicity.