02:52 PM by sUnShInE in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Did you know that you can watch movies on your Photo iPod?

Well, not really, but you can patch together a type of custom flip book, by scroll-wheeling through thousands of pics, creating the illusion of a movie.

Time on your hands? Cool use of your 'spensive toy? (Yea, maybe to both...) Either way, it's a tip to Apple of what we gadgetphreaks are a'hankerin' for!

Read about it via Engadget.

10:59 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

PDAmill has just released its biggest and probably best game so far: Arvale: Journey of Illusion. The game includes over 20 hours of gameplay, six immense continents with 280 maps to explore, 200 different monsters to fight against, and over a hundred different items, weapons, and magic spells to use.

For more info, check out the PocketGamer review and the PDArcade review.

A test version is available for download.

In this regard, we would like to wish Peter Balogh from PDAMill all the best for his upcoming wedding!!

07:17 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Intel has a technote explaining why Pocket PC games may run relatively slow on the VGA-enabled Axim x50v:

These types of applications are not natively capable of operating effectively in a VGA system, as they will only draw to a QVGA resolution display area. As such, a VGA-aware operating system (like Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition for Pocket PC) “translates”, via software, graphics accesses from a QVGA-specific application into the display area of a VGA system.

This enables applications that are coded with an assumption of QVGA to operate effectively in a VGA system. However, the operating system “translation” to VGA adds significant processing overhead. As a result, any measurement tests that are specifically designed to QVGA will show abnormal results when run on a VGA system. This is explicitly due to the overhead in the operating system associated with turning those QVGA-based calls into VGA-aware calls.

At least there is an unofficial solution to this problem: use a tweaked GAPI driver (more info).

05:57 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

A follow-up to our recent PalmOne discussions (here and here): David Berlind from ZDNet explains why PalmOne may already have caused a devastating blow to PalmSource:

Since the beginning of this month, when Needham & Co. issued a research report that said PalmOne had "tacitly admitted" it was going to use PocketPC in its Treos, PalmSource's stock has dropped by over 30 percent. I've been hypercritical of PalmSource's failure to fully embrace Java as its primary development platform, thereby giving the more than three million developers that work in Java guaranteed access to the PalmOS market. My commmentary drew a response from PalmSource product marketing vice president Charlie Tritschler who tried to convince me otherwise. I'm still not convinced. Now, with PalmOne on the verge of making its decision, it may be too late.

05:20 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Russel Baettie wrote some interesting bits on "The Mobile Web", in which he argues to push web standards forward to better support mobile web browsers.

Look at the little graphic I made above. I've tried to show how the web is this vast repository of information, and how the mobile phone right now only has access to a small sliver of that information. The big orange blob is the public stuff, the black behind is the private web. The ways to interact with that information on your phone is limited: You can reformat it with Small Screen Rendering, view only the pages meant for mobiles, view the XML in various ways, or somehow see all the information out there in some magic, yet to be determined manner. Or hell, you can just ignore the web as it is now all together and find some alternative way of getting information to the mobile devices (which isn't pictured).

01:02 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Because of lack of recent updates, we first thought that HandStory has been abandoned. We were wrong. Korean SJ Namo Interactive has just released HandStory Suite V3.1. That is new:

Palm OS
- Enhanced Clip management
- Hardware button control
- Seperate Options tabs for each view

Pocket PC
- Convenient Clip Management
- Context-sensitive Options window
- Windows-friendly User Interface

HandStory Media Suite 3.1 for PocketPC
- Video playing
- Screen bookmarks and captures

You can download a 15-days limited trial from here.

It'll be interesting to see how this revived "'Swiss Army Knife of media viewers" compares to Plucker & co.

12:33 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Formats | Workshop

The iPod eBook Creator is a Web-based tool written in PHP to convert books (or any text) to the iPod Notes format that you can add to your iPod for reading on the go.

12:27 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

AFAICS (As Far As Eye Can See) Research published a report called "Developments in e-book, and e-magazine reader technology", which covers the current and future development of e-publication reader technology between now and the end of 2008.

Nick Hampshire and Guy Kewney, the two researchers of the report, maintain that just four years from now e-books will be so well established that a typical price for mobile hardware will be less than US $35. They justify their (rather optimistic!) assumption of a growing need for e-book technology, 1. on simple economic grounds, such as the delivery of up to date text books to every one of China’s 165 million school and university students, and 2. on the need for new revenue sources, as is the case with the consumer electronics industry, or, crucially, the mobile phone companies.

They also looks at how these devices will evolve over the next few years by examining developments in key areas of technology. Interestingly, PDAs don't have a bright future, at least according to the report. Instead, the researchers claim developments in mobile phones to be the future main drive for e-book technology. The following graph depicts their projected growth in annual sales of devices capable of functioning as e-book devices: