03:58 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

French Akihabara News has a small mini-review (with a lot of images) of the new Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000. As a Linux-based PDA, the Zaurus stands out among the PDA crowd, and it looks like a good alternative for those who want to switch from Palm OS to something else but aren't quite ready yet for Windows Mobile

The reviewer appears to like the new Zaurus, and is only complaining about lack of connectivitiy (no BT or WiFi) and lack of USB2.

If you are not fluent in French, you can try the Altavista-translated version.

03:19 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Dina at Pdatopsoft has provided the following information on their new product offering...

3D Air Combat Game Pack (Pocket PC Edition)
Buy two games in one package and save $10 !

http://www.pdatopsoft.com/PocketPC/3...mbat-Game-Pack

3D Air Combat Game Pack (Pocket PC Edition) includes following games:
3D Mini-Dogfight 1.5b - The First Multi-Platform & Multi-Player real time 3D Air Combat Game for PPC features famous WWII fighters! Enjoy exciting air combat with realistic physics simulation and impressive natural sceneries. Dogfight Head-To-Head, Enjoy Together! Please go to product page for more information and download a free trial

3D Mini-Jetfight 1.2b - The Multi-Platform & Multi-Player 3D Modern Air Combat Game features 7 famous jet fighters and A/A missiles. Feel the excitement of high-altitude, high-speed jet fighters and experience the breathtaking air combat with air-to-air missiles! Please go to product page for more information and download a free trial

Pdatopsoft.com - Palm, Pocket PC, Windows CE, EPOC(Symbian), Smartphones and RIM software at www.pdatopsoft.com. New submissions daily!

11:08 AM by sUnShInE in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Just Released: TomeRaider 3

Available for Windows, Pocket PC, Psion, Smartphone, and Palm Powered devices. A few new features include HTML support, filter builder, reference links, search acceleration, image support, and super compression. You can even create your own content using TomeRaidIt ($15US).

TR is primarily designed to allow you to easily read large databases like The Wikipedia, encyclopedias, IMDB, the Bible, dictionaries, and supports external media. There are over 3,000 free files available at Memoware.com, and many more inexpensive ones available there to boot.

Going for $20 to $22.50US, it's been 2 years in the making, and a pretty big overhaul of a great proggie.

08:40 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Sunrise

"My decision to abandon Palm OS development for now has to be seen in the context of my business plan," Laurens explains. You should read his full blog entry, which makes it perfectly clear why Palm OS is currently unfeasable for small developers.

Just as a side note: Sunrise 0.36d is released today removing the HotSync Manager requirement (= Vade Mecum users can now use Sunrise as well).

08:28 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

If you think that e-books are helping the environment, you could be wrong. According to researchers, there is an "incredible amount of energy required to successfully pay for, download, and open the e-book":

"Particularly using the Adobe scheme, we found that to download a 2 megabyte e-book required a user actively participating in various logins, registrations, and downloads for an average of 12 hours, resulting in an average of 173.2 megabytes of data transfer," explained Arther, "Boiling all that down to kilowatt hours of energy shows that e-books consume approximately 18 times the fossil fuel of an equivalent published work."

This is not an April joke it seems (edit: well perhaps I should give that a second thought, *shame*). 173.2 MB to download an e-book?? Could someone explain? Perhaps I am missing something in that story...

04:58 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Linksys offers welcome news to Pocket PC owners: the WCF54G Wireless Compact Flash Card, as the name implies, brings 54 Mbps 802.11g performance to Pocket PC PDAs and smartphones.

The WCF54G is compatible with Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2002 or later. In addition to supporting 802.11g, the card is also backward-compatible with the 11 Mbps 802.11b standard.

According to Linksys, the card roams seamlessly among multiple 802.11g/b wireless network access points or wireless routers, it also operates in ad hoc mode (without an access point) to download data from wireless PCs without a cradle or network connection, and can share data directly with other wireless PDAs.

The card will be available for an estimated street price of US $99.

02:28 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

We're almost stifling a yawn this time around, but there is another interview featured in ZDNET UK with palmOne president Ed Colligan where he talks about the potential future of his company.

Colligan's key points:
- Treo 650 rolls out in the US, in Asia and Europe early next year
- Treo alone makes 50% of palmOne's revenues
- estimated y-y growth for Treo is 36%
- biggest Treo rival in Asia: Samsung (not Sony or Nokia)
- HP's wireless PDAs no true competitors because they're "big devices"
- there are tradeoffs to be made when designing a smartphone
- Palm OS alternatives possible in future; would be communicated early
- written $40m-commitment with PalmSource expires in 2006; no plans for extending commitment
- China market is supposedly working well (despite rumors that P1 had quit China)

Here is one bit of the interview I found quite amusing. To the question whether palmOne is lagging on the technology curve, Colligan replies:

I probably would have accepted that a year ago. I think the category defining products in this space are at PalmOne. You read any review of any smartphone and the Treo 650 wins. So I don't accept that premise.

Well. I don't recall anyone questioning palmOne's leadership one year ago. Do you?

09:57 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

"International wireless solutions manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) believes the days of disconnected PDAs are gone" is how an article in today's ZDNet UK begins.

According to RIM Asia-Pacific vice-president Patrick Spence,

"Disconnected PDAs were great in the past but today, people's information is changing too rapidly for that type of model and customers want to synchronise their PDAs with their PCs fast."

This statement is not suprising in light of RIM's announcement from last month of the 7270 BlackBerry, the first Blackberry to support VoIP and 802.11b WiFi. The device is due to go on sale in early 2005, with selected customers testing it already.