10:57 AM by Zire in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Astraware has done it again! They combined many game elements that make their company one of the best gaming companies in the palm world. I'm always looking for something new and when Astraware comes out with something I always load it and atleast try it. I loaded this game and then played it on the train. Since the train is noisy I decided to put on my headphones. The main things that I noticed is how good the music is (similar to cubix) and the graphics are really good. I also really liked the graphics. Astraware has really made the controls easy to work with and fully customizable. On my zire71 I have the directional pad set up for movement and the middle button as the menu so I can play while holding onto the bar on the train. I know you're saying get on with it...so here it goes. The game is really cool (atleast for now) there are alot I mean alot of puzzles that if you die you have to complete again but not start from the beginning of the game. I like the fact that the game is automatically saved at the beginning of each room so that you can start exactly from where you left off. Right now I have two save files one for one path and one for the other. When you play the game you'll know what I mean. Play this game you'll like it. Get it at the Astraware Site.

From the site:

Ix has been imprisoned by a strange alien race known as the Mazerians - and it is up to you to guide him to his freedom.

Kidnapped as a young boy by the Mazerians and put on display in their alien zoo, Ix's day begins as it always has, but today there's something in his living space he hasn't seen before, an unusual plant that gives him the means to escape.

In order to find his way home Ix must travel through a range of alien landscapes, with hundreds of rooms to traverse, solving puzzles and collecting elements to aid his bid for freedom. Along the way he will meet friends who offer clues and enemies who must be out-witted for him to survive.
Mazera features:

* An enormous world to explore
* Myriad puzzles and problems to solve!
* Bright and colorful graphics
* 30 minutes of specially-commissioned musical score!
* A hidden secret area to unlock
* Full Screen support for 320x480 and 480x320 devices!
* Compatible with greyscale and colour devices

06:28 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | News

The following is an interesting essay posted by Michael Hart on Yahoo's ebooks-community. It should be great material for further discussion, so post your thoughts in this thread

The Future of eBooks

eBooks have been with the public a third of a century now, though most are probably barely aware of them, if at all.

Most of them are still available free of charge on the Net and a few are available for perhaps an average of $75 each from several companies selling mainly to libraries with an entire collection of a million books or more, but it would be rare indeed, if there is even one example, for such big libraries to have even 1% of their catalog as eBooks.

Many such libraries simply haven't figured out how to make catalog entries for free eBooks and one of the attractions of the pricey eBooks is that they come with prepared MARC, MAchine Readable Catalog, records, that free the libraries from having to make their own catalog entries.

*Obviously one of the requirements for getting eBooks into *wide use in libraries is to take care of this problem.

Besides that, of course, is the situation concerning facts that no major players are playing in a major way in eBooks at all, just a few putting their toes in the water without actually trying swim anywhere.

At the present time, the vast majority of eBooks have been prepared and released by private citizens of the Internet, with somewhere over 100,000 eBooks currently downloadable, legally, free of charge.

Of course, countries are still extending copyrights, right and left, to make it illegal to put these books on the Net and new countries are adding to their copyright term every single year, until eventually, nearly every single country will have ruled out a million eBooks that were slated into the public domain before this anti-eBook legislation began when the Internet was first coming on the scene.

Even so, it is quite obvious that Project Gutenberg should be recognized as continuing a growth rate in excess of the famous "Moore's Law" that states that some computer things will double in size ever 18 months.

The Project Gutenberg collection has grown from 10 eBooks, in 1990, to 25,000, in 2004, far in excess of Moore's Law, which would have predicted only 6,451 by the end of 2004.

Thus we can only expect 100,000 Project Gutenberg eBooks a couple of doublings later on, and 1,000,000 10 years after reaching 100,000.

Once we have this collection of a million eBooks online it won't be long before much more organized systems of eBooks become available, either from inside the libraries or from the outside, as it is inevitable that search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MicroSoft new engine, would continue their massive coverage of eBooks. Just Google "Hamlet and Project Gutenberg" in Google right now for an example, you get over 10,000 hits.

The more eBooks we make available, the more people will do things with them, including making them more available for everyone to find and use, and also make them available for use in much wider varieties of format, catalog information for wider range of international library systems, etc.

Once a million eBooks are available, which I predict would be within a decade, several things will happen:

1. Libraries will make a greater effort to catalog them.

2. Search engines will increase their eBook listings.

3. Machine Translation will begin to translate books into what should soon be 100 different languages, which are going to drive the international cataloging efforts to even greater heights.

4. Just as with the cell phone, some countries without an existing major library system will simply bypass steps through the physical library system to the eLibrary as they did by bypassing a million miles of copper wires, by simply going directly to eBooks that flow over that same kind of electronic transfer systems as cell phone technology makes their calls. All will be wireless.

5. Even today's smaller laptop computers have enough disk drive space to hold an eBook copy of every book I have ever heard of, and more. I have a DVD here that holds over 20,000 eBooks in only 4.3G of space, meaning that laptops with DVD drives could easily carry all 100,000 eBooks on a one inch stack of plain DVDs. When double sided, double-density DVD burners get cheaper, it will be four times as easy to carry 100,000 ebooks, in fact it might only take two DVDs. Thus carrying a million, once thought to be totally science-fiction when I said it first, back in 1971, should become easy enough that they weigh only about one pound.

6. My furthest dreams for my expected lifetime, up to the year 2021, are for there to be 10,000,000 eBooks up on the Net for free downloading, just about all of what I estimate to be in the public domain, and 1,000,000,000 if you count them each being translated into languages far and wide. . .a process I expect would still be "in progress" in 2021, barring some unexpected growth from the machine translation area.

7. There you have it, my guess at the course of eBooks of about half a century, from the first 5K file posted on the Internet on July 4, 1971 to perhaps a billion book files by the end of 2021, or shortly thereafter.

06:10 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Avantgo still seems to do well. According to a press release by its parent company iAnywhere, AvantGo marks its five-year anniversary with the achievement of one billion subscriber synchronizations:

An average user subscribes to 6-8 channels of content with about 100 pages of content per sync. Nearly half of AvantGo users view content on their device at least once per day.

"Reaching one billion syncs demonstrates the popularity and maturity of AvantGo and the strength of our technology," said Neil Versen, senior director of AvantGo at iAnywhere. "Adding to our billionth sync achievement, we have established ourselves as a pioneer and leader in mobile advertising. It’s a testament to the fact that mobile marketing works when many of our partners continue to renew their campaigns and validate that the medium is a powerful, cost-effective way to build brand awareness and acquire new customers."

I am not sure how to evaluate this statement, but it appears that AvantGo is focusing more on ads-delivering than content-providing nowadays. With the emergence of various offline-browser alternatives (iSilo, Plucker, MobiPocket), and the fact that more and more people use online browsing via WiFi, I would be very surprised to see AvantGo gain any further market momentum in the future.

05:58 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Richard MacManus of eBook Culture reflects on his last three months' experience, both positive and negative, with reading e-books.

While he agrees that e-books are more portable than paper books, he also adds that the availability of commercial e-books appears to be limited, and that the existance of proprietary e-books (with the various forms of DRM) makes it more difficult to understand the "real value" of e-books as compared to paper books.

And I have to agree with him.

06:47 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Today I stumbled over a tool called DVD to Pocket PC. Its claim:

You can convert your DVD's to your Pocket PC and watch them in great quality, with stereo sound and in full screen landscape mode. A memorycard as small as 128 Mb is sufficient to store a full length feature film, up to a hundred minutes

From what I understand, the movie files are re-encoded using Microsoft's Windows Media 9 format which has a much better compression algorithm than DVD (Mpeg2).

A free trial is available. I would be curious to hear your experiences on watching full-length movies on a PDA. How does it work? Can you recommend it despite the small LCD screen?

06:36 AM by Colin Dunstan in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Earlier we reported that the Sony Librie book format is being reverse-engineered, allowing for you to create your own Librie e-books.

Now Sven released a new version of his little console tool MakeLFR. MakeLFR 0.3 adds text compression and graphics support (find it attached).

Great work, Steve! You should really ask Sony to hire you with a great salary, since I am sure your tool will lead to a 100% revenue increase for the Librie.

06:11 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Buy.com currently sells the palmOne Tungsten T5 for a low $349.99 - shipped free. Plus, they include a free T5 hard case!

I don't think you can go much lower than that. Hurry if you are interested, because I don't know for how long the offer will last.

06:04 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Here is a cool question for you, asked today in the Inquirer: Which is better: Microdrive or flash memory?

First the article talks about durability Microdrives apparantly don't like high altitudes, whereas CompactFlash cards don't mind hot coffee. So the point goes to flash memory.

It then goes on comparing overall cost/absolute storage capacity. Costs for 1GB flash (either SD or Compact Flash memory) range $60-100, whereas costs for 1GB microdrive is around $32. The author thinks the price gap is only temporary:

It's a pretty safe bet to say they'll be some aggressive price cutting on flash memory and devices built around flash in the next six months so they can get some separation from microdrive-based devices.