01:34 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:

Announcements
Happy Birthday Ignatz!
MobileRead Mobile for offline-readers, update
Under Attack ;(

Book Reader Hardware
Sony Librie - download all BBeB encrypted e-books
To good to be true: Sony Librie finally cracked!

Emerging Technologies
Delphi XM MyFi - radio via satellite
Flexible Liquid Crystal - the answer to our display problems?
iPod Mini challengers - and how they fail again
iPod Photo - now officially on Apple's site
MP3 Photo Jukebox
OpenZaurus 3.5.1 - alternative Zaurus OS
Sandisk release new fast and small card readers
Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 converted to English!

General Chat
Add MobileRead to MyYahoo!
E-books for your mobile phone
eBayFeed 1.11 - eBay USA fixed
Got Gmail? Perhaps you are already hacked!
It is true: palmOne is losing its market share

General Palm Discussion
PalmGear - Mobile
PalmGear - RSS Feeds working again!
PalmGear with a new look - breaks PalmGear RSS feeds!
PDA Sales Dropping
Treo 650

General PPC Discussion
eReader selected as "Best e-Book Reader" for PPC
visNotes-encrypted memos

03:06 PM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Google's Gmail is vulnerable to a security exploit that might allow hackers full access to your email account simply by knowing your username, according to Nana Netlife Magazine:

"Everything could get publicly exposed – your received mails might be readable, as well as all of your sent mail, and furthermore – anyone could send and receive mail under your name", thus reveals Nir Goldshlagger, an Israeli hacker, on an exclusive interview with Nana NetLife Magazine. "Even more alarming", he explains, "is the fact that the hack itself is quite simple. All that is needed of the malicious hacker, beside knowledge of the specific technique, is quite basic computer knowledge, the victim's username – and that’s it, he's inside".

Google admitted to the security flaw and is working on a fix.

One tip for Google: Stay beta forever, then you don't have to bother with legal claims at the end.

12:34 PM by sUnShInE in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Gateway has now announced its own MP3 player with photo capabilities. The Gateway MP3 Photo Jukebox has a mere 4Gb of storage, and will street at US$249.99. The Photo Jukebox uses Windows Media Player 10 to synch up music and photos from a PC to the device, comes with a 1.6-inch vibrant color screen, and weighs 3.4 ounces.

Humorously, Gateway is also taking shots at Apple saying, "The new Gateway MP3 Photo Jukebox will make anyone currently on a waiting list for other mini-digital music players think twice". They're also boasting that the Photo Jukebox's battery can go for 8 hours and, more importantly, can be removed and recharged "unlike most other digital music players."

Gateway is only taking pre-orders right now, with shipments expected in mid-November.

Read more from the Gateway press release.

12:15 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

eBayFeed required a small fix to make it work with some recent changes (10/19/2004) at eBay USA. You are advised to upgrade to eBayFeed 1.11.

source code: here and here.

full package, zipped: here.

You can still see the script in action at halted.de (make sure to copy it on your own server as this server is only for temporary demonstration purposes!)

If you want to give it a quick try, use this feed link with your favorite feed reader like Bloglines, FeedDemon, etc.

About:
eBayFeed/1.11 allows you to create customized RSS 2.0 feeds of your favorite eBay searches. Compared to other eBay-to-RSS solutions, ebayFeed has the following advantages: it is fully customizable and extensible (open-source), it supports eBay platforms of other countries (take a look at config.inc), you can run it on your own server, it doesn't log your clicks on items, nor does it advertise your search habits to others (such as qksrv.net), and it allows you to fully utilize eBay's advanced search forms. It currently supports eBay USA, eBay UK, eBay Germany, eBay France, eBay Italy.

08:57 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

OpenZaurus is an alternative linux distribution for Sharp Zaurus-based PDAs (except the SL-A300 and SL-6000). The original purpose behind the project was to create a ROM image (kernel + root filesystem) which was a bit closer to what the developer community specifically desired. The method by which this was accomplished was simply to use the Sharp ROM as a base and make alterations, bugfixes, additions and even removals, where necessary, to make the package more open.

LinuxJournal compares OpenZaurus to the original Sharp ROM:

One might think, why would I want to replace my current Sharp Linux distribution? Although I must admit Sharp's embedded Linux distribution is pretty impressive, some points could be improved. Some of these points include SD card compatability and missing utilities, such as SSH. In addition, OpenZaurus provides 16MB of built-in Flash separate from the 64MB of memory split between, in the SL-5500, 32MB for storage and 32MB for heap. The heap memory also can be written to, allowing you to add and remove applications that you can't touch in the Sharp ROM, such as the Hancom applications. Most importantly, OpenZaurus offers freedom of choice.

The same article also goes into detail how you can download and install OpenZaurus on your own Sharp PDA. See attached images how pretty the system looks like.

11:10 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Thought I should mention that we also have two mobile pages up for a quick overview of new and updated software at PalmGear:

PalmGear New Software PalmGear Updated Software

Link-Depth is 0 for both channels.

Note that the links might change in near future, since I am working on something new which will eventually incorporate those two links.

Enjoy
Alex

09:28 AM by sUnShInE in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

I'm listening to a piece on NPR this morning that PDA sales are down and dropping. According to an IDC press release, PDA sales are down 8.7% from the third quarter last year, and if a handheld device doesn't have voice capabilities, a growing number of users around the world aren't interested.

PalmOne's unit shipments fell 12.7% from the third quarter last year to 736,481. That left the company with 34.7% of the PDA market, down 6.9 percentage points from the second quarter.

David Linsalata, analyst in IDC's Mobile Devices program said, "It is crucial that vendors push handheld devices into new market segments through the integration of existing technology such as GPS bundles in order to energize this market and return it to a growth path.”

05:49 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Join me in wishing our team member Ignatz a warm and loving ...

Happy Birthday!

Ignatz, I just want to thank you for all the wonderful effort you have put into this community. It simply wouldn't be the same without you!