05:10 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.

04:58 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.

05:47 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?

05:36 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.

05:11 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.

05:04 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.

10:34 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

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

Avantgo
Avantgo server trouble?

Book Links
New York Public Library serves e-books

Book Reader Hardware
Sony Librie EBR-1000EP Wiki
Sony Librie English Reference

Emerging Technologies
41% of the global PDA market to go WiFi in 2005
First-hand T-Mobile Sidekick 2 Review
iPodLounge Catalog
iTunes 4.7 - Apple digging its own grave?
iTunes 4.7 - Unfix for the "Fix"!
New Messaging Standards
Nokia 7710 - Smart phone for smart people
Poll -- Tell Us What You Think of Voice Recognition
Random Thoughts About Smart Phones
Sharp's Linux PDA plans for the US

General Chat
RSA Security plans to infest your PDA with DRM
US-nationwide TV on your cell phone

General Palm Discussion
MailWave - new promising e-mail client for PalmOS
palmOne dementi: PalmSource not with PPC
Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 simulator available
PalmSource - rough times ahead?
Xiino 3.3E PalmOS Webbrowser

General PPC Discussion
New version of Warlords II available for PPC
Novel writing on the go...

New Links
Exclusive: 1src.com forums for offline-browsers

10:34 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

If you still use the Avantgo service, for the past few days you've probably received the following message on your PC during hotsync:

"Server is temporarily halted for maintenance. Please try again later."

The AvantGo webpage doesn't give a hint as to why the service is currently not working.

I feel bad for you if you actually pay for the advanced AvantGo account