04:43 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

T-Mobile said last night it would offer free wireless Internet connections through Monday at the roughly 300 Wi-Fi hot spots it operates in Florida (e.g. at Starbucks, Kinko’s, Borders, and airports) in the wake of Hurricane Charley.

A spokesman for T-Mobile said it was offering the service to help people displaced from their homes by Hurricane Charley, which lashed much of Central Florida last night with heavy rain and hurricane force winds last night.

It is great to see how new technologies such as Wi-Fi can make a big difference nowadays (meaning Wi-Fi is good for everybody, not just us 'geeks' ).

04:28 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

RSS Sync is a Pocket PC 2003 ActiveSync Extension. It synchronizes RSS/RDF news to your PDA - effectively creating an offline newsreader.

Unlike Egress, which can be used only while you are online with your PDA, RSS sync works a slightly different way: the sync program updates RSS data at scheduled intervals. Data is then synchronized to the PDA, where it can be viewed in the RSS Viewer aggregator. The headlines are stored in a small database on the PDA, so you can carry the information with you anywhere and examine it without being connected on the internet. When a link to a website is provided with the RSS article, you can activate it and be redirected to a web-browser, which connects and retrieves the web-site online.

Myself a RSS devotee for not more than three months, already I cannot imagine browsing the web without it.

04:51 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

I read first about it at Shaun's PDA247: The ESD Monopoly. ESD stands for Electronic Sales Distributor and includes portals such as Handango, pdassi, Smartphone.net, Palmgear, and Pocketgear.

ESD-Union was created as a mechanism to make the public aware of the evil roots that have started to corrupt the ESD sites; and, how it is affecting the people that you, as a consumer rely on for your software within your handheld device. Unfortunately, there are a lot of secrets that are never told. Now they will be.

Did you notice that the ESD market has been consolidating, and that Handango and PowerbyHand are now the two dominating ESD companies? Did you know that the ESD margin (the part of the total revenue of sold software the ESD receives) increased from 20% in 1999 to 40% in 2004?

What is your take on ESD? Do you think PDA software developers should avoid ESD in future?

06:41 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

One of our members, eltintero, converted the Athens Olympics 2004 Schedule into an iSilo document that you can browse with your Palm or PocketPC. Quote from eltintero: "Hope you find it useful. I repeat, not all the sports are there, only the ones I find more useful. This archive is free, and made by me ;-)"

You can download the schedule in our forum.

Great work, eltintero!

12:40 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Congress has fired a shot in the struggle between content providers and content users. Unfortunately, they seem to have taken dead aim at content users when they took the shot.

The Register reports that a new Congressional Budget Office paper on Copyright Issues in Digital Media has been released as a advisory document for Congress. But instead of working to balance the public interest with protection of commercial interests, it seems to have focused on keeping the markets profitable to ensure content providers will continue their creativity. In fact, it even goes so far as to support pricing that is set based on the particular uses of the content. Check out The Register's article for some great analysis.

And lest we turn radical as a result of perceived abuses by lawmakers, content providers and their legal teams, we must also acknowledge that we do depend on a reasonable legal protection of content. Without it, we could see some degree of dwindling in the quality and quantity of new books, movies, music, software, etc.

In the mobile computing world, the commercial software developers and content providers are generally our friends and allies, along with sellers such as PalmGear, PocketGear, Handango, Fictionwise, eReader, etc. If we want to see our mobile computing community grow and prosper, it means we also want to see the commercial side of things prosper.

Let's hope we can find a satisfying legal and social compromise that can stand the test of new technology, while meeting the needs of both consumer and producer.

07:45 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | iSilo/X

Darren released a new (non-beta) version of iSilo/X today. You can lookup the changes from previous versions here and here.

06:57 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Microsoft's voice input/output software for PocketPCs and phones has now hit US store shelves. Voice Command, which is based on a next-generation phonetic speech-recognition technology, enables voice access to contacts, phone, calendar, media player, and more -- without voice training. In addition to speech recognition, the program also provides voice prompts to the user.

Key features of Voice Command, which supports devices running Microsoft's Windows Mobile 2003 based Pocket PC and Pocket PC Phone Edition software platforms, include:

• Speaker independent
• No voice training required
• Conversational style that asks questions if more information is needed
• Use a single command to quickly get what you want, or be guided if you prefer
• Say "What can I say" or "Help" at any time

The Voice Command software for Windows Mobile 2003-based Pocket PC and Pocket PC Phone Edition is now available for $39.99 in retail outlets nationwide.

05:17 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Jon Lech Johansen, the infamous cracker of CSS (the encryption used for commercial DVDs), has cracked the Airport Express crypto which uses a combination of AES and RSA to encrypt the audio stream.

Jon has also released a small tool called JustePort (requires Mono) which allows you to stream mpeg4 lossless files to your Airport Express.

For all hobby cryptologists among you, this is the hidden RSA key used by Airport Express:

59dE8qLieItsH1WgjrcFRKj6eUWqi+bGLOX1HL3U3GhC/j0Qg90u3sG/1CUtwC
5vOYvfDmFI6oSFXi5ELabWJmT2dKHzBJKa3k9ok+8t9ucRqMd6 DZHJ2YCCLlDR
KSKv6kDqnw4UwPdpOMXziC/AMj3Z/lUVX1G7WSHCAWKf1zNS1eLvqr+boEjXuB
OitnZ/bDzPHrTOZz0Dew0uowxf/+sG+NCK3eQJVxqcaJ/vEHKIVd2M+5qL71yJ
Q+87X6oV3eaYvt3zWZYD6z5vYTcrtij2VZ9Zmni/UAaHqn9JdsBWLUEpVviYnh
imNVvYFZeCXg/IdTQ+x4IRdiXNv5hEew==
Exponent: AQAB