03:55 PM by ignatz in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

[Links from Slashdot]
A French company is producing a device they are calling a TDA, tactile digital assistant. It uses no stylus, but simply your thumbs. I haven't made it through the website yet, because it's pretty heavily slashdotted at the moment, but it looks pretty sweet. There are also two columns written about it here and here. Looks like the initial price will be high, around $600. Target release is in 3 months and they are already taking pre-orders (though I don't know anyone gadget crazy enough to buy a product that they've never seen). It runs on ONE AA BATTERY for weeks, they claim. It is available in black and white and color. I'll be very curious to see how this develops...

02:37 PM by ignatz in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

I hadn't been to the Brighthand Palm forums in a long time, so I recently went to peruse. Lo and behold, there is an incredible (and incredibly long) thread on upgrading your Tungsten battery and squeezing a lot more life out of it. A lot is made of the complexity, but if you have any basic soldering and electronics skills, it sounds simple. I am planning to replace my T|E battery (stock at 850 mAh) with a more powerful one (1200 mAh) and will try to document the procedure for the benefit of all. If you have ever cursed your battery length and you've got a steady hand and a brave heart, this is a thread for you!

(BTW, PDAparts.com has a page with instructions for dismantling a wide variety of PDA's. Recommended if you've never been inside yours before!)

10:22 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Everyone knows you can walk up to machines to get a variety of items like stamps, money, tickets, etc.

Well you may soon be able to walk up to a machine and get a paperback! For an expected price of less than $100,000, the On Demand Machine Corporation will be offering the BookMachine that can create paperback books on demand. Books can be printed in three to five minutes in various sizes. The machine even handles the payment process if using a credit card.

While there are competing systems offered by IBM and Xerox, the BookMachine is designed to be so simple that a customer or clerk can run the machine as easily as a copy machine. A master database holds all the contents of books remotely.

Pretty impressive. Still, wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just download the book and read it on your handheld?

Our thanks to Engadget for pointing out this bit of news first.

10:28 AM by brahamt in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

After much rumor and much speculation, the fourth generation of the venerable Apple iPod was announced today Apple Site.

Over the past several months, there were numerous rumors about the features to be included in the new iPod ranging from the plausible (video display) to the not bloody likely (WMA support). In the end, we got the iPod mini controls, simplified menu system, slightly smaller size, 50% better battery life, speed variable Audiobooks, multiple On-The-Go Playlists, and my personal favorite, Sync and charging through USB.

Other Links
Newsweek Article from MSNBC
MacMinute

05:12 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | iSilo/X

The news is a few days late, but better now than never...
Only after the two-weeks old release of iSilo V4.05 Final, the makers of iSilo already offer the next beta V4.1 Beta 2 for download (iSiloX download). Lot's of changes, plus the added ability to support external document linking (e.g., cross-document linking).

06:17 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

There's a new audio subproject of Project Gutenberg called Radio Gutenberg.

This new audio site currently has almost 400 free audio book titles available. Most are read by computer, which can be an interesting experience all by itself, but there are also 8 human read titles by Arthur Conan Doyle provided by AudioBooksForFree. "[Radio] Gutenberg makes audio eBooks available for some of the same great literature available in plain text."

Our thanks to PDA 24/7 for this discovery.

06:08 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Formats | Workshop

ConvertLIT, which is most probably illegal in the US by now, allows you to circumvent Microsoft Reader DRM. V1.8 was just released, and comes with the following bug fixes and new features:

- Dictionaries are now properly expanded,
- completely rewrote space handling, to fix "italics" bugs,
- changed compression library to a new version to fix rare hangs,
- create subdirectories. (Use "-d" to disable).

As always you can download the program and its sources for free.

05:59 AM by Colin Dunstan in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

According to a recent Associated Press news article, Sony is saying that it has no plans to offer its Librie book reader in the United States, where the core technology originated (E-Ink). So you can either go to Japan and buy it there in Japanese letters for $380, or hope that another company will eventually come up with a similar technology (and hopefully without the restrictive DRM the Librie is suffering from). Why is Sony slowly abandoning the Western Hemisphere? First it stopped selling its PDA line, now the Librie...?