10:36 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Digital China and ECS Technology (China), two of PalmOne’s sales agents for the China market, will stop selling PalmOne products in China due to decreasing profits. According to Digital China, margins on a PDAs made by Taiwan-based Asustek Computer are 2-3 times higher than Palm PDA margins, even though marketing costs are higher for Palm products. ECS Technology complained that PalmOne is not serious about the China market, as the Palm PDA is not really Chinese-language based like Hewlett Packard (HP) and AsusPDAs.

10:31 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Sony Ericsson announced the availability of the K700i phone yesterday. The VGA-resolution camera phone features a 65,536-color 176-by-220-pixel TFT display on one side, and a digital camera on the other side with a 4x optical zoom lens. The special design, called a "dual-front", offers customers the ability to take pictures horizontally to help reduce shaking hands.

10:21 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Our Six Gmail Invite Contest is over and the winners have been drawn.

To every winner: Please PM me your working e-mail address, so that I can send you the invite!

Contest #1: Most active (non-team) members from June 15 to June 29:

doctorow winner
cbarnett winner
alexstapleton winner
Montalvo winner
cyberax
DaNDeE
gadgetguru
derekweb

Contest #2: Two forum feedbacks that each deserve a free Gmail invite:

cbarnett (again ) winner
derekweb winner

Thank you everyone for participating!! I hope you enjoyed the contest as much as we did. Looking forward to the next contest with you!

05:11 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Asus's new MyPAL A730 PPC will be out by the end of July, according to this news at pdabuyersguide. The A730 will have a 520MHz Intel PAX 270 processor with 64MB RAM/64MB ROM.

My favorite addition: it will feature a 3.7-inch transreflective VGA display!

The Asus will also come with built-in Bluetooth and a 1.3MP built-in camera (and a WiFi model is expected to be released sometime later in August/September).

10:23 AM by sUnShInE in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Rumors of the Tungsten T4 have been floating around since last Fall, before Palm OS6 (or Cobalt, whatever you wanna call it ) was even announced. The rumors are really heating up right now, perhaps for a deadly thin Summer marketing season. Here are the two latest:

Rumor #1: The T|T4 will have a 450MHz processor, a 480x320 color LCD screen, integrated 802.11g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 96Mb of RAM, and a single SD expansion card slot. Source: atmaspheric endeavors.

Rumor #2: A device running Cobalt with a T3 form factor including 64Mb RAM, two SD slots, and integrated Bluetooth with a retail of $400. Source: PalmInfo Center.

Are these rumors just to give us hope in a dwindling market? Perhaps. There is, however, better news in the burgeoning cell arena.

It looks like a new Treo will be released soon, that seemingly would replace the popular Treo 600. The device has not been announced yet, but rumored specs include a 320x320 high resolution display, 1.2 megapixel camera, faster 312MHz processor, and integrated Bluetooth.

The Sidekick II has also not yet been announced, but several photos are available online thanks to the FCC. This updated Sidekick has the same flip-screen design and thumb keyboard, with supposedly more memory in a slightly thinner package. There were specs in the manual from the FCC site.

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

The Inquirer has mentioned a rumor (originally from "The Business" -- next time a link would be nice) that Nokia is interested in the PDA business. According to article, Nokia is developing a number of portable computers which will run the Symbian OS and utilise the company's own Series 60 software. The source at Nokia also suggested that one solution being considered is a ruggedised sub-notebook.

05:39 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The NY Times is now providing its own RSS feeds with several new categories including media and advertising, most-emailed, real estate, theater, Times on the Trail, multimedia, theater, Circuits, Week in Review and the Sunday magazine section. Previously, only the 3rd party Userland feeds were available.

What wonderful things can be done with RSS can be seen in this thread, where Montalvo posted a link to his script that makes RSS feeds handheld-friendly.

09:53 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Doctorow, Alex, Cyberax, and a few anonymous provided the necessary information to reveal that Google's toolbar uses Bob Jenkins' Hash Function to calculate the checksum which is required to query a site's pagerank from google's server.

The complete source code was transfered from ASM to PHP by Alex and is available in the same thread mentioned above.