08:38 AM by ignatz in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

NASA has announced that they have a nearly working prototype of a "PSA", personal satellite assistant designed to move semi-autonomously in the weightlessness of the space station. Despite looking like a large version of the jedi training sphere seen in the first Star Wars movie, it reportedly has no laser blasts. Instead it can be used to assess environmental conditions, help astronauts with experiments, and even video conference with Earth. See this Wired News article and go straight to the source at NASA.

08:27 AM by ignatz in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

French telecom company Orange has released what they are billing as the world's smallest smart phone (The Register, Google News). It has 64 megs of RAM, runs Windows Mobile 2003, and has a slot for an SD card. The SPV C500 measures 10.8 x 4.6 x 1.6 cm (4.25 x 1.8 x .6 in) and only weighs 100 g (3.5 ounces). It will be available in Europe in the summer.

04:37 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Let's talk about the future. Sony has introduced three Linux-based in-car navigation and entertainment devices in Japan today. The NV-XYZ 33, 55, and 77 feature 3D map navigation technology, media players, hard drives, GPS, and PC connectivity.

The units measure 8 x 4 x 1.9 inches (204 x 104 x 49 mm), and weigh 25.4 ounces (720 grams). They are based on a MIPS-based processor of some kind, and boot a distribution based mainly on MontaVista Hard-Hat Linux (HHL) from a cramfs filesystem on Flash memory. They include a 6.5-inch thin-film transistor (TFT) touchscreen LCD display running at WVGA (800 x 480) resolution.

More info can be found here. The Linux Source-Code is already available.

Prices range: $1400 - 1900

I guess the next big thing we are waiting for is a HUD display with the buildings perfectly matching what you see outside...

10:43 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Thanks to our editor ignatz, I am now a proud owner of a gmail account (my secondname [at] gmail.com)

Haven't had much of a chance yet to test it, but first impression is great!

10:28 AM by ignatz in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Gmail has gotten a lot of hype, both positive and negative. When it was introduced right around April 1 it was widely thought to be an April Fools joke. Subsequently privacy issues have received a lot of press. And through it all people have been clamoring for accounts, even paying as much as $75 on ebay for one (though now the market there is so flooded accounts are going for closer to $10).

I received an invite to join Gmail from a largely inactive Blogger account. I thought I'd give it a try just to see what it was all about, not to mention the thrill of having something that everyone wanted. I actively use my email from multiple locations, mainly work and home. After a little dabbling with it I decided to begin forwarding my other email accounts there.

I found to my surprise that I really like Gmail and it has become my primary email client. I will review a few key points of the service:

• The servers are fast and there is never a lag when accessing the Gmail pages. Accessing individual mails is also fast. They have greatly improved on the slow speeds that I have experienced in the past with webmail. [edit: It should be noted that I have only connected to Gmail with broadband. I can't speak to the experiences that dial-up users will have.]
• The threaded view of mails (they call it "conversations") that Gmail has used is well implemented and is very effective. When you receive a reply to a message, the original message is shown with it, making it very simple to track the course of the conversation. I have found this especially useful with mailing lists. In fact Gmail is a great tool for reading lists, especially high volume ones, as threads of conversation are very easy to follow.
• The spam filtering still leaves a lot to be desired. It certainly works. I forwarded an older account that gets large amounts of spam, and probably 90% is caught. However, a good amount still sneaks through. Gmail incorporates spam training, but it is not clear what the filtering algorithm is. It would appear that they are using Bayesian filtering, but I have not found any references, and there may be other tools at work. [edit: I should add that the spam filtering works fairly well right "out of the box" so plainly more is being used than just the training that you give it. I also have not noticed a single false positive (ham marked as spam), though others have reported some.]
• Rather than use folders, Gmail archives all your mail into one large "Archive" folder. Then you can use Google search to find mail that you're looking for. This is surprisingly effective. You also have the option of applying labels to mail. This works like folders with the exception that one conversation can have any number of labels applied. This can certainly aid in organizing mails that defy easy categorization.
• Gmail also offers the option of keyboard shortcuts to speed movement around the interface.
• Reportedly there are more improvements underway, but I have not seen much to indicate what is coming. Certainly they will soon add the ability to POP (and possibly IMAP) your mail, which is lacking now.

And finally the privacy issue. Gmail does scan your mail for keywords and displays relevant textual ads to the right of your emails. They are fairly discreet and easy to ignore. I think cutting through the hype, the darker potential here is that by combining a reference of your emails with your searches, Google could potentially form a fairly good profile of you, if they were interested in doing so. These profiles could then be sold and you could become a target of advertisers. It's hard to guess how likely this is. To use the service, you need to be aware of this possibility. Conscious management of your cookies could probably minimize the potential risk to your privacy, but could also make Gmail more difficult to use. I have chosen to live with the risk for now to take advantage of the convenience.

Overall I think that Gmail is a great tool. I'm not sure that I will stay with it in the long run, but for now I'm very happy with it. If more improvements are indeed in the pipeline, it could easily become the dominant free webmail, at least once it is released to the public. But that could be another 3-6 months. Will people still be interested?

08:39 AM by Colin Dunstan in Miscellaneous | Lounge

For those who weren't quick enough to catch Alex's post on Aventuremail (free sign-ups are currently disabled), I have another free e-mail that may catch your interest:
Spymac offers a free 1000 MB e-mail account (includes both POP3 and Web Access), 100 MB of free web space (complete with FTP and WebDAV access) and 250 MB of free storage in Spymac's image gallery.

07:50 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Today Opera announced the availability of a proxy service called Opera Mobile Accelerator which they say can accelerate mobile browsing by 2.5 times, and reduce the amount of data transferred for those browsing with their version 6.31 browser (by stripping out unnecessary data, and compressing what's left).

The service is available by subscription only: 3 months subscription - EUR 12, 6 months subscription - EUR 20, 12 months subscription - EUR 30.

There is also a 14-day free trial period open to everyone.

04:05 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Blue Nomad annouced the release of BackupBuddy for Windows V2.0, which is a ground-up rewrite of V1.x. I was always a fan of V1.x, so make sure to give this one a try!

BackupBuddy 2 protects all the contents of your handheld by storing, in a database on your PC, all changes made to your device since your last backup. BackupBuddy 2 can restore copies of your programs, data files and settings in the event of any emergency: crashing of your handheld caused by an errant program, an accidental file deletion and damage or theft of your PDA.