Solo Media Coming February 1!

Okay folks, we have a semisolid live date for Solo Media. Publishing gets reinvented February 1, 2005.

We've still got some stuff to iron out in the next two months, though. Most importantly, distribution and pricing.

We're thinking 50¢ for each issue. Seems like a nice, round number and small enough that people won't hedge too much about paying it. Fictionwise makes handling micropayments easy, and we fit right in with what they're doing over there.

But what about subscriptions? We're doing serials here, and that means once you're into the story, you're not likely to skip an issue deliberately. "No, I don't need issue 11. I'll just pick up 12 when it comes out." So it would be a good idea to allow for package subscriptions as well. What's a reasonable price for that? I'd like to offer a small discount as an incentive to subscribe, maybe 12 monthly issues for the price of 11? So a year's subscription would cost $5.50 rather than the $6.00 you'd pay buying individually.

But then how does that factor in with compilations? We're also planning on repackaging each story arc as a stand-alone ebook, similar to how comics are often republished as trade paperbacks. Again, for this I was thinking about deducting the price of a single issue. If it was a seven-issue arc, we'd charge $3.00 for the ebook rather than buying the back issues individually for a total of $3.50. Would people be less likely to subscribe if they thought "I'll just catche the compilation when it comes out."

Ooh! Here's a thought. Not only is there a one issue discount for subscribing, but you also get the compilations of those issues for free. I'd have to see if the folks at FictionWise could do this, and it would be tricky when story arcs span annual boundaries (do you get the free compilation if only one issue fell within your subscription window?), but that sounds like a neat idea.

So, any thoughts? We want to make sure we get this right.

Open Standards

One of the hot topics in IT right now is open standards, using technology
that doesn't lock you down to a particular vendor. This is different than
open source, giving your actual code away to anyone that wants it. For
example, Microsoft Word 2003 isn't open source; Microsoft protects the
source code used to compile Word from anyone other than themselves.
However, Word 2003 does support saving documents as well-formed XML files,
marked-up text that is easily portable to any other platform or device.

So I started wondering, why hasn't anyone done this on PDAs? How hard would
it be to create an office suite that uses xHTML? An ebook reader that uses
Open Reader?

We've got portable devices, so how about some portable formats?

Office Blues

I've had some problems settling on an office suite for my Zodiac.

For a long time, I'd bounced between WordSmith and Documents To Go.
WordSmith was the better pure word processor, but now that I'm doing
independent consulting, I find more need for Excel and yes, even
PowerPoint. Moreover, now that I'm connected once again, the ability to
save and send files as native Office documents others can read is an
important feature; I don't want to have to go home and sync before I send a
document to someone. Kinda defeats the purpose of being mobile.

So I decided to shelve WordSmith. But before installing Documents To Go, I
tried an experiement. I installed QuickOffice.

This goes back to the Open Standards thing I just posted about. QuickOffice
seemed to have two major advantages over Documents To Go:

1. While both suites can open and save native Word and Excel documents,
Documents To Go can only open Native Powerpoint, and this only in Documents
To Go 7, which seemed in past testing to be more unstable on my Zodiac than
version 6. QuickOffice and open and save PowerPoint files.

2. QuickOffice can also save files in HTML format, the ultimate in document
portability. In a lot of ways, QuickOffice is more an HTML editor than word
processor, even giving you the ability to edit the code directly rather
than WYSIWYG.

Unfortunately, QuickOffice didn't make the grade. It installed fine, and
though the desktop component for adding files to the handheld isn't as nice
as Documents To Go, it's still far better than WordSmith's. But once I had
documents on the handheld, I noticed the formatting looked... odd.

My fiction is formatted in Word the way you'd expect fiction to look. No
open block paragraphs. First line indented, full justified. In QuickOffice,
everything just ran together. Paragraphs weren't separated a la HTML, nor
were they indented. A look at the underlying HTML showed why. QuickOffice
has essentially no paragraph formatting support at all. Or more to the
point, while it carries over style information embedded in the HTML, it
doesn't respect it. The document probably would have looked okay back on
the desktop, but it was a jumbled mess on the handheld.

If the underlying code had been good, I probably could have dealt with
that. After all, I don't need it to look pretty, I need it to be
well-structured. Well, QuickOffice falls short here, too. In a new
document, with double returns to force block paragraphs, a look at the
underlying HTML shows the document to be enclosed in one giant P tag, with
two BR tags setting off each paragraph. If I wanted HTML that bad, I'd use
Word '97.

So I'm left with Documents To Go again. No open standards (sigh) but at
least I have something that can email readable documents to others. I just
have to assume they have Office, but that's pretty safe assumption these
days. But again, a question. 6 or 7?

I crossed my fingers and installed 7. I really like the ability to read
PowerPoint documents, and the customizable toolbar. Beforehand, though, I
removed everything from my Zodiac that wasn't strictly necessary. Gone went
TealScript (I'm now forcing myself to learn Graffiti 2, southpaw-unfriendly
though it is) and gone went Fonts4OS5. PToolSet is gone. So are most of my
games. (Everything was copied to an SD card before deletion, so all that's
really gone are preference settings, should I decide to reinstall on the
road.)

And so far, no glitches. Documents To Go 7 is humming along just fine, and
I can email documents to anyone I want.

Now if DataViz would just put well-formed xHTML and CSS support in
Documents To Go 8, I'll be happy.

The last PDA I'll buy

Hi, folks,
With all apologies to Jeff and Josh, and the group, I'm sorry I haven't posted at all. I've become quite busy in lab as I push to finish my PhD. And my wife and I have been preparing for our firstborn.
However, all this "living" has at last weaned me away from gadgetry for the sake of gadgetry. I'm sure you all know what that entails; lusting, pawing, drooling over the latest and greatest. Once obtained, we spend more time fussing over features and screens to get it =just so.= And so on.
All I mean is that I'm using my gadgets as they fit into my life. I'm besotted with the Zod1. It is the perfect reading machine. I know I've said in the past the only thing I care about is pixel resolution. The Toshiba 800 and the new VGA PPCs are still out there, but it just doesn't matter to me anymore. Mostly, it's a price issue. Most of you know that as gadget fiends, we are quite willing to bleed ourselves white to buy the latest and greatest. But I realized I've turned into gagdet mortal when I became absolutely repulsed and disgusted by the high prices. I've said before that, perhaps the VGA screen is worth $400 (meaning the Dell x50v.) No more. That's way too much for a PDA. That's ultimately why I'm so happy with the Zod1 as a PDA; the half-VGA screen is actually a functional compromise for me with the feature/price ratio. It's punchy.

Realistically, though, I've at last realized that all I want a PDA to do is to let me read and write. Maybe some arithmetic (I recommend Power48 at http://www.mobilevoodoo.com/power48.htm. You can download ROMs of the HP48 series of graphing calculators for Power48 to emulate.) But that's it. Once I got past the whole gee-whiz features to actual usage ratio (I like the word "ratio", don't I?), I spat into my palm (note the small-case "p"), slapped my forehead, and made a pact with myself never again will I be fooled into thinking that PDAs are really all that different from one another, and that they are actually better than what I have now. Here's another thing I've noticed: there's no difference between PalmOS and Windows Mobile. I'll leave this statement alone for now.

I have a few other thoughts on mobile computing usage, and I promise I'll develop this theme in a few more posts (that will come sooner rather than later!)

Drivers for the Wi-Fi Card by palmOne

palmOne - Support - Drivers for the Wi-Fi Card by palmOne

Okay, T5 users! You got your bleedin' WiFi! Happy now?

HP Still Doesn't Get It

HP has finally started shipping those Bluetooth Stereo Headphones we first caught a glimpse of back in September, which are compatible with their h2200, h4100, h4300, h5100, h5500, h6300, rx3000, and hx4700 series iPAQ Pocket PCs. They’ve even built controls into the headset itself, so you don’t have to fumbling around for your Pocket PC when you want to skip a track or adjust the volume or anything, but they are serious about the headphones not working with anything except an iPAQ. A few people have reportedly tried using them with other Bluetooth-enabled Pocket PCs, to no avail.

No, guys, the whole idea of Bluetooth is interoperability. Dumbass.

Not really a bigscreen...

SlashPhone :: Phones : Samsung : Samsung "Anycall Theater": "Samsung has came out with a similar idea that allow you to dock your Samsung mobile phone on the high quality speaker and use it to watch TV or listen to MP3. 'Anycall Theater' will be available in Korea first."

Email Is For Old People

At least if you live in South Korea.

Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English About Korea: "The email era is coming to an end because replacement communication means such as Internet messengers, mini-homepages (dubbed 'one-man media'), and SMS are wielding their power. As a consequence, the stronghold of email, once the favorite of the Internet, is being shaken from its roots.

The ebbing of email is a phenomenon peculiar to Korea, an IT power. Leading the big change, unprecedented in the world, are our teens and those in their 20's. The perception that 'email is an old and formal communication means' is rapidly spreading among them. 'I use email when I send messages to elders,' said a college student by the name of Park. For 22-year-old office worker Kim, 'I use email only for receiving cellphone and credit card invoices.'

A poll conducted by Chungbuk University computer education professor Lee Ok-hwa on over 2,000 middle, high school and college students in Gyeonggi and Chungcheong provinces in October revealed that more than two-thirds of the respondents said, 'I rarely use or don't use e-mail at all.'"

Damn, and I was just getting excited about GMail working on my Zodiac...

Missing the Point: More Webmasters Need to Learn Their Craft

PPCW.Net - THOUGHT: Is browsing the Internet via PDA and GPRS a good idea?: "The outlook for the PDA-friendly 'mobile Internet on the go' appears to be mixed. At least, the evolutionary progress is on hold right now, or shall I call it consolidation? Or did the wireless carrier loose interest in the PDA-friendly web world? With respect to the number of sold Pocket PCs with GPRS modem, I wonder if they are missing something, or do I?

If my neighbor would ask me if browsing the Internet on a PDA is good idea, frankly, I would tell him no, not for what he expects, except he needs access to a few specialized sites, than yes. No doubt, it is nice to have the possibility of always accessing the Internet, as long as you are willing to pay the much higher prize. But technological limitations may often block access to the 'normal' websites for PDAs. I personally already think about getting a UMTS/GPRS card for my subnotebook in combination with a volume tariff. If you are actively browsing the Internet, you never know how much volume the next click is going to generate, with a time based tariff, you are safe with respect to the costs. And with a notebook, you always know that you can access the site of your desire."

Actually, properly coded, accessible HTML should "scale down" automatically to smaller screens. If you're a webmaster and you've never read Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com, you're doing both yourself and your users a disservice. Designing for website usability helps everyone, from PDA users to the blind. Complicated, Flashy websites might look cool (then again, they might not), but usable websites rock.

Get an Editor, or Learn to Edit?

I got to thinking recently (never a good sign). Why are writers the only artists/craftspeople that need editors? Painters, carpenters, etc. create without passing the result through the filter of someone else. Why is it not only acceptable for writers to use an editor, but assumed that they should? Heck, even film directors get to ignore the editor when they release the "director's cut" of their movie.

I think a big part of this is that most writers are horrible editors of their own work. Far too many writers assume that everything they write is gold. Mark Twain wrote some brilliant stuff and some truly horrible stuff, and supposedly really couldn't tell the difference. And as most writers get more successful, they become less edited. Why do you think Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling publish longer and longer books as they get deeper into their careers? I love listening to Tom Clancy audiobooks, because they're abridged (edited) and the long-winded stuff has been cut out.

But is this a natural feature of writers? Is the inability to self-edit unavoidable? Other artists learn to do it. And that's the key. Editing is learned skill most writers never learn to do.

Editing isn't that hard. You just have to be able to separate yourself from your writing so you can look at it objectively. Be willing to ask yourself with each sentence, each paragraph, each chapter: is this the best I can make it? In today's world of spelling and grammar checkers, there's no excuse for typos. But after you get your manuscript technically perfect, start questioning it. Have you omitted all needless words? Is each sentence as clear as you can make it? Have you cut every adverb you can bear to part with? Do you have any unclear pronouns (I hate referring to two different "they"s in one sentence, but I do it on occasion.).

Question the big stuff, too. Are there any plot holes? Forgotten characters? Motivations that don't make sense? Look at the big picture. Is this really the story you wanted to tell?

I don't buy that writers can't edit their own stuff. You can, if you learn how and are honest with yourself about your work. Give it shot, and see if you get any better.

Battle of the Network Browsers

Now that I have a connected device, I've been looking for the best way to surf on my Zodiac. It's not a big secret that the browser that comes with the Zodiac is subpar (it's based on a very old version of NetFront, not the slick xHTML/CSS compliant NetFront that came with the last of the Clies), but what else was out there?

I tried Xiino, but it developed a nasty habit of crashing if I lauched it with anything stored in the clipboard. Couldn't figure out why, or how to stop it. Next!

AvantGo has a new beta going, and it looks promising. The problem is that it too has a tendency to crash if it tries to open a network connection on its own. It works fine if I manually connect via the Network screen in Prefs prior to opening AvantGo, but if it has to connect on its own, bam! Fatal Exception.

So I'm back to using the tired web browser that came with the Zodiac and using SnapperMail for most of my RSS feeds, via NewsGator's POP3 gateway. Anyone know of a web browser for PalmOS that actually works?

Wow! This would rock for teaching...

iGo - Pitch Duo - PS6B1V "Give presentations from your handheld device or smartphone—wirelessly. No notebook, no wires, no hassle, just a powerful presentation direct from your handheld or smartphone. Pitch Duo not only lets you get rid of the cables and weighty notebook, it also enables you to view your presentation notes on your handheld device and use it to wirelessly control, via Bluetooth, the presentation while the audience sees just the slides. One year warranty and a FREE copy of award winning Quickoffice™ Pro included."

Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content

Digital Web Magazine - Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content

Jason Kottke is fantastic at aggregating content. Every time I read his latest list of links on Kottke.org, I find some tidbit of information that interests me, one I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise. How does he choose content, I wonder? (Recently, his ideas and links about what Google is doing have been particularly interesting.) Some of Kottke’s links don’t interest me at all. But it’s not hard to weed those out. I scan over them quickly, and forget I ever saw them.

Every time someone makes a list, be it on a blog like Kottke’s or a list of groceries, content is aggregated. The act of aggregating content (usually content that is alike in some way) makes it more understandable. Instead of looking at a whole field of information, you choose smaller, more logical subsets of it in the hopes of understanding those. After you’ve done that, you can apply what you’ve learned to the whole, or even just a larger subset.

Should we be concerned that aggregators are increasingly allowing users to find their own ways to use our content how they see fit?

Aggregation lies at the heart of the Web. It has to, given the amount of information that the Web contains. Were it not for aggregation, all the world’s information would be on a single Web page in a single domain. Wouldn’t that be exciting? (And painful!)

Aggregated content can be viewed on a spectrum, with human-aggregated content on one end and machine-aggregated content on the other end. The difference is in the way the content is chosen, and can range from a very strict machine algorithm to the whim of a human who simply “felt like it.”

This is why I don't mind "link and dump" blogging. Sometimes I just think it's interesting to see what someone else thinks is interesting.

Spam, spam, spam, spam...

I wrote a while back about how I rarely get spammed, even though I put my email address out there pretty much everywhere. I really didn't see it as a problem. A lot of readers wrote back on that one, very angry that would dare belittle their spam hell.

Well, good news for those readers: I feel your pain. Shortly after posting that article, my spam count went up dramatically, and has continued to grow ever since. I get close to 300 spams a day now, more than 10 spams to each actual email on average. GMail does a pretty good job of filtering most of it out, but right now they're only catching 70% or so. That's 90 spams a day that still

My Next Cell Phone

I love my cell phone. I really do. Bluetooth and 1xRTT, what could be
better?

Well, let me tell you. As l've mentioned before, l see the phone as the
communications module in a Bluetooth PAN. My current phone does an
admirable job with this, but I'd love to see a phone with:

WiFi. Some cell phones already support this, and I think this will only
become more common as time goes on. Carriers are smart enough to realize
that it works to their advantage if data users don't clog up their networks
with traffic. Let them eat WiFi! So I think Motorola's v600 is just the tip
of the WiFi cell phone iceberg.

evDO. 1xRTT is nice, but evDO will be amazing. With a theoretical top speed
of 2.5 megabits per second, evDO rivals WiFi in throughput, but with
greater latency. It won't be as good as WiFi for highly interactive things
like gaming, but it will work where WiFi won't: anywhere you have cell
coverage.

Smart switching. This is crucial, and the biggest missing piece. The phone
has to be smart enough to know which data service to use. While still
hooked to your belt or in your pocket, the phone has to automatically sense
nearby hotspots and judge their quality. When an incoming data request
comes in from a paired device (be it a PDA, laptop, whatever), the phone
needs to determine the fastest available data connection and handle the
patch-through transparently. If WiFi is available, use that, and pick the
best of any available hotspots. If WiFi goes down, switch over to evDO (or
even throttle all the way down to 1xRTT) without letting the user know
there's been a problem.

Of course, great battery life. This is a given in a phone with three, maybe
even four wireless technologies. If the phone only works for a few hours,
it doesn't do a whole lot of good. This phone should stand up to a hard
day's data use and still have enough juice left over for a couple hours a
day of voice calls. While I have no problems with charging a phone every
day, it should last the day without a car charger or swapping batteries.

My ideal phone doesn't exist yet, but we're close, and there's really no
reason to believe it won't exist. All the pieces are there already, but no
one has put them all together in an acceptable package. This is the
communications module I'm waiting for. How about you?

Stepping out of shadows of WiFi

Yahoo! News - Stepping out of shadows of WiFi: "Bluetooth -- a short-range wireless technology -- is finally coming of age.

After years of standing in the shadows of WiFi, its much broader reaching wireless counterpart, Bluetooth has found its niche: a burgeoning market for wireless phones and headsets."

Nice story, but it misses the point. A Bluetooth phone and headset are only part of a PAN, Personal Area Network. Add a Bluetooth PDA, a Bluetooth high-quality camera and a Bluetooth GPS, and we're getting somewhere.

A Matter of Degrees

I've been arguing for a while now about why I not only believe that PDAs
are NOT dead, but why I think smartphones won't kill them. It comes down to
what you do with your device and what you don't bother to do with your
device.

Smartphones, even the popular Treo, are phones first and foremost. This
means that certain concessions have to be made in terms of size, screen,
etc. PDAs can be larger, have bigger screens and more features. In fact,
the very things that make a good smartphone make a poor handheld computer,
and vice versa.

I love the Treo. I've recently had the chance to fondle the 650 from Sprint
and it is absolutely beautiful. It's a gorgeous screen, the keys are
wonderful, the networking works fast. It's a great smartphone. But I could
never be happy using it as my only device. The screen, sharp as it is, is
too small. It's too small for writing, it's too small for reading, it's too
small for movies and gaming.

I don't want to live with the limitations of a phone. This is why Bluetooth
is so great. I can have a phone that's great at being a phone (my Sony
Ericsson T608) and I can have a handheld computer that offers a
no-compromises computing experience.

My Tapwave Zodiac has everything that a smartphone could never get away
with. It has a large screen, great battery life (because it doesn't have to
power the phone radio), massive internal memory and plenty of expansion
room. My Zodiac is a computer, capable of word processing, full screen web
browsing, even PowerPoint. While the Treo can do some of this, it can't do
it as well, and most "smartphones" can't handle Office documents at all.
With my PalmOne IR Keyboard, my Zodiac is as good as a miniature laptop,
only more pocketable and a LOT cheaper than a Sony VAIO U75.

Smartphones have their place. That place might be good enough for a large,
even majority portion of the folks looking for more than a "dumbphone" can
offer in mobile information management. But handheld computers aren't going
to go away, and serve a vital -- and growing -- niche of those that need
something close to a laptop experience with no compromises in portability.

The Communications Module

I've been thinking a lot about this idea that handhelds need WiFi to be
viable. I don't think that's true. (Big surprise.) But in thinking about
it, I came up with an idea that I can't believe more people don't champion.

Why is the iPod such a success? It wasn't the first MP3 player on the
market. It wasn't even the first to use a hard drive instead of flash
memory. In fact, there are lots of MP3 players out there that look better
on paper than the iPod. They have more storage for the price, support more
formats, have bigger screens capable of playing video, double as voice
recorders, have more features. So why do these devices lose to the iPod?
Because the iPod, like so much else from Apple, does what it does extremely
well, but no more.

The iPod is a perfect example of a divergent device. Instead of combining
more and more features into a do-everything box, the iPod specializes and
focuses on music storage, organization and playback. That's all it does,
but Apple has put so much thought into the design of the iPod that it's
easier and more pleasant to use than the more powerful, but more
complicated, competition.

So why is there so much outcry from the geek community towards convergent
solutions? Divergence works. Mobile devices work best when they focus on
one thing and do it really well. So why should a PDA have a GPS, or WiFi,
or a camera? It shouldn't. A PDA should have a big screen, lots of memory,
a user interface designed for pen input, strong battery and Bluetooth.
Nothing else.

Why Bluetooth but not WiFi? Because Bluetoth is what makes divergence pay
off. You can have several devices that all do their own thing perfectly,
with no compromises, and they can still borrow each others' resources when
they need them. I can use my handheld as my central "console", doing
everything with it that I'd do with a laptop, only without lugging around
the laptop. But through Bluetooth on the PDA, I can pull GPS coordinates
from a Bluetooth GPS, I can pull in images from a Bluetooth-enabled
digicam, and I can connect to the internet through a Bluetooth cell phone.

None of that is new. But this is what occurred to me that really reframed
the concept. The phone in this scenario isn't really a phone. It's the
communications module of the PAN. Sure, it does voice (preferably through a
Bluetooth headset), but in this case its role is providing the connection
to the internet. Now here's the interesting part. Some newer phones, like
the Motorola v600, support WiFi as well as cellular technology. Doesn't it
make more sense to keep the communications technology in the communications
module? Why put WiFi in the handheld, increasing the cost and complexity
while reducing battery life, if you can use a Bluetooth connection to the
phone and use WiFi to access the internet from there?

Hot television

Macleans.ca | Top Stories | Technology | Hot television: "Why is a TV executive so agitated about online pirates? Because he, like most media honchos, has seen the scary numbers indicating that the next big craze in illegal file-sharing is not music, not movies, but television. High-quality digital copies of popular shows such as Desperate Housewives, The West Wing and, well, pretty much anything else on the tube are available online a few hours after they air, many in high definition. Pirates with HD-ready TV sets can enjoy these shows in widescreen format and in better picture quality than what regular cable provides -- no need to spring for satellite feeds or specialty channels. All they need is a high-speed Internet connection, a modicum of computer know-how, a little patience -- and a willingness to risk a lawsuit. With the spread of personal video recorders like TiVo, 'people are ignoring the old notion that you watch your program at 8 o'clock when CBS or NBC decides you should be watching it,' says Mike McGuire, a digital rights expert with research company Gartner Inc. 'And they're using the Internet to do that.'"

infoSync World : Review Centre : Sprint Treo 650 - Page 2

infoSync World : Review Centre : Sprint Treo 650 - Page 2: "It is always difficult to follow on success, but palmOne's fourth generation Treo manages to do just that. It takes the already first-rate design of the Treo 600 and rounds out the feature set, adding more polish, pizazz, and tweaks to perfect the design. The memory overhead problem is the only major gaffe on the Treo 650, although the current lack of Bluetooth DUN support and out of the box voice dialing is also disappointing. On the flip side, excellent software integration, a first-rate thumbboard, good camera, and record-breaking battery life make the Treo 650 a compelling product, and one that replaces the Treo 600 as the standard-setting communicator on the market."

Finding Your Currency

Fast Company | Finding Your Currency: "If giving of yourself is crucial to building successful relationships, then the next question to answer is 'What do I have to give?'

'What if I don't have much to offer?' You know, I'm shocked and a bit sad by the number of people who ask that when I explain that to build strong relationships -- the kind that will consistently grow sales, boost your career, or just pack your social calendar -- you have to give, give, give, and not keep score .

So, I'm here to slap some of that 'not enough' thinking out of you. Everybody has a currency to give, or some capacity to help somebody else fulfill their mission or vision of themselves in some way. Trust me on this point: I've seen some pretty low thresholds for what counts as currency.

Jokes can be a currency. If you can make people laugh, you're helping them have a good time, and they'll be more up for doing business or hanging out with you. Heck, sometimes just being someone empathetic or decent to talk with is a currency in the right (or wrong) environment. Yet, I'm confident that you possess currencies much stronger and much more abundant than these simple examples. You've just got to know how to find them, something even I struggled to do for a while."

This is a really interesting article. Once you start thinking of your unique skills and attributes as currency other people value, a whole new way of thinking opens up.

Opera introduces new Fit-to-Window Technology

MobileRead Networks - Opera introduces new Fit-to-Window Technology: "Opera Software is pitching a new idea that promises to put and end to the problem of rendering Web pages effectively regardless of screen size.

A couple of days ago the company announced its new Extensible Rendering Architecture (ERA), blending together all of the company's existing rendering technologies -- including Small- and Medium-Screen Rendering (SSR/MSR) for mobile devices and TV-rendering -- to tackle the problem head on with dynamic resizing.

Opera's ERA technology enables dynamic resizing to adapt Web page content to fit any width - from projectors to mobile phones, and everything in between. Furthermore, printing Web pages will often leave out parts because the Web page is wider than the paper, and ERA can make the Web page fit the width of the paper for complete printouts."

Read/Write Web: First eBook Purchase

Read/Write Web: First eBook Purchase: "Regarding pricing, I still think eBooks need to come down in price some more in order to attract new customers. Amazon are offering the hardcover book for US$17.37, which is only a couple of dollars more than I paid for the electronic version at Fictionwise. However I would've had to pay some hefty delivery charges to buy the hardcover at Amazon (one drawback of living on the other side of the world), so the zero delivery cost of eBooks is a big plus for me.

The other factor was the immediate delivery of the book via Internet download. Being in New Zealand, typically I have to wait 3-4 weeks for Amazon deliveries. New Zealand book retailers as far as I know don't stock this book yet (and even if they did, book prices are generally significantly higher in NZ stores than on Amazon - even factoring in delivery). So eBook format is probably the only way I'd get to read Wolfe's new book before Christmas.

All up, NZ$20 isn't a bad price to pay for a brand new book I can't wait to read - so I'm happy"

The Death of Anchors = The End of One-Way News

BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis: "Yes, the exit of Dan Rather, stage left, spotlight off, tail twixt legs, marks the death of the anchor, the extinction of the trusted news star.

But it's more than that. It's the toppling of journalism on a pedestal. It's the end of news as a lecture. It's the death of one-way media.

That is what anchors embodied. And that is what we, the people formerly known as viewers/listeners/readers in the audience, have rejected.

We rejected the old system of trust: If we trusted the person, it was thought, then we trusted what he said. Anchors equaled automatic authority. But no more.

Oh, trust is still important. In fact, in this new, distributed world of ours, it is even more important. Trust is our organizing principle. Trust is what makes weblogs, Technorati, eBay, Craigs List, RSS, chat, and email work: We pay attention to those we trust; we filter out the rest. We each decide whom to trust; it's no longer decided for all of us."

What does this have to do with Writing On Your Palm? One word: moBlogging.

How to Explode TV News... And Turn a Broadcast Into a Conversation

BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis: "When you've done all that, you've turned news into a conversation.

You've turned the spotlight away from the anchor -- the mere personality who got you in trouble -- and you turn it onto the news itself, where it belongs.

You've engaged the people you used to call your viewers, who used to just sit there but have since started walking away, into the news.

You've made anchors what they should be: supporting players, second bananas. (And you've saved yourself a helluva lot of money along the way.)

And you've informed the public. Isn't that what news is about instead of an anchor's fame?"

Brighthand on the Treo 650

: "There's a lot more to this great improvement on the most popular smartphone ever invented, but it's going to take a few weeks to flush out all the functionality for a thorough review. For now I'll sum it up this way...

Everything that made the Treo 600 so hot is even better. The Web, messaging, the camera, the better screen, better buttons, and more powerful applications all join to make the Treo 650 the newest 'must-have' smartphone, and when I can back it up to and restore from a card it will be... dare I say it... as close to perfect as it gets in a smartphone. With the Treo 650 palmOne has once again raised the bar.

Considering that the competition has yet to reach the Treo 600's quality, reliability, feature set, and ease of use, the 650 just has to annoy every competitor in the market as much as it will delight every Treo 650 owner."

PalmAddicts: THOUGHT: Wi-Fi for T5 Coming Soon!

PalmAddicts: THOUGHT: Wi-Fi for T5 Coming Soon!: "The PalmOne WiFi card for the T5 is close. I witnessed the latest beta being loaded and run on a T5 today and it worked fine. The same driver is backward compatible with the T3 as it was also loaded on a T3 right after the T5. Although a release date was not given it appears that this beta is very stable and is close to being a final. Those with a T5 (I don't have one) hang in there as it appears the WiFi capabilities will be with you soon."

Whoa! How come no one saw this? Lawmakers OK anti-piracy czar

MSNBC - Lawmakers OK anti-piracy czar: "Buried inside the massive $388 billion spending bill Congress approved last weekend is a program that creates a federal copyright enforcement czar.

Under the program, the president can appoint a copyright law enforcement officer whose job is to coordinate law enforcement efforts aimed at stopping international copyright infringement and to oversee a federal umbrella agency responsible for administering intellectual property law."

Palm OS US Retail Lead Gains 10 Points

PalmInfocenter.com: Palm OS US Retail Lead Gains 10 Points: "Palm OS is the market share leader in the U.S. retail handheld market. Based on new data from the NPD Group, the Palm OS US Retail share grew 10 points over the year, mainly on strong sales of the palmOne Tungsten E.

Based on data released by the NPD Group, a retail sales tracking firm, U.S. unit share for Palm Powered handhelds in September 2004 was 76 percent, exceeding that of all of its competitors combined, and gaining roughly 10 points since September 2003.

According to NPD, Palm OS market share was boosted by strong sales of palmOne's wireless handheld products, particularly the Tungsten E, which accounted for 29 percent of all handheld sales in the month. Other Palm OS licensees also contributed, with the Garmin iQue 3600 standing out as the most popular handheld priced over $400 in September.

Retail sales as measured by NPD include sales through retail stores, e-commerce, and distributors. NPD tracks retail sales of handhelds through a combination of domestic retail sales reports and weekly surveys of approximately 35,000 U.S. consumers."

Batteries improving but still guilty as charged | CNET News.com

Batteries improving but still guilty as charged | CNET News.com: "During the holiday season, many wish for greater understanding between people and nations. Others just want better batteries.

Although electronics manufacturers have made substantial strides in getting their devices to eke more life out of a battery charge, one of the chief complaints among consumers remains the perceived short run time of audio players, notebooks and other devices.

'You can never be too rich, too thin or have enough battery life,' said Stephen Baker, an analyst at NPD Techworld. 'While everyone is focused on improving battery life, we still have a long way to go.'"

Wired News: A Kinder, Gentler Copyright Bill?

Wired News: A Kinder, Gentler Copyright Bill?: "The Senate passed a scaled-back version of a controversial copyright bill Saturday, keeping a provision that imposes severe penalties on people caught with camcorders in movie theaters but scrapping other provisions that copyright-reform activists had criticized.

On Saturday, the Senate met and passed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2004, or SB3021 (.pdf), a revised version of the Intellectual Property Protection Act (HR2391), which had cobbled together a handful of copyright-related bills. Now the bill heads to the House of Representatives for consideration in early December.

Digital rights groups said while there is still cause for concern in the bill, it is a vast improvement over the previous version."

The Sad State Of The Palm Economy, And Other PDA Ramblings

Kent Pribbernow has gone off on a bit of a rant about the state of the PDA industry in general, explaining why he bought a Pocket PC and why it will probably be his last PDA. I found this comment particularly interesting: "It's almost too funny to watch Palm and Pocket PC users go at each others throats without realizing that BOTH SIDES have lost the war."

Kent acknowledges that PalmOS devices lose some of their vaunted stability and ease of use when adding third party software. He also notes that Windows Mobile is a sub-par user interface and that the quality of Pocket PC hardware has been declining. But his conclusion is short sided.

Kent thinks that PDAs have become marginalized between notebooks and smartphones. I don't see it that way. I think that a PDA and a Bluetooth-enabled "dumbphone" make a better, more flexible solution than either a notebook or a smartphone, and I wouldn't trade my Zodiac for any Pocket PC, much less an unpocketable notebook. I like having a truly pocketable office that is with me all the time, and the ability to connect to the net for email, IM and web browsing anywhere. One of Kent's biggest problems with PalmOS offerings is that they generally don't offer built-in WiFi, and that's true. What Kent hasn't realized yet is that WiFi is over, that the combination of Bluetooth and a 3G cell phone makes WiFi irrevelant. Why limit myself to only connecting to the net at "hotspots"?

The sky isn't falling, and the PDA isn't dead. Nice as smartphones are, I can do things on my Zodiac/T608 combination that simply aren't possible on a Treo 650. And even if I had $2,000 to spend on one, I wouldn't try carrying a Sony VAIO U75 in my pocket. Sorry Kent, but I'll stick with my PDA and get some real work done.

NewsGator Online

NewsGator Online: "You could spend your entire day searching for information on the web. With more news, blogs and other content added every day, it gets harder and harder to sift through and track the information that’s important to you. Plus, the volume of content makes it harder to find the good stuff. With NewsGator Online and NewsGator Outllook Edition, you can quickly find all the articles, news, and topics that interest you from across the Web."

I've been using this for a couple days now, and I can't believe I'll go back to a "static" aggregator. With this I can upload an OPML file containing the feeds I read, then access those feeds anytime, anywhere. I can use my full-blown web browser at home (Firefox), I can view scaled down mobile-friendly HTML on the go or I can just download posts from all the blogs I read as email messages into SnapperMail. Mark something as read in one place, and it's read everywhere else. Never read the same article twice. This is a great way of staying on top of all the sites you read.

Tapland - Tapwave Zodiac News: Would You Like Fry's With That?

Tapland - Tapwave Zodiac News: Would You Like Fry's With That?: "Tapland has received information from Tapwave that the Zodiac is heading to the electronics retailer Fry's Electronics within the next week or so. The Sunnyvale, California-based retailer with 28 stores in 5 states will become the newest brick and mortar partner, joining CompUSA's 220 store locations and J&R Music's Manhattan showroom."

Yay! This is great news, especially since Fry's is supposed to be opening a new store here in Aurora, CO!

Tapland - Tapwave Zodiac News: Audible Player Coming Soon

Tapland - Tapwave Zodiac News: Audible Player Coming Soon: "According to sources at Tapwave, a Zodiac-enhanced and Tapwave Certified version of Audible.com's Audible Player is under development and should be available within two weeks. The Zodiac optimized version will offer exclusive features that aren't available in the standard Palm OS version including support for the highest audio quality format. The standard Audible Player for Palm OS does not currently take advantage of the Zodiac's 480X320 hi-resolution landscape display, and the dual expansion slots are not supported. The Tapwave Certified Audible Player will be a welcome improvement for Zodiac owners who are Audible Listeners."

While I certainly welcome this, I'm not sure I don't already have it. I recently downloaded the latest PalmOS 5 version of Audible and on my Zodiac, I get a full 320x480 display, support for blanking the screen and full support for both SD card slots and internal memory in both RAM and VFS forms.

Who will buy a T5?

Tom Stoneham's Palm Blog: "I work in a humanities department at a university and I can tell you that only about 30% of my colleagues know what a flash drive is. And those who do know about them see them as simple replacements for floppy disks: easier to carry and higher capacity, but essentially no different.

Now think what the T5 offers to those people: a way of carrying their files (and email and PIM data) with them which allows them to view and edit the data without a desktop. For most people, that sounds like a true alternative to a laptop. Laptops are big and heavy (especially cheaper ones with bulky PSUs), they are a fiddle to set up on a train or a plane, and unless you make it you primary computer, there is no automated synchronization of data. In contrast the T5 is small and light, has a good battery life (and a small PSU), has a bright clear screen which is perfectly adequate for quickly looking something up in a document, allows simple editing of Office files, and is automatically synchronized at the touch of a button.

To put it bluntly: the T5 could be the killer device for people who want to transfer data between home and work (or two offices) but don't want to lug around a bulky laptop. At the moment they use floppy disks (or flash drives or simple email files to themselves) and the T5 offers a significant increase in functionality for them."

The Treo 650's Achilles Heel

: "palmOne's Treo 650 is now available through Sprint, and it will be released by many other wireless carriers in the coming months. While this is an eagerly-awaited smartphone, the first people to receive them have discovered that the Treo 650 can hold fewer applications and files than they expected."

Vision: Digital Media

Vision: Digital Media: "The means of media are now in the hands of the people.

The people we used to call consumers, readers, or viewers (let's call them citizens now) will take more and more control of what we used to call media (I don't know what new name to give it, but now it's as much about conversation as it is about consumption). The elements of this upheaval:

* Control: I say the most revolutionary invention in media was not the Gutenberg press but the remote control. It and the cable box, the VCR, and the TiVo enabled us to control consumption of media -- and we took advantage of that. Bad TV died; good TV rose in the ratings; HBO was born; TV exploded; TV improved -- thanks to the good taste and newfound control of the American public.

* Creation: Now come tools that let us create media: blogging software (which is merely history's cheapest easiest publishing tool connected to history's best distribution network) and all those neat things that come with Macs today. They allow us to make text, photo, audio, and video media. And what we make has value. Jonathan Miller, head of AOL, told me that 60-70 percent of the time spent on his service is spent with content created by his audience. That's where the money is.

* Marketing: At the same time -- thanks mostly to Google and blogs turning links into assets with tangible value -- we the people have the ability to market content; we do every time we link to it. Jon Stewart's blockbuster appearance on Crossfire got a few hundred thousand viewers on CNN but ten times that online thanks to the links of Fark and bloggers.

* Distribution: And the means of distribution are getting cheaper and faster: BitTorrent shares the cost of distribution across the network; RSS automates it; broadband will soon be part of the public infrastructure like roads or even a fundamental right like voting. So look again at Stewart on Crossfire: That segment didn't need carriage on a cable network with big clearance "

The Future of Copyright?

The Gripe Line Weblog by Ed Foster: "Members of the jury, it is my sad duty today to now present the closing arguments in the prosecution's case against the defendant you know as Ms. X. I say it's sad because we all hoped that the passage of new copyright statutes last year -- popularly known as the Maintaining Mickey Mouse Mandates Act of 2010 -- would sufficiently deter crimes of this nature. As we have seen in this court, that unfortunately did not prove to the case with Ms X.

'The facts here are not in dispute. On or about a week ago last Sunday, Ms. X did willfully and illegally obtain on the Internet a pirated copy of the 2008 cartoon feature 'Cinderalla Meets the Little Mermaid.' You heard the government's expert witnesses testify that secret detection technology indicated the film was indeed subsequently played on her television set. And you heard the defendant herself freely confess that she and she alone was involved in this heinous crime.

'Naturally, some of you might suspect one or all of her three children were themselves willful participants, and that she confessed to keep her children from being the ones sitting before you today. It's true that under the MMMM Act, age is no excuse. But it also specifies that parents also bear full responsibility for any act of copyright infringement committed by their children just as if they had willfully committed the crime themselves. This court, in its infinite mercy, has chosen to accept her confession, and therefore so should you.

'As this is one of the first prosecutions under the MMMM Act, you may also not understand why the defendant is not represented by counsel. Let me just assure you that the intent of Congress in this respect was very clear. Movie piracy is a crime that threatens the very fabric of American society. There can be no defense.

'Finally, I know even the most hard-hearted of you might feel the state is going little too far in asking for the death penalty in this case. But under the MMMM Act, we in fact have no choice. If the infringement is willful, it is a capital offense.

"Members of the jury, I have every confidence that you will do your duty. And that's not only because of the fact that, if you don't, things might get a little more uncomfortable for you in your own cells. So in the matter of Ms. X versus the special U.S. prosecutorial district for Anti-Copyright-Terrorism in Guantanamo Bay, I ask you to return the only verdict you are allowed to render. Guilty as charged."

The Complete Mobile Desktop

Inspired by James over at jkOTR, I decided to find out if I could run a
complete mobile blog with pocketable equipment. Turns out it's remarkably
doable, and a whole lot of fun.

The Hardware

First up, my Tapwave Zodiac, though any Bluetooth-enabled PalmOS device
would do. I like the Zodiac because it has a huge screen (which the PalmOne
Zire 72 lacks) and a huge battery (which the PalmOne Tungsten T3 lacks).
The PalmOne Tungsten T5 would probably work as well as my Zod. Plus, the
Zod looks cooler.

Next, my phone, a Sony-Ericsson T608. This rare beauty was the first
Bluetooth CDMA phone Sprint carried, maybe the first ever. It works
wonderfully with my Zodiac and frankly, I rarely see the phone. It usually
stays in my front pants pocket and does its think invisibly.

Lastly, my keyboard, a PalmOne Universal Wireless. This is a refinement of
ThinkOutside's IR Stowaway design, adding a full number row and centering
the PDA stand. I suppose I could have gone with a Bluetooth keyboard, but
I've yet to see one in person that doesn't wobble. (ThinkOutside's
Bluetooth Stowaway is raised from a central platforms, and see-saws back
and forth if you're a ham-handed typist.)

The Software

This is where it gets tricky. Out of the box, the Zodiac doesn't really
help me. The web browser thaht comes with it is based on an old, outdated
version of NetFront (now that Sony's gone, how about licensing the new,
xHTML+CSS-compliant NetFront to other vendors, eh?), and it comes with no
mail client at all. How am I really supposed to keep in contact, stay on
top of the blogosphere?

Mail client: SnapperMail. This is the best mail client available for
PalmOS, bar none. Period, end of story. I'm still finding new and nifty
features that make things easier. Mostly, it's just well-written,
interoperates well with other PalmOS applications, and syncs flawlessly
with GMail. If you've never tried SnapperMail and use any other mail client
for PalmOS, you're missing out.

Web Browser: Web Browser, based on NetFront. I haven't changed this one
because frankly, I don't use it all that much. Most blogs are also
available as RSS feeds, a much better way to keep track of what you've read
and what you haven't.

RSS Aggregator: Hand/RSS. From StandAlone Software, this will be a gem if
they work out a few more quirks. While it's supposed to support OPML input,
I was never able to get it to work. But after I manually entered the RSS
feeds for the blogs I read regularly, this has been wonderful.

I open up Hand/RSS and update my feeds. Now I see two panes, a list of
headlines on the left and the summary for the selected headline on the
right. Depending on the blog, I can read the whole entry there, or I can
select the Open Link menu option to open the page for that post in Web
Browser. Then when I go back to Hand/RSS I'm right where I left off. Once
I've either read or decided not to read everything for a particular blog, I
tap the Mark All as Read menu option and move on to the next blog.

Let's say I run across something cool, and want to post about it on one of
my sites. I just tap the Email menu and a new message opens up
automatically in SnapperMail. The title is filled in with the post title
and the message body contains the text of the post. From here I edit
accordingly (often just putting blockquotes around the quoted text with a
shortcut-Q shortcut I've created), add my own commentary and address it to
one of the email-to-blog addresses I have for my sites that let me post by
email. Then I tap Send, the email goes out across the Bluetooth connection
to my phone and from there to the internet, and I automatically go back to
looking a Hand/RSS and start reading the next post.

Pretty cool, huh? I can also, obviously, write entire articles originally
in SnapperMail (like I've done with this one) and send it out as soon as
I'm done.

Oh, one more thing. In the background, as I do all this other stuff, I'm
running VeriChat and logged into Windows Messenger (jkirvin@yahoo.com) and
Yahoo Messenger (jkirvin). So if I need to ask someone something about an
article I'm writing, they're just an IM away and then I'm right back to
work.

Now that I'm working as a consultant, I'm far more mobile than I was
working retail. And with the solutions listed above, I just as productive
on the road as I am at home. I just might be doing more.

eBook Culture: The Long Tail and how it applies to eBooks

eBook Culture: The Long Tail and how it applies to eBooks: "Wired has a very interesting article this month, called The Long Tail. It's on how niche markets are the future of entertainment media - music, books, movies and more.

Because the Web effectively enables 'unlimited selection', the economics of scarcity is becoming obsolete. Wired says:

'For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.'

This is what I was getting at in my previous post, a rant against the Tom Clancys of the book world. Why would I read that kind of rubbish, when I can choose from a huge variety of books that fit my niche tastes?"

Google Does Books

http://www.ebookculture.com/archives/2004/10/google_does_boo.php

SearchEngineWatch reports that Google has just launched a new
program, enabling publishers to submit books for inclusion into their beta
Google Print search service. Google's stated goals are to enhance their
search capabilities, by including book content to their huge Web database,
and make money off ad revenues. They've said they won't be earning
commissions off the books themselves, unlike their main competitor in this
space Amazon.

The main part of this news, IMO, is that Google has announced it will scan
and save the full-text of a book:

"A key difference is that the new program provides an automated
account-based service for publishers to manage what's included in the
program plus a share of ad revenues. In addition, the program scans the
full-text of books, not just small excerpts."

Google is apparently schmoozing with publishers over in Europe, as we speak.

Just Browsing Thanks!

But it's important to note that Google isn't getting into the eBooks
business (yet?). Users won't be able to read in full the books in Google's
database. Google says:

"Google Print is designed to help you discover books, not read them from
start to finish. It's like going to a bookstore and browsing - only with a
Google twist. Google searches across entire books in order to find the
pages that are most relevant to your search."

There will be "content viewing limits" to enforce this!

Obligatory Web Platform Rant

I think this is another step forward in the eBooks with Web Platform vision
I've been writing about for the past few weeks here on eBook Culture.
Google Print, along with Amazon (who will be a key player in this space
too), will provide search functionality for people to find and browse their
favourite books - just like people do with websites and blogs nowadays.

Google Print is a pointer to the future of book browsing - and by
extension, reading. The increased availability of book data and the
enhanced functionality that the Web brings to it (filtering,
recommendations, etc), will surely help book sales and encourage people to
start reading books again. For a start, people will be able to find books
that they want much more easily than they can today.

And of course when digital books (eBooks) finally make their mark on the
mainstream, Google Print will be very well positioned to offer compelling
content services to complement digital books - advanced search options,
mixing 'n matching content, recommendation systems, open reviews, etc. The
possibilities are mouth-watering!

26 Benefits of Ebooks

http://www.ebookculture.com/archives/2004/10/26_benefits_of.php

"Found on the ebook-community mailing list, this excellent set of reasons
why eBooks rock. I couldn't have put it better myself, so I'm just going to
cut 'n paste all 26 benefits here. Thanks to Michael Pastore of Publishers
Cafe Blog for posting it and allowing others to re-post it (another
addition to my RSS feeds too!):

1. Ebooks promote reading. People are spending more time in front of
screens and less time in front of printed books.

2. Ebooks, faster to produce than paper books, allow readers to read books
about current issues and events.

3. Ebooks are easily updateable, for correcting errors and adding
information.

4. Ebooks are searchable. Quickly you can find anything inside the book.
Ebooks are globally searchable: you can find information in many ebooks.

5. Ebooks are portable. You can carry an entire library on one DVD.

6. Ebooks preserve books. The library of Alexandria was burned and the
collection ruined. Richard Burton's wife, after his death and against his
wishes, destroyed a book he had been working on for ten years. The original
manuscript of Carlyle's The French Revolution was lost when a friend's
servant tossed it into the fire. Ebooks are ageless: they do not burn,
mildew, crumble, rot, or fall apart. Ebooks ensure that literature will
endure.

7. Ebooks are good for the environment. Ebooks save trees. Ebooks eliminate
the need for filling up landfills with old books. Ebooks save
transportation costs and the pollution associated with shipping books
across the country and the world.

8. Ebooks can be printable: and thereby give a reader most or all of the
advantages of a paper-based book.

9. Ebooks defy time: they can be delivered almost instantly.

10. Ebooks defy space: ebooks online can be read simultaneously by
thousands of people at once.

11. Ebooks are cheaper to produce and to purchase.

12. Ebooks are free. The magnificent work of Project Gutenberg, and other
online public libraries, allow readers to read the classics at no cost.

13. Ebooks can be annotated without harming the original work.

14. Ebooks make reading accessible to persons with disabilities. Text can
be resized for the visually impaired. Screens can be lit for reading in the
dark.

15. Ebooks can be hyper-linked, for easier access to additional information.

16. Ebooks -- with additional software and hardware -- can read aloud to
you.

17. Ebooks let you tweak the style. Many ebooks allow readers to change the
font style, font size, page size, margin size, colors, and more.

18. Ebooks may allow the option for the addition of multimedia: still
images, moving images, and sound.

19. Ebooks, with their capacity for storage, encourage the publishing of
books with many pages, books that might be too expensive to produce (and
purchase) in paperback.

20. Ebooks are evolving. As technology develops, ebooks may contain new
features. For example, a book of recipes may contain a recipe calculator to
figure how much maple syrup is needed to bake 200 cookies. An ebook that
prepares you for the GRE could include an interactive test. An ebook about
politics might allow you to click a link and register to vote, or send an
email to a Presidential candidate that tells him he is not a good
environmental steward.

21. Ebooks empower individuals to write and to publish, and in this way
help to challenge "the crushing power of big publishing", that excludes so
many authors from the New York City publishing circus. Publishing can move
from the impersonal and profitable, to the personal and pleasurable.

22. Ebooks allow publishers to publish (and readers to read) works by a
larger number of authors, and works on a wider variety of topics. Critics
of traditional book publishing (such as Jason Epstein and Andre Schriffin)
state that economic pressures have reduced and limited the number of
authors and topics that traditional publishers will now produce.

23. Ebooks defeat attempts at censorship. All these works were banned:
Analects by Confucius. Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Ars Amorata by Ovid. Pro
Populo Anglicano Defensio by John Milton. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne.
Wonder Stories by H.C. Anderson. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. The
Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Ulysses by James Joyce. ... Many of these
books were confiscated, burned, or denied availability in libraries,
bookstores and schools. Ebooks guarantee that readers maintain their right
to read.

24. Ebooks -- thanks to the simplicity and speed of publication and
feedback -- allow authors to experiment in many themes and styles.

25. Ebooks help paperbook publishers to sell paperbooks. Cory Doctorow has
explained that the giving away of ebooks, for free, has helped to sell the
paperback editions of his stories and novels.

26. Ebooks are good for paperbook publishing. By setting an example for
diversity and freedom of expression, ebooks may motivate the stagnant book
publishing industry towards the renewal of small presses, the end of the
blockbuster-bestseller publishing mentality, and a healthier balance
between the needs of commerce and culture."

One artist's view of filesharing

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5059

Scott Andrew Lepera has some great comments on the pros and cons of file
sharing.

"Recently, one poster wrote something to the effect of 'I'll never support
filesharing of any kind; I just found two of my songs on an illegal P2P
network.'

My response was: only two? Dude, I'd be worried. It sounds like your songs
might not be worth stealing. (I don't think he was amused.)"

gapingvoid: cities are dead?

gapingvoid: cities are dead?: "Steve Fassman makes an interesting point in the comments of my latest Paris post:

Cities are dead.

With the internet the prime reason for the existence of cities is gone. Cities exist to make it easier to talk to other people to conduct business. The Internet has taken on that mantle and you can have your conversations between basically anyone, anywhere.

I fear that the great cities like Paris will not be able to keep up with the times.

I can relate to this certainly, though I think cities will be with us for a long while yet. Just that now there's a new game in town, and cities will have to get used to competing more with other viable alternatives. Being stuck in the boonies is no longer the life sentence it once was. And perhaps living in the city will no longer offer the obvious economic advantages over staying down on the farm.

Before we see the decline of the cities, though, I think we'll see the decline of the skyscaper, for similar reasons we saw the decline of the battleship in the 1940s, in favor of the aircraft carrier. Limiting firepower, even massive firepower to a single delivery locus is an inefficient way to do it.

So suddenly we see the internet replacing the elevator..."

This is interesting. I grew up in Houston, a city of 4 million confused Texans. Then in high school I moved to Nazareth, PA. (I now live in Denver, CO.) Let's compare those two locations.

Houston:
4,000,000 people
* Hispanic (37.4%)
* White Non-Hispanic (30.8%)
* Black (25.3%)
* Other race (16.5%)
* Two or more races (3.1%)
* Vietnamese (1.7%)
* Chinese (1.2%)
* Asian Indian (1.0%)
* American Indian (0.8%)
* Other Asian (0.6%)

Nazareth:
6,000 people
* White Non-Hispanic (97.8%)
* Hispanic (0.9%)
* Black (0.5%)

Think there was a little culture shock?

But what if it doesn't matter where you live? One of the most attractive things about writing to me is that it's location independent. I can write here in Denver, my writing partner can write in Wichita, Kansas, and I can move to Canada or New Zealand and continue writing just like I did here in the US. I listened to an interesting podcast recently about "digital migrant workers", using as an example the Americans that moved from LA to Wellington for four years to work on Lord of the Rings. Writers differ in that we don't have to follow the work and we don't have to stay put, either. We carry the work with us, literally in the case of writing with mobile technology.

The Blogger Secret

Okay, for future reference, there is a trick to Blogger's post-by-mail
system. You have to send email from the same account registered with
Blogger. I was trying to send from my GMail account, and I kept getting
an email from postgateway@blogger.com saying:

Your message could not be posted because of the following reason(s):
jkirvin.****@blogger.com, Invalid Content Type

I changed SnapperMail to use GMail for my POP3 and my own SMTP server, and
now it works like a champ! W00t!

Test of SnapperMail

It works! I can post by mail!

Death of the Tablet PC

jkOnTheRun: Death of the Tablet PC: "At some point in the Tablet's short history we've lost a very critical point and that is that the Tablet PC must be very mobile. You MUST have it with you when you need it or it is useless to you. But we have gone the other route, and instead we've taken the svelte Tablet PC and stuck a full keyboard on it, and in some instances an optical drive. That means it's much bulkier and heavier than the original slate form. 'But it's more useful with a keyboard.' That point of view is just so WRONG that it shows people really don't get it. And the Tablet is something you must GET to want one. Having the convertibles around clouds the purpose of using a Tablet and guarantees it is less mobile than it should be. And the message that sends out to prospective owners who WANT to get a Tablet but are sitting on the fence is counter-productive. 'OK, it's a laptop that happens to be a Tablet. So why do I need both. Oh, I see, true Tablets aren't useful by themselves, you have to have a keyboard.' No wonder sales of Tablets are so low. The target market is CONFUSED about what a Tablet is and who can blame them. What's wrong with a nice slim Tablet PC with a small portable wireless keyboard for those times when you need it. That correctly relegates the keyboard to its proper role with the Tablet. 'Don't use it much but it's easy to carry if I do.' Once it's permanently attached it becomes a necessity, and it's much harder to convince the prospective customer that he really doesn't need it. And that is a very mixed message."

Palm Blogging, Part 2

I'm posting this from VersaMail (there seems to be something odd going on with SnapperMail and Blogger's email-to-post feature) and keeping my fingers crossed. I tried AvantBlog, and it was less than ideal (no titles). All of the Java-based solutions crashed my Zodiacs, and mo:Blog looks great, but crashes on exit. Why are so many Palm Blogging solutions stability-challenged?

More on Palm Blogging

More on Palm Blogging
I'm posting this with Vagablog, one of the PalmOS blog clients out there. This one actually seems to work fairly well, with one glaring exception: it doesn't support post titles. Darn it all to heck! The search for mobile nirvana continues.

Goodbye Hotmail, Hello GMail

Pocket PC Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves: "I have had my Hotmail account for years, going back at least to 1999 and possibly as early as 1998. I started using it a bit more than just as my Passport/Instant Messenger account when Outlook XP was released and it supported Hotmail accounts. I have never cared for the Hotmail web interface. Too slow and it used to insist on putting any link you click on in a frame. This summer I got a GMail invite and figured what the heck. You can never have too many email accounts, right? Wink

GMail gave me a gig of storage, which should last me a few decades for normal text emails versus Hotmail's 2MB, but Hotmail allowed access from Outlook, so it was an even trade. Hotmail 1, GMail 1.

Last week, GMail began offering SSL POP3 access and they turned it on for my account a few days ago. It works quite nicely. The only issue is emails in your 'Sent' folder on the GMail service appear in your Inbox when you download via POP3. The service is still in beta but even if they don't change that 'feature' I can live with it. Hotmail 1, GMail 2.

Recently, Microsoft began turning off Outlook/Outlook Express access to new Hotmail accounts and are starting to do so for existing accounts. It appears mine got turned off yesterday. Hotmail 0, GMail 2. GMail's SSL POP3 access also works on Windows Mobile 2003 and higher inboxes, which is a bonus. Make that Hotmail 0, GMail 3."

Tapwave Zodiac 2 Review at The Register

Tapwave Zodiac 2 [printer-friendly] | The Register: "The Zodiac 2 is undoubtedly a fine piece of hardware, that offers the best mobile gaming experience I've had. It's certainly hard not to recommend the Zodiac to PDA owners who are also keen gamers. There's no doubt it's better than a PDA at gaming, and on a par with other such gadgets at all the personal information management stuff. If you're in the market for a PDA and you know you'll want to play games on it, do take a look at the Zodiac."

All Hail SnapperMail!

I've just started using SnapperMail in conjunction with my GMail account,
and it is a frickin' revelation. Here's a blurb from Snapper:

The latest version is now version 2.1.0 (our third update in
the last 2 months). Improvements over 2.0.4 include:
- 12x faster IMAP syncing over v2.0.4
- AOL Mail is now supported, including other non-SEARCH compliant IMAP
servers
- Smaller fonts (in LoRes and HiRes) to improve message readability.
- Wider support for IMAP servers
- CRAM MD5 Authentication for POP3 and IMAP
- UI refinements and bug fixes

Currently we are running a 25% upgrades discount for owners of version 1
wanting to switch to version 2 or users wanting to crossgrade to a better
edition. To get the discount, use coupon GIMME2EXTEND when purchasing from
your user account at www.snappermail.com/download/login (expires end of
this month).

Google GMail tested with SnapperMail
------------------------------------
Google's GMail POP3 access rolled out last week and has been successfully
tested with Premier and Enterprise Editions (SSL is required so Standard
and Lite Editions are incompatible). Not all users have GMail access yet as
Google is rolling it out in stages. Users should check their accounts under
"Settings". SnapperMail GMail configuration is available at
www.snappermail.com/support/isp.cfm#82

I can attest that the GMail support not only works, it works well. It can
be automated (though with Bluetooth to my phone, not sure I want to do
this, don't know what will happen if I'm on a call) and it's even fairly
quick on my CDMA connection. I particularly like the icon in the lower
right corner of the screen which toggles between stylus mode and "finger"
mode. With finger mode, everything becomes oversized so you can use it with
a fingertip with alarming accuracy. Neat!

More on this as I put it through more paces.

eReader.com New Releases Feed

eReader has an RSS feed for new releases, complete with "Add to Cart" buttons. This is a great way to keep up with new ebooks.

http://www.ereader.com/new_releases.rdf

The Skinny on Sprint's Treo 650

PalmAddicts: SENT IN: FINALLY...the truth from Sprint...: "1) Business clients started shipping today

2) Existing Sprint Treo 600 customers can buy an upgrade to the T650 today

3) The Treo 650 goes on sale to all customers tomorrow, at which time the webpage will be updated. It may not show up in the Retail section of the SprintPCS website, but should be in the Business side."

New Clio Announced, But Will Anyone Care?

: "Data Evolution Corp. has announced plans to release the Clio NXT, an updated version of a device that skirts the line between handheld, laptop, and tablet.

Much of what makes these devices interesting is in their unusual design. Like its predecessor, the Clio NXT will sport a rotating screen that will allow it to either be used as a traditional laptop or as a tablet (see picture below). It will include both a nearly full-size keyboard and on-screen handwriting recognition."

Based on Windows CE 4.2. Can anyone say "application compatability"?

PalmInfocenter.com: Tapwave Reaches the UK, Singapore and S Korea

PalmInfocenter.com: Tapwave Reaches the UK, Singapore and S Korea: "Since launching the awarding-winning Zodiac multimedia handheld in the U.S., international demand has been high. In response, Tapwave recently formed partnerships with well-established companies in three major global markets to bring the Zodiac to local store shelves and online abroad.

In the UK, Tapwave has an exclusive partnership with the Dixons Group, who is selling the Zodiac through PC World, Dixons, Dixons Tax Free Stores, and Currys. In Singapore, Tapwave named ECS Holdings, LTD., as their exclusive distributor. ECS Holdings is a well-established local Singapore distributor who carries and promotes leading consumer electronic products including Apple and Hewlett Packard. In Korea, Tapwave is partnering with Sonokong, who is co-branding the Zodiac and promoting it through retail and online distribution.

'With our new partners, we can now fulfill demand in these key international markets...and we are not stopping there,' said Byron Connell, co-founder of Tapwave. 'In the months ahead, the company will continue to evaluate new opportunities and expand distribution into other markets.'"

PalmInfocenter.com: palmOne Holds European PDA Retail Lead

PalmInfocenter.com: palmOne Holds European PDA Retail Lead: "A new consumer retail analyst report from Europe says that palmOne help its overall lead in PDA sales though the European consumer retail channel in September.

Thanks largely to its success in France, palmOne took the number one position in the PDA retail market in September 2004 in the Top 5 European countries, according to the latest report from Context's SalesWatch, which tracks sales of business and consumer technology products through indirect channels of distribution in Europe.

Although palmOne's consumer market share dipped in July, the company regained some strength in August and September, increasing to 42% against rival HP's 36% market share in September. While its entire portfolio of products sold well, the Zire 31 helped secure it a higher market share than HP also in the German consumer market."

VersaMail GMailSetup

Great screen shots showing how to set up VM for Gmail. Neat!

The Science of Best Sellers

MSNBC -: "The science of best sellers: If you've just written the Great American Novel, is it better to get a quick plug on the "Today" show or benefit from slow, steady word of mouth on the Internet? A group of researchers did a statistical analysis of Amazon.com's best-seller list — and concluded that slow and steady is better for sales than a short, sharp shock."

DeLay Supporters Move to Protect His Spot

Yahoo! News - DeLay Supporters Move to Protect His Spot: "Supporters of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay proposed a Republican rules change Tuesday that would protect the Texan's leadership position if he were to be indicted by a Texas grand jury that already charged three of his associates.

House Republicans are likely to approve Wednesday the change in the rule that would force him to step aside if indicted. The show of support would be an endorsement of DeLay's position that the Travis County investigation is a partisan attack.

Currently, rules of the House Republican Conference, which comprises all House GOP members, requires leaders to resign the party post if they are indicted for a felony punishable by two or more years in jail. The proposed change would eliminate the step-aside requirement for nonfederal indictments.

The Texas grand jury is investigating alleged campaign finance irregularities in 2002 state legislative races. Republican victories in those contests enabled DeLay ultimately to win support for a congressional redistricting plan that resulted in the GOP's gain of five seats in this month's elections."

Ugh Active Sync strikes again

For all of you I am the 50 year old. Jeff talked about being brand loyal to Palm (NOT). If Tapwave gets a WiFi, I may switch. Anyway I am the alleged guru of PDAs at a certain electronic store. To my horror I had 3 HPs come in one day with sync issues. After contacting "Yoda" the force failed. The damn things won't sync. No matter what I tried nothing worked. A day later one Pocket PC customer asked which PDA to get. After telling him the horror stories with another salesperson adding his comments, I SAID' "GET A PALM or ZODIAC". I am sure many people will tell me different. But after knowing of 7-10 people having problems with Active Sync, I would say there is a serious issue with the thing. May the Palm be with you.

Maxium Geek

Okay, my writing partner Josh and I have a new Podcast, Maximum Geek.

The blog for Maximum Geek is

http://www.solomedia.org/podcast/

The feed is

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MaxiumGeek

Enjoy!

Publishers Awaken to an "E-Book Society"

OhmyNews International: "A recent AFAICS Research report concludes that just four years from now e-books will be so well established that a typical price for mobile hardware will be less than $35. It maintains that areas where print and paper were once dominant now 'look set to give way to digital data and the electronic display.'

One of the founders of AFAICS, Guy Kewney, who runs newswireless.net, said he was pulled into the project 'against my better judgment.' He seems to have been persuaded by his partner Nick Hampshire, a longtime e-book advocate.

Earlier this year an 'e-book society' Web site opened concentrating on design for e-books as a distinct form of publishing. The new angle is the development of e-book hardware in Japan and a policy in China to support digital publishing in future. "

E-Books Blamed for Global Warming Increase

SEATTLE, Washington - 'I thought I was helping the environment,' bewailed Margaret Yee, a systems analyst with a lending institution, 'I had no idea e-books were so damaging to the environment.' Her feelings were echoed by many after a new study revealed that global warming sharply increased after the advent of the e-book. 'We assumed e-books were simply along for the ride,' said researcher Allen Arther, 'There was no assumption on our part that they were a causative factor. But the facts simply cannot be explained any other way.'

'[There are] money-hungry, techno-challenged dweebs at the helm.'
-- Ross Childrezza, head of People's Right to Read
The problem, postulate researchers, is the incredible amount of energy required to successfully pay for, download, and open the e-books. 'Particularly using the Adobe scheme, we found that to download a 2 megabyte e-book required a user actively participating in various logins, registrations, and downloads for an average of 12 hours, resulting in an average of 173.2 megabytes of data transfer,' explained Arther, 'Boiling all that down to kilowatt hours of energy shows that e-books consume approximately 18 times the fossil fuel of an equivalent published work.'"

The Jeff Kirvin Show: Episode 1, the First Episode

The Jeff Kirvin Show: Episode 1, the First Episode

That's right, I've started my own podcast. Point yer aggregator of choice (I prefer Doppler) to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheJeffKirvinShow and have a listen.

Wired News: Senate May Ram Copyright Bill

Wired News: Senate May Ram Copyright Bill: "The Senate might vote on the Intellectual Property Protection Act, a comprehensive bill that opponents charge could make many users of peer-to-peer networks, digital-music players and other products criminally liable for copyright infringement. The bill would also undo centuries of 'fair use' -- the principle that gives Americans the right to use small samples of the works of others without having to ask permission or pay.

The bill lumps together several pending copyright bills including HR4077, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, which would criminally punish a person who 'infringes a copyright by ... offering for distribution to the public by electronic means, with reckless disregard of the risk of further infringement.' Critics charge the vague language could apply to a person who uses the popular Apple iTunes music-sharing application.

The bill would also permit people to use technology to skip objectionable content -- like a gory or sexually explicit scene -- in films, a right that consumers already have. However, under the proposed law, skipping any commercials or promotional announcements would be prohibited. The proposed law also includes language from the Pirate Act (S2237), which would permit the Justice Department to file civil lawsuits against alleged copyright infringers.

Also under the proposed law, people who bring a video camera into a movie theater to make a copy of the film for distribution would be imprisoned for three years, fined or both."

Okay, the file-sharing crap is bad, the draconian punishment for bootlegging is overboard, but...

They're going to make it illegal to skip commercials? Am I reading this right? When did this happen?

You know, if I don't get a job soon, I may just have to pack up and move to Canada anyway.

Wired News: Senate May Ram Copyright Bill

Wired News: Senate May Ram Copyright Bill: "The Senate might vote on the Intellectual Property Protection Act, a comprehensive bill that opponents charge could make many users of peer-to-peer networks, digital-music players and other products criminally liable for copyright infringement. The bill would also undo centuries of 'fair use' -- the principle that gives Americans the right to use small samples of the works of others without having to ask permission or pay.

The bill lumps together several pending copyright bills including HR4077, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, which would criminally punish a person who 'infringes a copyright by ... offering for distribution to the public by electronic means, with reckless disregard of the risk of further infringement.' Critics charge the vague language could apply to a person who uses the popular Apple iTunes music-sharing application.

The bill would also permit people to use technology to skip objectionable content -- like a gory or sexually explicit scene -- in films, a right that consumers already have. However, under the proposed law, skipping any commercials or promotional announcements would be prohibited. The proposed law also includes language from the Pirate Act (S2237), which would permit the Justice Department to file civil lawsuits against alleged copyright infringers.

Also under the proposed law, people who bring a video camera into a movie theater to make a copy of the film for distribution would be imprisoned for three years, fined or both."

Okay, the file-sharing crap is bad, the draconian punishment for bootlegging is overboard, but...

They're going to make it illegal to skip commercials? Am I reading this right? When did this happen?

You know, if I don't get a job soon, I may just have to pack up and move to Canada anyway.

Awesome copyright article in The New Yorker

The New Yorker: Fact

Under copyright law, what matters is not that you copied someone else’s work. What matters is what you copied, and how much you copied. Intellectual-property doctrine isn’t a straightforward application of the ethical principle “Thou shalt not steal.” At its core is the notion that there are certain situations where you can steal. The protections of copyright, for instance, are time-limited; once something passes into the public domain, anyone can copy it without restriction. Or suppose that you invented a cure for breast cancer in your basement lab. Any patent you received would protect your intellectual property for twenty years, but after that anyone could take your invention. You get an initial monopoly on your creation because we want to provide economic incentives for people to invent things like cancer drugs. But everyone gets to steal your breast-cancer cure—after a decent interval—because it is also in society’s interest to let as many people as possible copy your invention; only then can others learn from it, and build on it, and come up with better and cheaper alternatives. This balance between the protecting and the limiting of intellectual property is, in fact, enshrined in the Constitution: “Congress shall have the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited”—note that specification, limited—“Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

The future will not be published on paper...

gapingvoid: seth on "branding is dead": "Great thoughts on the same subject by the ever-wonderful Evelyn Rodriguez:

Another hint: Don't look for books to portend the future of brands. Or the future of anything for that matter. The unfurling edge of the unfolding future is being revealed in the real world all around us (observe!) and, secondarily, recorded within blogs, daily and monthly media. A book takes 12-18 months to publish after it's written (and that's after you've written the proposal, found an agent, condensed all your thoughts and research into cohesive drafts and revised the drafts and submitted to your editor and...)

Reminds me of a story: Some clever-dicky journalist type once asked a great Jazz musician (it may have been Thelonious Monk, but I'm not sure) where he thought 'Jazz was going.'

The musician replied, 'If I knew where Jazz was going, I'd already be there.'"

eMedia trumps print in this one crucial area. It's much, much faster. That's why Josh and I are pursuing careers as serialists rather than novelists. A monthly serial rather than a novel every year or two keeps me in more constant contact with my readers, especially given that my email address will be in each and every issue. Coupled with a discussion forum for Solo Media, we're hoping that this will lead to a much more active conversation between writers and readers, not necessarily a collaborative effort, but greater sense of engagement from the readers (and encouragement for the writers).

gapingvoid: why branding is dead

gapingvoid: why branding is dead: "Somebody sent me an e-mail asking why I thought 'Branding is Dead'.

'C'mon Hugh, it's not necessarily true just because you and Doc Searls say it is.'

Well, I belive it to be true for a few reasons.

1. The term 'Branding' was pretty meaningless when I started in advertising in the early 1990's. Ask six people to define what 'Branding' is and you will get seven different answers. The longer I've been in the business, the truer this has become. Perhaps it's time to pull the plug.

2. 'Branding' has no point other that to define the brand-metaphor. The actual business is secondary. In the end, it's in the business of changing the landscape in order to make the map more aesthetically pleasing to look at.

3. Branding asks the question 'What is it?', when the question really should be 'What is it for?'

4. 'Branding' is backwards looking. It's all about capturing past associations. It's never about what the business could become, but protecting what came before.

5. 'Branding' is all about articulating top-down, hierarchal control of the conversation. 'This is what it means.' It's EGOlogy, not ECOlogy.

6. I generally find people who like using the word 'Brand' a lot are assholes.

7. I find the people who disagree with me the most are in the branding business themselves, and have no incentive to agree with me. In fact, quite the opposite.

8. I think the world is changing. I think branding-as-high-art serves the purpose of a reality that no longer exists.

9. Perhaps most importantly: Markets are conversations. The conversation I am having with my friend about your product is not 'The Brand'. It is a conversation between me and my friend. It's none of your frickin' business until I tell you it is."

I find number 3 particularly insightful, yet just off the mark. The real question is "who is it for?"

This is the difference between PalmOne and HP. HP is old-school, brand-conscious. They design the iPAQ to be brandable, to be "something", that being a "multimedia companion," whatever that is. They design to spec, building a device that will look good in bullet points.

PalmOne starts by imagining their ideal user and building something that person will just have to have, because it suits their needs so perfectly. The T5 is only the most recent example of this kind of thinking. PalmOne's greatest hits, from the Zire 71 to TE all the way back to the original Pilot, also fit this methodology. Business, marketing, writing, it all comes down to the same thing.

Start with the audience, not the show.

The Decline of Brands

Wired 12.11: The Decline of Brands: "Even as companies have spent enormous amounts of time and energy introducing new brands and defending established ones, Americans have become less loyal. Consumer-goods markets used to be very stable. If you had a set of customers today, you could be pretty sure most of them would still be around two years, five years, ten years from now. That's no longer true. A study by retail-industry tracking firm NPD Group found that nearly half of those who described themselves as highly loyal to a brand were no longer loyal a year later. Even seemingly strong names rarely translate into much power at the cash register. Another remarkable study found that just 4 percent of consumers would be willing to stick with a brand if its competitors offered better value for the same price. Consumers are continually looking for a better deal, opening the door for companies to introduce a raft of new products."

I totally, completely understand this. That's why PalmOne doesn't bug me. Yeah, used their handhelds for many years, but right now they're not making the mest experience for me. Tapwave is. So I buy a Zodiac. A friend of mine has a Tungsten C that is slowly dying (the Y key is now intermittant) and while he owns a Bluetooth cell phone and lusts for my Zodiac (he has the 64MB C packed to the gills), he resists buying a Zodiac because he feels some brand loyalty to PalmOne. Granted, he's also over 50, which makes me wonder if brand loyalty is a generational thing that we Xers and younger don't get.

Thoughts?

MPAA touts lawsuits, new P2P-fighting software | CNET News.com

MPAA touts lawsuits, new P2P-fighting software | CNET News.com: "The lawsuits are being accompanied by a series of full-page newspaper advertisements, running in college publications and in mainstream titles including The Wall Street Journal.

One of these ads shows a finger clicking a mouse, alongside a headline emblazoned in red: 'Is this you?' That's followed by a long list of user names and IP addresses typical of those found on file-sharing networks such as Kazaa, eDonkey, DirectConnect, Grokster and Lime Wire, which are named specifically. 'If you think you can get away with illegally trafficking in movies, think again,' the ad warns."

That's why smart pirates download from Usenet.

Someone Else That Doesn't Get It

Paper And Technology [Part 2] eBooks: "Even PDA's are not so couch friendly. Frankly, scrolling down with my little PDA pen to read the next page of whatever I am reading sometimes gets cumbersome. What if you fall asleep and lose your pen? If you couch is anywhere near what mine is like and has nice big spaces in between the couch pillows, good luck finding it. Be prepared to buy extra pens."

Apparently, the author has never even tried reading an ebook on a PDA, or she would have noticed that you can page down with buttons.

Palmcasting

I've written a detailed how-to on podcasting with a PalmOS device over at Raving Media. Check it out!

http://www.ravingmedia.info/2004/11/palmcasting.htm

Blueteething

After too long an absence, I'm online again with my mobile device. I've had a few mobile Internet devices before, convergent devices like the Pocket PC Phone Edition and Microsoft Smartphone, and I've spent enough time troubleshooting Treo issues that I feel like I've owned one. This time, I'm doing something different. I'm going with a "two body" solution, tied with Bluetooth.

I've been a proponent of Bluetooth PANs (Personal Area Networks) for a while, even though I haven't really been able to do much with them myself. My first Bluetooth device was the Zodiac, which I only got this summer. (Actually, I had a Tungsten T3 for two weeks before that, but I really only had it long enough to know that I did not like the battery life, or lack thereof.) But shortly before getting a Bluetooth PDA, I switched to Sprint from T-Mobile, and Sprint doesn't officially offer any Bluetooth phones. Sprint, like Verizon, uses the CDMA cellular protocol, which while offering better signal quality than the more widespread GSM, also draws more power. Puttng Bluetooth in a CDMA cell phone is supposed to offer substandard battery life, which is why no one offered Bluetooth phones from Sprint or Verizon. That's changed a little recently with the Motorola V710 from Verizon and an LG phone coming out in the indeterminate future from Sprint, but phone afficianados know that there actually was a Sprint Bluetooth phone earlier in the year, if you knew who to ask.

This is the Sony Ericsson T608, a CDMA cousin to the popular GSM T68i and T610. It was only available to business customers and by request, never really advertized. But I recently managed to acquire one of these beauties (thanks, Bob!) and while my PAN is not yet complete (I'd like to add a Bluetooth headset and GPS), it's a lot more functional than it was.

In case you've been hiding under a rock for the last few years, Bluetooth is a short range radio technology that takes the place of cables. Think of it as either wireless USB or a radio-based infrared that doesn't need line of sight. Bluetooth-enabled devices can share resources without being physically connected. I can sync my Zodiac via Bluetooth without getting up off my couch, and now I can not only dial the phone from the Zodiac, I can get on the internet from the Zodiac without even taking the phone out of my pocket. As long as I have my cell phone on me (and what 21st century American doesn't?) I have internet connectivity anytime, anywhere. WiFi? I don't need no stinkin' WiFi!

Case in point. Last night, I went to go see "The Incredibles," Pixar's new movie (very good, btw). I recognized most of the voice actors, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson, but I couldn't place the voice of Bob, the main character. I pulled out my Zodiac, and with my phone still in my pocket, connected to the internet and brought up the Incredibles page on the Internet Movie Database. Once I knew Bob was voiced by Craig T. Nelson, I could go back to watching the movie without distraction. I should point out that there was no WiFi in the theater, so it wouldn't have done me any good to have a WiFi-enabled device.

Pairing with a Bluetooth phone has completely changed the way I use my Zodiac. I've said it before: a connected PDA is a different experience than an unconnected PDA.

How did I get this set up? I'll give you some tips and tricks in my next article.

Brighthand Reviews hx4700

: "The word 'big' keeps coming up when I talk about this model.

In some ways, big is good. The hx4700 has the biggest screen and the biggest battery of any of the VGA Pocket PCs.

However, big isn't always what you want. This iPAQ is physically much bigger than its nearest competitors, and it has a much bigger price, too: $650.

It's nice having what's nearly a laptop in your pocket, but it had better be a big pocket. At least that pocket won't be crowded with a lot of spare cash, as you probably won't have much left after buying the hx4700."

MSNBC - Bloggers offer no apologies over impact on news

MSNBC - Bloggers offer no apologies over impact on news

Blogs have drawn attention to political stories that more established media outlets then report on, and exposed flawed journalism by those same newspapers and television news programs. But some at the gathering said they face a near-constant struggle to establish the credibility enjoyed by professionals.

“Things get picked up by bloggers that take awhile to get picked up by the mainstream media,” said Mark Glaser, a columnist for the Online Journalism Review who writes about Web logs. “Bloggers have to start from scratch in building trust.”

Not on this site. I think my regular readers know I'm an opinionated pain-in-the-ass. But the article does bring up some interesting points about volunteer journalism. When should established media sit on a story? Is there any longer a real stigma to being "scooped?" While bloggers have a lower barrier to entry than reporters, their status "among the people" also tends to make them more receptive to criticism and quicker to make corrections; does this mean that in time bloggers might become the preferred source for news?

Payloads for RSS

This is the best definition of what podcasting really is that I've yet seen:

Payloads for RSS: "What if, in the middle of the night, while I'm not using my computer, it downloads huge video and audio stuff to my local hard drive. Then when I arrive in the morning there are fresh bits, news clips, a song of the day, whatever, provided by all kinds of content providers, from big TV networks like CNN and MSNBC, to a Dutch school where kids are taking a film class using inexpensive video recorders and iMacs."

Oh, Good Lord...

Sunrise News: "I have abandoned the development of the PalmOS version of my viewer, at least for now. The main reason is that I seriously doubt whether PalmOS will survive in the long term. At any rate, the news of late has not been favourable: PalmOS's dwindling market share, Sony exiting the US and European markets, PalmOne investigating the use of Linux and WinCE in their products, no OS6 devices on the horizon. Hopefully my assessment will turn out to be wrong, but I simply cannot afford to spend time, energy and money into marketing, supporting and maintaining a product for a platform with such an uncertain future.

I'm pouring all my energy into the Windows CE version of the viewer. I expect to release the public beta in February.

I'm also investigating the feasibility of creating versions for SymbianOS and RIM Blackberry. These are attractive platforms from a marketing standpoint as they are both seeing significant growth."

SO IS PALMOS!!! It's that the growth is mostly in smartphones, which the BS numbers you state don't count!

How many people have written off PalmOS, only to be surprised and chagrined later?

eBookwise

"eBookwise

This website:

· Sells eBooks for “migrated” GEB 1150, GEB 2150, REB 1200, and GEB 2200 devices. Learn about migration and more.

· Sells an eBook reader called the eBookwise-1150 (a re-branded GEB 1150 device) for $99.95, which includes a $20 content bonus. Learn more.

eBookwise already sells over 6500 titles with many more being added in the coming weeks and months. Please make sure you register now for free at eBookwise so we can keep you updated on our progress!"

While I still think ebooks work better on PDAs, it's nice to see someone breathing new life into the Rocket eBook. If you like the idea of ebooks but just find the PDA screen a bit too small, give this a look.

The Future Will TiVo-ized (not to mentioned blogged, RSSed, and deep-linked)

Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits: "Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, declared today that 'the Internet has become our entire business environment, not just another medium for distribution,' and challenged online journalists to become activists in taking the message back to their employers that 'we can't afford to continue to operate in separate silos.'

Delivering a keynote speech at the Online News Association conference in Hollywood, he said a change is taking place right now in which broadband access, Web search, RSS feeds, and weblogs are coming together to 'unlock the content from any vessel in which we try to contain it.'

We are entering a future in which 'the franchise is not the newspaper, the broadcast station, or even the website,' he said. 'The franchise is the content itself. ... Get ready for everything to be Googled, deep-linked, or Tivo-ized.'

Curley acknowledged the difficulty of building a new economic model for journalism built around 'atomic content,' but pointed to bright spots in the transformation, especially the 'emergence of an engaged audience' that can be seen forming around the news in the context of weblogs."

No, the Sky Isn't Falling

MobileRead Networks - palmOne: No more high-end PDAs in future: "The Independent was able to chat with palmOne chief Ed Colligan, uncovering some more interesting information on what we might expect from palmOne in future.

Read closely the three following quotes from the article (I marked the important parts in bold):

These changes [enhancements of the Treo 650], Mr Colligan believes, will help PalmOne to compete with manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson and Nokia, as well as persuading existing Palm users to switch to a smart phone.

'The PDA market has been flat to declining,' he says. 'But I look at the mobile computing and communications business and see that growing rapidly. We are cannibalising ourselves. If PDA sales are shrinking, it is because we have a smart phone business.'

[T]he low-end market [of PDAs] is one where Mr Colligan believes he can make money - and where the competition struggle.

Mark my words: There won't be any high-end PDA from palmOne anymore. Not today. And not in a year. Colligan CLEARLY says so himself. He says he wants his (btw shrinking) customer base turn towards smartphones. He says there cannot be place for both, PDAs and smartphones, and without doubt he is in favor of smartphones. And lastly, to avoid spreading rumors that palmOne is completely abandoning the PDA market he mentions that the low-end sector is still of his interest.

So only a shift in strategy?

I suspect there is more what Colligan is not telling us. Notice that palmOne has had some serious distribution problems. In Europe, you'll hardly find anyone on the streets with a Treo in his hand. Colligan says there was a problem of over-supply; but he fails to explain why his only European partner is UK Orange so far, and what he could do to win other important alliances with European phone network companies. This just doesn't sound right. And if palmOne is really focusing on, I quote, 'mobile computing and communications', why then did they decide to release a Tungsten T5 without WiFi?"

Because WiFi does not a high end handheld make. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Bluetooth and a 3G cellphone make WiFi obsolete. Notice that all of the PalmOne top-end devices (Treo 650, Tungstens T3 and T5, Zire 72) have Bluetooth. I think PalmOne realizes, moreso than the general public, that no one solution is perfect for everyone. I have absolutely no interest in buying a smartphone. I've owned two, and convergence requires too many compromises. In fact, even though I've got 1.3GB in my Tapwave Zodiac, most of that music for while I write, I'm seriously considering ditching the music, loading up my 1GB card with as many ebooks as I can, and buying an iPod for music and Audible. That means I'll have four devices to carry (Zod, keyboard, phone and iPod), five if I continue to carry my headphones in a retracting case. But each device will do what it does nearly perfectly, no compromises.

In a sense though, Morpheus is right. PalmOne will not be releasing a "technology demo" high-end handheld a la the HP hx4700. They're more focused on providing solutions, not gadgets.

On the Potential of Podcasting

Evil Genius Chronicles 11 14 2004: "It now seems like the strongest anti-podcasting meme is that of 'Podcasts take too long to listen to. I can read X blogs in that time.' It's tiresome to hear people over and over look at podcasts with blog-colored glasses. Because these people write blogs and read blogs and podcasts are in some cases (decreasingly so) associated with a sponsoring blog (such as this one), they think there is a one-to-one correspondence. When they have drank so deeply the blog kool-aid, everything tastes like blog to them. Ain't so, McGee. I frankly don't care how many text blogs you can read. As I've said over and over, audio carries far more extra-textual information and nuance and context than does the written text, so it is a fallacy that you are 'reading more'. You are reading more and getting less, so I think that issue is a wash. If you think the value of a podcast is solely contained in its words, you have missed the point by a mile. You get the words, you get the personality, you form a connection to the podcaster faster than you ever can from reading their text weblogs. It's not about speed of information datadump, its about the ease of feeling connected to another person.

Stop thinking of podcasts in blog terms, bloggers. If you have to score them, I'd take a stab that the DNA sources for them is 85% radio, 10% blog and 5% TiVo. Do you complain that 'I can't skim This American Life or The Howard Stern Show?' Is that really what is of value to you in a medium, how little you can pay attention to it while paying lip service to having 'consumed the content?' God help us all if that's the best we can do."

I like this for a few reasons. One, it explains better than I've yet managed why I enjoy listening to Audible at least as much as reading ebooks. A good narrator can add a lot to the experience.

Two, I like the idea of creating a new medium, and I respect the difficulties in conveying what makes it both special and different from what's already out there. I now describe myself as a "serialist", and most people still go, "huh?" Maybe this time a few years from now they won't.

And finally, I'm interested in the phenomenon of podcasting. I haven't got into it much yet, but it sounds really nifty. Has anyone figured out a good way to handle this on PalmOS?

Why Microsoft Outselling PalmOS "Handhelds" Isn't a Big Deal

Microsoft overtakes rival palm - (United Press International): "Palm has said the overall size of the handheld market is declining as more consumers shift to cell phones, MP3 players and other gadgets that incorporate electronic organizer features.

'Every time someone buys a Palm OS [operating system] smart phone, that's one person less buying a Palm OS handheld,' so shrinking handheld numbers are 'what you would expect,' said Michael Mace, chief competitive officer for PalmSource Inc."

Mace brings up a valid point. The Gartner numbers reflect only PDAs without cell phone functionality, meaning that the wildly successful PalmOne Treo is not counted (why do we have so much trouble in this country not counting things?). PalmOS still outsells Windows Mobile in the PDA/Smartphone space when all PDAs are taken into account.

What this number really means is that Windows Mobile licensees are still making a lot of dedicated handhelds, while PalmOne is joining Samsung and other PalmOS licensees in focusing on smartphones. So the real question is this: one piece or two? Who has it right: the Pocket PC-paired-via-Bluetooth-to-cellphone crowd, or the convergent PDA-and-cellphone-in-one crowd?

While I'm sure this marks me as a weirdo (yet again), I'm taking the middle way: PalmOS to a Bluetooth cellphone. More to follow.

Slashdot | A Projection Display For Your Pocket

Slashdot | A Projection Display For Your Pocket

"The German Fraunhofer-Instituts für Siliziumtechnologie is developing a pocket beamer. It uses a laser beam and a rotating mirror to display the image. Another laser and a photo diode is used to verify whether the displayed image is shown correctly, so the electronics can adjust the image when the beamer moves. No colors yet; 320x240 in nice shades of red is what they have now, but higher resolutions and color might be implemented later."

UPDATE: Sprint Says Treo 650 WILL Support Bluetooth Dialup

UPDATE: Sprint Says Treo 650 WILL Support Bluetooth Dialup: "In an earlier post this week, I railed against Sprint for disabling the use of Bluetooth on the new Treo 650 for laptop Internet access. Jeff Shafer from Sprint Business Solutions Public Relations contacted me and said the following:

It is important to note that the characterization [in your post] is inaccurate.

Due to some development deadlines, the phone has been launched as described, without the DUN [dial-up networking] capability. However, as part of a scheduled maintenance release of software (timing pending some testing), the DUN capabilities will be supported. We also support the functionality in the just released PPC-6601 (Pocket PC device). In no way is Sprint suppressing the functionality as you describe or with the motivations you assert.

I'm glad to hear that Sprint will be supporting this functionality and is not trying to double-dip on mobile business users. I also asked whether the commentator on my previous post was right about the terms of service being a concern, and Jeff responded, 'my understanding is that no, we do not have a restriction on these devices from a pricing/plan standpoint. This sort of use only represents a pretty small fraction of Sprint Vision customers, so we see it as one of those areas where if this is how customers choose to connect, we don't stand in the way.'"

Triple jkOTR Review- Complete desktop in your pocket

jkOnTheRun: Triple jkOTR Review- Complete desktop in your pocket: "I am quite happy with the Sony Vaio U-70 running the Tablet OS and the handwriting recognition engine built into the Tablet is second to none. It does a remarkable job interpreting even my lousy handwriting and converting it into clean, readable text. But when I am faced with a heavy writing session I need my keyboard. I do a lot of writing and the keyboard is the only way to go for pounding out articles like this one. Entering the text is only part of the equation as I have to do a lot of editing and corrections for larger articles and reports that I write. Sometimes it's necessary to move whole sections of text around inside the article and for that there is no better tool than a mouse. It is much easier to precisely select, move or replace chunks of prose with a mouse.

I have previously written how I incorporate the diminutive Sony U-70 into my daily workflow and I am still convinced it is the best computer for me. The news that Sony is going to bring an updated version of the U-70 to the US market is welcome and means we will likely see a lot more of the little workhorses in the near future. The Sony U-70 is so small and light it is easy to carry just about anywhere and it is so versatile it allows me to use it however the situation dictates. A lot of the writing I do takes place during unexpected blocks of free time that present themselves during the day, such as a cancelled meeting or better yet the meeting that finishes much earlier than anticipated. I might find myself with a half hour of time to spend working on a report that needs to get done so having the right tools with me is crucial.

I set out to identify and build the most portable fully functioning desktop I could and have settled on an arrangement I am very satisfied with. I started (of course) with the Sony U-70 and determined the components I needed to add were a good mobile keyboard with full-size"

David Hewson's diary: Creating an office for writing

David Hewson's diary: Creating an office for writing: "I was being interviewed not long ago by a charming chap who closed the questions with an earnest glance.

'Tell me you write with a pen and paper,' he pleaded. 'Not on a computer.'

Desk2 Oh no. Oh, no, no, no. The first book I ever finished (unpublished, thank God) some twenty five years ago was produced on a typewriter. Two thirds of the way through I wanted to change the protagonist's name. The pain... Technology's important to me for one reason alone: it saves time. I edit continuously, often writing 200,000 words to get those final 120,000 you see in a book. Anything that cuts down that workload is to be welcomed, which is why I give great thought to what I use and how it fits into my habits.

Recently I redesigned my office and what's in it completely. Here, for the record, is what happened to the place where ninety per cent of my writing life occurs (though not the thinking part, which is often outside, on a mower or down a country lane with the dog).

If you're thinking of creating a home office for writing, this is what worked for me."

jkOnTheRun: UPC or Pocket PC?

jkOnTheRun: UPC or Pocket PC?: "I do not think many people realize the utility of well equipped Pocket PCs and mobile professionals should not overlook them as valuable tools. I still use the Toshiba quite a bit, although the Sony has replaced a lot of the heavy work stuff. Most people probably don't realize that a properly equipped Pocket PC can provide 90% of the functionality of a good laptop or ultra-portable computer (UPC)."

James Patrick Kelly on DRM

p2pnet.net - the original daily p2p and digital media news site: "DRM is all-but useless. Just about everyone agrees on that - except the people who are trying to get rich on it, of course, and the entertainment industry, which is trying to convince itself that it actually works as a form of product protection, and ....

But you know how it goes.

Sci-fi author Jim Kelly wondered if DRM schemes are hurting his career.

'The way I see it, readers and rep are what really matter to a writer. Dollars should follow from a satisfied readership, although exactly how this happens in these times of technological and economic innovation is not immediately apparent, alas,' he writes in an Asimov's Science Fiction post, going on:

'I do believe that the net has irretrievably compromised twentieth-century notions of intellectual property and that no amount of DRM shenanigans is going to turn back the copyright clock.'"

PalmOne's Ed Colligan on CNETAsia

News & Technology - CNETAsia: "Some people suggest that Palm is lagging on the technology curve. Do you accept that?

I probably would have accepted that a year ago. I think the category defining products in this space are at PalmOne. You read any review of any smart phone and the Treo 650 wins. So I don't accept that premise.

I think the Tungsten T5 is very creative and trying to change the way handheld computers are viewed, too. Most of them are glorified organizers. That's fine. We're trying to do something different here where we create a very high capacity device that will allow people to carry their most important digital information with them. I think that will be a new trend in handhelds, and we're starting that trend in motion."

PDAs vs Microtablets

I've talked a lot recently about how the future of PDAs is in true handheld computing, being more than just organizers. But there's a new kind of PC just starting to surface that does essentially the same thing: the Windows microtablet computer. The OQO and Sony VAIO U series are prime examples of these. Not much bigger than PDAs (the OQO is a little bigger than a Toshiba e800, the VAIO U is about he size of an Apple Newton), these are full-fledged PCs in their own rights, running Windows XP and capable of anything a desktop can do. Why get a PDA that can sync with Word if you can get a pocket-sized PC that can actually run Microsoft Office 2003?

There are compromises both ways, but I think it breaks toward the PDA. While microtablets can do almost anything a desktop can do (I wouldn't try playing Doom III on them), they come with disadvantages, too.

The biggest is price. Compared to a $200-500 PDA, most microtablets are in the $2,000 range. For this, you get something along the lines of a 1GHz Centrino processor, 512MB RAM, a 800x600 screen and a 20GB hard drive. While these specs are impressive compared to a PDA, they're pretty slim by PC standards. Other than the size, you're not getting much bang for the buck.

So what, you ask. I'm not using this as my primary PC anyway. Well, that opens another can of worms: synchronization. While PDAs specialize in syncing data to a desktop PC, microtablets don't. Thre's really no easy or effective way to do it, at least not yet. So how do you keep your data straight between the microtablet and your PC?

The official answer, according to OQO, is that you don't. The idea behind microtablets is that they are your primary PC, that you plug it into a docking station in the office to use a full-size monitor, mouse and keyboard, then unplug it and pocket it when you leave. Nice idea, but in the age of MP3s (not to mention video), how many people can get by with a 20GB hard drive that already has 2-5GB reserved for Windows XP and Office? My home PC has over 60GB used with just my own CDs ripped and a few games loaded in addition to my work stuff. If I really get into buying music online, I'll have to add a second hard drive. You can do with with a microtablet by adding an external drive via USB or Firewire, but even I won't carry that much stuff around and I have no fear at all about looking like a tubby Batman.

While we're on the topic of data, let's consider loss. If I drop my PDA down a sewer grate, I'm out about $500, the cost of replacing my Zodiac and SD cards. If I drop an OQO, I'm out $1,900. That's a big difference, but let me ask you something. On your computer, what's more valuable: the hard drive, or the data on the hard drive? If you're using the microtablet as intended, you better damn well have bought an external hard drive, one with a "one touch backup" feature, and you better plug your microtablet in and back it up at least every few days. Because while if I drop my Zodiac down the sewer, I just have to buy a new Zodiac and sync it to get all my data back, if you drop an OQO and don't have a redundant backup, you're screwed. And lest you think this is a "well, duh" moment, let me ask you this. How many of you actually back up your desktop PCs regularly?

Microtablets are a neat idea, and I'm sure they'll be wonderful in niche situations, but they're not as good as high end PDAs for most business users. I'll still take the tandem of a good desktop and a good PDA over putting all my eggs in one very small basket any day.

Firefox on your Palm?

This week in Firefox news | CNET News.com: "Now that it has the Firefox 1.0 milestone under its belt, the foundation has identified three areas for future growth and development: cell phone and small-device browsing, desktop search integration, and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) distribution."

Zodiac owners have been crying out for a better browser. I'm about to pick up an elusive Sony T-608 (a Sprint Bluetooth phone that doesn't officially exist) so I can check my GMail on my Zodiac, and I would love to see a version of Firefox that would run on Garnet. How about you?

Microsoft grabs lead in handheld market | CNET News.com

Okay, I don't get this.

Microsoft grabs lead in handheld market | CNET News.com: "A wide choice of manufacturers, including HP and Dell, helped Microsoft, Gartner said.

'Business customers tend to steer clear of markets dominated by a single supplier, which is where the Palm OS market stands today,' Todd Kort, a Gartner analyst, said in a statement."

Has Kort really looked at the Windows Mobile market? HP and Dell are the only significant players. Viewsonic quit. Toshiba quit. Compaq was absorbed by HP. In retail, HP dominates the Windows Mobile side of the shelf just as much as PalmOne dominates PalmOS. There are niche players on both sides (Tapwave for PalmOS, Navman for Windows Mobile), but I don't think the vast variety of Windows Mobile devices is really the selling point. If anything, Windows Mobile devices tend to be more cookie-cutter similar to one another than PalmOS devices.

So why the Windows Mobile gains? Based on my experiences selling PDAs, I'd guess it's the Windows logo. Consumers naturally assume that Windows Mobile devices are more compatible with Windows on their desktops than PalmOS. While I freely admit that Windows Mobile device integrate better into Windows networks than PalmOS devices, but many consumers don't realize that Documents To Go, included free on most PalmOne devices, actually does a better job with Microsoft Office documents than Pocket Office.

PalmOne and the other PalmOS licensees need to do a better job of educating consumers on what these devices can really do, and point out that "Palms" are more than just organizers.

Diesel ebooks: download free ebooks in palm, microsoft & adobe

Diesel ebooks: download free ebooks in palm, microsoft & adobe: "A next generation ebookstore using Diesel technology to categorize over 35,000 titles so you can find and download your book in a snap. Our titles download in Adobe, Microsoft, and Palm formats to your computer, PDA or handheld. Test the technology with a free downloadable ebook today!"

1src Forums - Gmail on your Palm!

1src Forums - Gmail on your Palm!: "If any of you have GMail accounts, you can now use SnapperMail to retrieve your email using Gmail's new POP3 features!!

I tried out about 6 different email apps for the PalmOS, and the ONLY one I could get to consistently send and receive email from my Gmail account is Snapper Mail. Here's how to get it working:

Log into your Gmail account, go into Settings, select the 'Forwarding and Pop' tab, and enable the type of POP3 you want to do.

Next, launch SnapperMail and create a new POP3 account. In the 'Server' tab, fill in the POP3 server with 'pop.gmail.com', enter your full gmail email address as the username, and enter your password in the password field. In the 'Outgoing SMTP Server' field, enter 'smtp.gmail.com', enter your full Gmail Email address, and enter your password.

Finally, AND THIS IS IMPORTANT, tap 'More' and make the following settings:

For POP3 settings:
Set the 'Use SSL' dropdown to 'Always Secure (wrapped port)', set the port to '995' and leave the other checkboxes unchecked.

For SMTP settings:
Set the 'Use SSL' dropdown to 'Always Secure (STARTTLS)', set the port to either port '465' or '587' and leave the other checkboxes unchecked.

Set up the rules as you wish, and when you tap 'Send/Receive' you should be able to send and receive mail!

Works like a charm on my Tungsten C!"

PalmOne to mobilise email - vnunet.com

PalmOne to mobilise email - vnunet.com: "'We've not been banging our chest enough about how great our products are,' said PalmOne's European sales director, Philip Rambech. He predicted that the firm would for the first time see a 50/50 split in profits between its handheld and smartphone lines in the current financial year, but challenged the notion that handhelds are disappearing.

'The old, non-connected style of PDA might go away, but we're making all of our handhelds connected from now on,' he said, citing the example of the Tungsten T5, which was introduced last month. 'Our own studies show that users will connect it to email or the web via a Bluetooth-enabled phone,' he added."

Brighthand: Worldwide Handheld Market Up Over 13 Percent

: "The number of handhelds shipped worldwide was up 13.3 percent last quarter, according to figures from market-research company Gartner Dataquest."

PDAs dead? Ha!

Targeted Design

PalmOne has got a lot of flak recently from the PDA nerd crowd. Everyone was hoping the T5 would have had everything the T3 plus WiFi, Palm OS 6 Cobalt, and any other bells and whistles that could be crammed in there. The T5 was a step down, they cried. It had no WiFi. It had no Cobalt. It didn't even have a vibrating alarm or a cradle.

What these people don't see is that PalmOne had no intention of releasing a gadget-heavy drool device. Devices like HP's iPAQ hx4700 simply aren't PalmOne's style.

There are two ways to go about designing any product. One, you can build on specs. You compile a list of all the buzzword features out there and cram as many of them as possible into one box. This is the hx4700: it's got a VGA screen, Bluetooth, WiFi, SD and CF card slots, a removable battery, and even a laptop-style touchpad in place of the directional pad. It's not really designed for anything or anyone in particular, but it's got all the power and flexibility you could want. To do what? Well, that's up to you.

The second way to approach product design is to find a niche and exploit it. Target a specific kind of person, say, mobile businesspeople, and try to design a product that makes their lives and jobs easier. Put in anything you need to appeal to this market, but leave out anything that doesn't have a compelling reason to be there.

This is why the Tungsten T5 looks the way it does. The T5, with its drive mode, Documents To Go, easy Outlook synchronization and nearly infinite standby time (thanks to the flash memory) is a perfect information device for mobile executives. It comes with a cable rather than a cradle because you need the cable for drive mode and a cable is easierr to pack. It doesn't run Cobalt because it doesn't need to and Garnet is cheaper, keeping the cost down. It doesn't have WiFi because not all users need it, and those that do can buy PalmOne's WiFi card; the cost stays lower for everyone else.

Targeted design is the real "Zen of Palm," and it explains, rather well, why PalmOS devices still sell in better numbers than Windows Mobile devices. Rather than try to be everything to everybody, and doing it all in a mediocre fashion, PalmOS devices specialize in a particular type of user. Think about it. Compare the sleek and elegant Treo to the bulkier, try-to-do-everything iPAQ 6300. Which is the more efficient smartphone? Compare the Zodiad to... well, there hasn't really been a Pocket PC really good at gaming since Casio quit, but you get the idea. Most PalmOS devices have a specific type of user in mind. You can really tell if you have someone mismatched to the wrong device. And that's why when you find the right one, the fit feels natural, like the PDA was meant just for you.

This is where PalmOne still "gets it," and why I wouldn't hold my breath expecting them to make the ultimate "feature" PDA anytime soon.

Building Suspense: Story Questions

Over time, I've got some wacky critiques. The one I really don't get is when someone someone expects me to answer a story question as soon as I pose it. For example, take this excerpt from the first issue of my news series, The Unification Chronicles:
---
She walked over to stand next to him. "You understand why we're here. You know better than anyone why terraforming a dead world isn't viable politically with the folks back home."

He sighed. "Yes, Robyn, I know."

"Hey," she said. "Mars wasn't your fault. You did everything possible to avert—"

"It wasn't enough, though, was it?" Jack said. "And now we're passing up any number of worlds suitable for terraforming, taking unnecessary risks—"

"We're soldiers, sir. We're doing what we've been ordered to do."
---
Now, we've learned some important information here. We know that something bad happened on Mars, that Jack takes it personally, even though Robyn thinks Jack did all he could. Do we know what happened? No,, but we don't need to just yet. We will find out eventually, but only when it makes sense for the characters to think about it.

This is why point of view is so important, and why, thankfully, third person omniscient has fallen out of fashion. One of the best things you can do to lend authenticity to your stories is have the characters talk about things that they already know about as if they already know about them. First person or third person limited gives you the ability to hold things back from the reader because the point of view character either doesn't know them or just isn't thinking about them right now.

When you're talking to your friends, you don't say, "When I was at work the other day, where I've worked for seven years, something happened. I got the job because..." Your friends already know where you work, how long you've been there, you don't need to explain it.

Yet that's probably the most common complaint I get. My characters don't spend enough time explaining what they already know to the reader. In the above story, Jack does eventually think about Mars and what happened there, and that's when we find out, but it doesn't make any sense to bring it up sooner.

But you know what? The fact that some of my readers complain about this means it's working. The idea of dropping little hints at backstory like this is to pose a story question. Get the reader thinking about what's going on behind the scenes, and getting them to read on to find the answers. Laying out a string of story questions is the heart of suspense, and suspense (sometimes referred to simply as "tension") is the heart of dramatic narrative. A story without story questions up in the air is predictable, boring and flat.

The flip side is Chekov's Law of Writing: If you have a gun on the wall in act 1 it must be fired by act 3. Pose all the story questions you like, but don't leave them up there forever. You have to pay them off eventually. I can't tell you how annoying it is to get to the end of a book and still think, "But what about the butler? The last time we saw him, he was creeping down the hall with a heavy silver candlestick, then he's never mentioned again! What gives?"

So look over your work and ask two questions. Are you posing enough story questions, and are you eventually paying off the ones you pose?

Audible Nirvana

Okay, since Audible is just about the worst company on the planet at letting people know that they've done something cool, I thought I'd point this out. I downloaded the latest version of Audible Player for PalmOS 5 recently and found a few new awesome features. I bet they were put in place for the new Tungsten T5, but they work just as well on the Zodiac.

First, Audible finally supports full screen mode. In fact, you can't bring up the Graffiti area even if you want to. On extended screen devices, the extra space is now used to display the cover art of the book and a book jacket summary. You also see the title, author, narrator, format, size and where the book is stored. Yay!

Audible now supports more than one storage card. Again, this is probably for the T5, supporting both the internal flash drive and the SD card. But it also works great with the dual SD slots on my Zod.

Lastly, it seems they've changed their code for turning off the screen while listening. The menu option to do this manually is gone, and the screen turns off automatically after about five minutes, even on my Zodiac (which used to say "this feature is not supported on your device" when I tried the manual option). Even better, just like the Zod's MP3 player and Pocket Tunes, the Zod's power button LED softly pulses on and off while the screen if off to give you a visual indicator that the device it still doing something.

If you have an extended screen PalmOS device, especially if you have a Zodiac, go download the latest version of Audible Player.

Forbes - PalmOne Closes Shanghai Representative Office

Forbes.com: PalmOne Closes Shanghai Representative Office: "'PalmOne's representative office in Shanghai has been shut down,' announced a spokesperson with Palm's operations in China on October 25. The spokesperson confirmed that PalmOne will temporarily withdraw from the Chinese market.

Chinese manufacturers such as Lenovo, Founder, and Acer Computer also said that their cooperation with Palm had already stopped. PalmOne, one of the two spin-offs of handheld computer giant Palm, focuses on hardware manufacture while its brother company PalmSource is dedicated to developing Palm OS, a leading operating system powering mobile information devices. A person with public relationship division of PalmSource said that the restructuring now is coming to end.

PalmOne's frustration in China had something to do with its unfavorable cooperation with Chinese manufacturers."

The Future of PDAs

We've all heard it. "The PDA is dead." The verdict is in, and the traditional PDA market is moving to smartphones. The PDA's reign is over.

Or is it?

I'll be the first to admit that PDAs don't have much viability as organizers. Smarter cell phones do an adequate job of handling calendar and contact information (sadly, even many PDA users underuse the tasklist). Some phones can play MP3s, check email and some websites and play games. Isn't that what PDAs are for?

It used to be, but not anymore. Just as phones encroach on the PDA's traditional turf, a new venue has opened: real handheld computing.

Have you tried to go through airport security with a laptop recently? Takes a while, doesn't it? You almost wish you could just drive to frickin' Milwaukee. You have to disassemble the darn thing like a rifle, then put it back together, turn it on to prove it works, all without the use of your shoes. It's so much easier to just throw your PDA and foldable keyboard into a carryon bag and let them go through the X-ray machine. You have your shoes to worry about. Don't worry, the X-ray machine won't hurt anything, and you're far better off that way than futzing with a laptop or even trying to explain why you can't turn on your folding keyboard.

What about when you get where you're going? Can a PDA really replace a laptop for a businessperson on the go? Depends on the PDA, but yeah. About the best thing out there for business travelers right now is the PalmOne Tungsten T5. I know the geek set isn't happy with it, but imaging the following scenario:

Bill has to go on a business trip. His company is sending him to Kalamazoo for a big presentation. To save money, the company has bought him a PalmOne Tungsten T5 and a PalmOne Universal Wireless Keyboard for $470 instead of a laptop for $1,600. They've also upgraded his phone to a Bluetooth capable model and subscribed him to a data plan as well as voice.

In his office, Bill plugs his T5 into a USB port on his PC. Opening File Transfer on his PC, he drags and drops everything he can think of that he might need into his PDA. Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, text files, the all-important PowerPoint presentation he's supposed to give in Kalamazoo, some MP3s, and even a funny MPEG video his brother sent him in email. Everything gets transferred and the video is even automatically converted to a much smaller ASF file for viewing on the PDA. Bill hotsyncs to get his PIM data updated, then grabs his T5, the cable and charger and throws them in his carry-on bag. He's off to the airport.

Making it through security in record time (Bill's wearing slip-on shoes), Bill makes it to the terminal with plenty of time to spare. He pulls out his T5 and opens the media player. He starts some MP3s playing on his headphones, then opens the web browser. The T5 connects automatically via Bluetooth to his cell phone (still in his pocket) and connects to the internet. He surfs around, checks news and stock prices, then it's time to get on the plane.

After the plane gets to cruising altitude and he can turn on electronic devices again, Bill takes out his T5 and watches the video his brother sent him. Oh, that wacky Ted! Then he queues up an audiobook from Audible and settles in for the flight.

When Bill lands, he checks the reservation info in his T5 Calendar and goes to his hotel. He's tired when he gets in, and forgets to plug in the charger for his T5 before he goes to sleep. At least he remembers to set the alarm on the T5 to wake him up.

He gets up the next morning and gets ready to make his presentation. He grabs the sync cable and his T5 and takes a cab to the office where he's supposed to make his presentation. When he gets there, he finds out that his T5 is dead! He used up the last of the juice listening to MP3s while he got ready that morning.

Bill is taken to a conference room which has a PC attached to an LCD projector. He pulls out his sync cable and connects the T5 to the PC. The T5 pulls power out of the USB port and bam! That's enough juice to enable Drive Mode. The T5 shows up on the PC as a drive letter and Bill copies over the PowerPoint presentation. While letting the T5 trickle charge in the background Bill gives his presentation from the PC. When he gets back to the hotel, he plugs it into the charger and connects to the internet through his phone to check his mail. There's an email from the boss: his presentation was a success!

Is there any reason why Bill would have needed a laptop in this scenario? A laptop wouldn't have been any more functional, would have cost more, been more to carry, taken longer in the airport, and eventually caused Bill horrible back problems.

PDAs are not PDAs anymore. The concept of a personal digital assistant can be taken over by cell phones. Devices like the PalmOne Treo, PalmOne Tungsten, Tapwave Zodiac and HP iPAQ are handheld computers, with all the capabilities that implies. And in terms of cost, mobility and convenience, they're superior to laptops.

Wired News: Students Fight Copyright Hoarders

Wired News: Students Fight Copyright Hoarders: "Students at a dozen colleges around the country are organizing to teach their peers about the consequences of overly broad copyright law, hoping to prevent creative freedom from being stifled.

They are forming Free Culture groups on campuses to explain copyright law to fellow students. Stressing its importance for culture and society, the group says copyright law is being abused. To illustrate their point, the groups hold remixing contests, promote open-source software and rally against legislation like the Induce Act, which would hold technology companies liable for encouraging people to infringe copyrights."

Sony's Vaio U will be available in the States

From Brighthand. Personally, I can't see paying two grand for this. There's a flip side to the "handheld computer" thing. These devices that actually run XP aren't designed to be an extention of your PC, they're supposed to BE your PC. Not only is that a tough sell with a 20GB hard drive, but if I drop my PDA down a sewer grate, I'm just out a few hundred bucks. All my data is still on my PC at home, too. If I drop one of these, I'm out two large and all my data. No, thanks.

: "Earlier this year, Sony began offering in Japan a PC small enough that it can almost be used as a handheld. Today, the company said that this model will be released in the United States, too.

The Vaio VGN-U750P will be just 6.6 inches wide, 4.3 inches high, and 1.0 inch thick (16.7 cm by 10.8 cm by 2.6 cm). It will weigh 19.4 ounces (550 g).

This device will run Windows XP Pro. Although it will have a tablet shape and a touch screen, it won't use Microsoft's Tablet PC operating system.

Sony Vaio VGN-U750P The U750P will include an 800-by-600-pixel transflective color LCD. This will support both portrait and landscape modes.

This computer will use a 1 GHz Intel Pentium M processor. It will include 512 MB of memory and a 20 GB hard drive.

This Vaio will include built-in Wi-Fi (802.11g) wireless networking. It will have a USB 2.0 port, and slots for both CompactFlash and Memory Stick Pro cards.

It will ship with a carrying case and a folding keyboard. It will also come with stereo earphones and a multimedia remote control.

According to Sony, the U750P's Lithium Polymer battery will be able to keep it going for as long as 3.0 hours. A optional extended battery will also be available.

The Vaio VGN-U750P will be available next month for about $2,000."

Oh, What a Keyboard I Do Have

Okay, I finally have a keyboard again. After losing my original Stowaway Infrared, I needed another keyboard. Graffiti is great, TealScript even better, but if I'm writing anything more than a few paragraphs, I need something that can really keep up with my brain. I like the more relaxed pace longhand/Graffiti gives me, and use it intentionally for more contemplative, dialogue-heavy scenes, but for action, gimme a keyboard.

I thought about just buying a new keyboard like my old one, but I saw a photo online of a new keyboard coming out from PalmOne, called the PalmOne Universal Wireless Keyboard. It looks very similar to the original Infrared Stowaway, but adds a few important new features. It meant goinig without a keyboard for (gasp) a month, but it was so worth it.

For the basics, check out my original review of the first IR keyboard. Here's what's new, different and better.

Hardware

The single biggest change is that this keyboard has a real number row! I hated the four row layout of the original IR Stowaway, not so much because it lacked numbers, but because all the number row punctuation required function-key chords rather than using the shift key, like one would on a standard computer keyboard. The number row on the new keyboard is only half height (as is the spacebar row, which is how they managed to fit two rows into the space where there used to be one) but it's good enough. My parentheses keys are right were they belong, and all is right with the world.

The second thing I really like is that the stand or shelf in which the PDA sits actually slides over to the middle of the unfolded keyboard. It's a small detail, but it just feels more natural to have the screen centered on the keyboard rather than off to one side. The act of sliding the stand over also turns the keyboard on and off.

The IR arm now swings around a complete 180 degrees to accomodate just about any kind of device you'd care to put in this thing. In fact, the comes with drivers for both PalmOS and Windows Mobile. About the only problem I have with the hardware is that the ? key is outside the right shift, causing problems if I don't remember to reach a little further for question marks and slashes. Having a number row more than makes up for this. It's not perfect, but I'll take it.

Software

The driver seems to be completely new, a break from the previous hard dock and IR Stowaway drivers. In fact, I can't find any evidence that this model is actually made by Think Outside, although it looks like their work. The driver works well with my Zodiac, although not all of the special key combinations seem to work (for example, pressing the Cmd+Done keys doesn't hit the Done button in WordSmith, and while Fn+L does bring up the backlight dialog, the arrow keys don't move the sliders like the D-pad would).

The software is pretty simple, with only two configurable screens. The first turns the driver on or off and optionally enables keyclicks. The second screen turns on or off power management and has five selectable levels to choose from. These are basically just presets to determine how long the PDA looks for a keyboard after power on and how long until it automatically shuts off the IR port after inactivity.

While I have a little trouble using TealScript on screen with my Zod while listening to music (running WordSmith and PocketTunes), I'm happy to report that I have no such issues with background music slowing down keyboard input. If anything, listening to my 32 hours of musical scores (on a Lexar 1GB card) while writing is pretty amazing, especially with the Zodiac's stereo speakers. WordSmith in full screen mode (Cmd-W), music playing and my black Zod sitting in a black keyboard on my black lapdesk (since the center hinge now locks when the tray slides over, you can use this keyboard on your lap, but I don't recommend it), this is all the portable computer I need to write anytime, anywhere.

Cobalt, Schmobalt...

From a Brighthand report about PalmOne CEO Ed Colligan: "Mr. Colligan wasn't saying that there definitely won't be any palmOne handhelds or smartphones running Cobalt coming next year; instead, the company refuses to commit to doing so by any particular date.

'Nobody knows when we'll start the shift to Cobalt, OS 6, or on which devices,' Mr. Colligan said. 'For now, we're saying that we've built the functionality we need into the Treo and the Tungsten T5 and there's no need to confuse developers by switching. I'm not even prepared to commit us to a change next year, or the year after, at this stage.'"

Okay, troops, here's why this isn't a big deal. First thing, Ed's just saying they don't want to be locked down into any particular date. Given the reality of deadline slippage in this industry, that's not a bad idea. And he as a point, there isn't any compelling reason to move to Cobalt other than appeasing the geek set. Everything they want to do with their Treo and Tungsten lines, they're doing.

But more to the point, Cobalt might not be all it's cracked up to be. Tapwave is also not real eager to move to Cobalt, since the only thing they really like in Cobalt, the ability to run 100% ARM-native code, the Tapwave-modified version of Garnet can already do. Cobalt looks pretty, but for most end users, Garnet is probably as least as functional, if not moreso. Cobalt comes with some tradeoffs. Here's a newsletter article from the folks at TealPoint explaining how this might shake out:

Look Out for PalmOS 6

This spring, at the PalmSource Developer's Conference Silicon Valley, PalmOS devotees, evangelists, and propellerheads converged at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. The biggest handheld schmoosefest of the year, it's also the place for the world to learn the latest happenings at PalmSource and where the platform will be headed for the next twelve months.

INTRODUCING PALMOS 6

This year, PalmSource announced (surprise!) yet another version of PalmOS, debuting on devices later this year. This new version--supplanting PalmOS 5 from two or so years ago--promises new graphics capabilities and hardware security features for next generation handhelds and smart phones.

Sensing that the former numbering scheme was just too straightforward and clear to be any good, however, marketing folk have branded PalmOS 6 with the moniker "Cobalt" (known at the show as "Cobol... no what was it again? oh yeah, Cobalt"). The-Version-Formerly-Known-as-PalmOS-5 now has a new name too. It shall from now on be known as "PalmOS Garnet", or so they say. We honestly think they, like Prince, should have considered using memorable symbols instead of the new names. Here's an idea for two symbols that might be more memorable and less confusing: "5" and "6".

The new operating system is actually a full rewrite from the ground up, incorporating technology and expertise from PalmSource's acquisition of Be Inc. in 2001. This radical move adds additional multithreading, security and stability features to PalmOS, creating a device platform specifically-tailored to meet the concerns of cell phone manufacturers.

This is largely good news, for it puts PalmOS on strong ground for taking its share of the growing SmartPhone market. Indeed, it is likely to avoid a repeat of some of the costly and embarrassing losses Microsoft suffered recently when manufacturers cancelled PocketPC-based SmartPhones, some citing stability and source code access concerns.

Of course, if PalmOS is a strong platform, then we all, as users, developers, and fans benefit as well. But does that necessarily mean that we should all rush out and get PalmOS Cobalt devices when they come out? Er... not necessarily. As we'll see, the benefits of Cobalt itself don't necessarily all extend to end users. Indeed, there are several important considerations to weigh before personally deciding to take the Cobalt plunge.

NEW STUFF WE GET

PalmOS Cobalt does bring along with it a couple of flashy new features and capabilities. The most obvious of these is a new graphics library that sports fancy capabilities such as translucent drawing, antialiased lines, and scalable add-on fonts. While it was possible for programs to do some or all of these things before, having support in the operating system makes it much more likely that applications will utilize the improved graphics to give snappier looking applications.

OLD STUFF WE LOSE

Nothing comes without a cost, however, and this one's got a couple of doozies. First of all, PalmSource created a new type of PalmOS application and did not make any of the new features backwards compatible. While most older programs will run as-is on the new devices, companies cannot use any of the new features without making new, separate versions of their programs. These new versions, in turn, cannot run at all on existing devices, guaranteeing that developers will spend all their time maintaining two separate versions of every application if they want to access any of the new Cobalt features. Aargh!

Wait, there's more. When PalmSource released PalmOS 5, they struck a huge blow to hacks, desk accessories, popup applications, security apps, and other programs that need to run in the background. Just as we've just about recovered, they've done it again, and--get the doctor--this time it might be terminal.

When OS 5 came about, PalmSource changed the system patching mechanisms, removing many of them but providing an alternate mechanism for key system patches. Some programs got rewritten to accommodate the new method, while others relied on our program TealMaster, which emulates the old standards under PalmOS 5 where possible.

In PalmOS Cobalt, however, not only has PalmSource changed the mechanisms again, but many have been eliminated altogether. Most hack-style applications will not run under Cobalt, even if they run fine under PalmOS 5. Even worse, many of these will probably never be resurrected for Cobalt. Why? All in the name of security.

THE JOYS OF INSECURITY

In the coming year, we'll be hearing a great deal about the security benefits of PalmOS Cobalt, and why we should all run out and buy new devices (at list prices) to get them. "Super Security"... "Secure Superiority"... after all, who doesn't want extra security? Well, maybe we might reconsider if the extra "security" features are, in fact, security *from* us.

You see, when PalmSource designed the new OS, they wanted to meet the needs of their customers. But don't smile yet, as you're not one of their customers and neither are we. Their customers are the device and phone manufacturers that pay PalmSource royalties for each device they sell. And unlike us, phone manufacturers want to restrict the types of applications we can install, lest we put something "unapproved" on our phone that *might* crash the handheld, give it "unsupported" behavior, or (aha!) give someone "unauthorized" access to their communications networks!

And thus, PalmOS Cobalt has new "security" features which, amongst other things, gives manufacturers the sweeping power to prevent hacks, popup programs, background dictionaries, system enhancements, and yes, even other security apps they the don't specifically "sign off" on from running on the device.

While it has yet to be seen whether all manufacturers will choose to restrict such apps, if even a significant percentage of them do, it could create enough confusion in the market to convince developers that it's just not worth the cost to write and support these types of apps anymore. This would be sad, as one of the big benefits of PalmOS has always been ability to fine-tune and personalize our devices with hacks, popups, and similar apps.

CONCLUSION

When PalmOS moved from version 4 to version 5, there was a clear benefit for all in terms of better memory capacity, cost savings, and speed. This time, however, SmartPhone manufacturers seem to have gotten most of the goodies. For the rest of us, the benefits are not so clear, and it has yet to be seen whether PalmOS Cobalt will be widely adopted by end consumers or most PDA manufacturers.

Indeed, PalmSource may sense some of this uncertainty themselves, which partially explains their odd new naming conventions. They have announced that PalmOS 5 (Garnet) will be sticking around and will be officially supported and independently upgraded for the indefinite future. By naming the two versions "Garnet" and "Cobalt", they are positioning "Cobalt" less as a clear upgrade to "Garnet" and more as a parallel alternative platform. Will this strategy ultimately work? Stay tuned, 'cause we don't know either. But rest assured, we'll be here watching with you to find out.

Moving on...

For those of you in the Denver area, CompUSA and I have parted company. I'm not going to go into details here, but I just wanted to let everyone know. I'll be sure to announce where I end up.

T5 Should Be a Hit (for those meant to buy it)

I helped a friend buy a Tungsten T5 today. His Pocket PC Phone Edition died - again - and he figured it was time to move on to something else. We went through all the options, both convergent and two-body, and determined that his best option was to upgrade his T-Mobile cell phone to a nice Bluetooth and WiFi-enabled Motorola v600 and pair it with a Bluetooth PDA.

Now my friend isn't a power user. He uses his PDA constantly, but he uses it for work. He's in real estate, and he needs to keep track of clients and properties. He needs to figure out mortgages. Most importantly, he needs everything to work while he's mobile without having to tinker with it or think too hard about the technology. He just wants it to work.

It came down to the Tungsten T5 or the HP hx4705. While the iPAQ is definitely sexier, it's also more maintenance and HP has a track record of high-end devices that just don't work very well. Last weekend we watched as someone at a user group meeting showing off his new 4705 killed the screen. The screen went totally white, and not even a hard reset brought it back. The iPAQ 5000 series had the same kind of flakiness. Too much technology crammed into too small a space.

Which brings me back to the T5. The newest Tungsten has been almost universally reviled by the enthusiast community because it's not a compelling "upgrade" from the T3. It doesn't have WiFi, no voice recorder, no vibrating alarms, no charge LED, no slider. But these criticisms ignore what makes the T5 what it is.

Easy.

The T5 is a return to the "Zen of Palm." For example, it syncs with Outlook just as well as a Pocket PC, maybe even better. No effort required. Just about anything can be stored on the T5, just drag it to "File Transfer" or copy and paste into the drive letter that appears when the T5 is in "drive mode." Most office documents can be opened and edited without problems or file conversion, thanks to Documents To Go 7. If the T5 runs out of power, no problem: just charge it up and keep going. The flash memory means you don't lose your data just because you're out of town and forgot your charger. A business traveller can just drop a hodge-podge of files into the T5 and go, leaving the laptop in the office. Edit on the go, beam, Bluetooth, email or USB drive copy the results when you get where you're going.

Does the T5 have the bells and whistles of other devices? No. But it's a heck of a lot easier, and that's what PalmOne has been best at: getting the technology out of your way and letting you get things done.

On the Treo OS Hoopla

I honestly don't know what the big deal is. Rumor has it that PalmOne is considering making a Treo that runs Windows Mobile, although no one seems to know if it's the Smartphone or Pocket PC variant. PalmSource (the company that makes PalmOS itself) stock took a hit when the news hit Wall Street.

What's the big deal? PalmOne announced that they'd be open to using operating systems other than PalmOS back when it was first announced that PalmOne and PalmSource would become separate companies. If I were a stockholder in PalmOne, I'd be ticked if they weren't investigating using other operating systems. Putting all your eggs in one basket is generally not a great idea. Now PalmOne states they're also looking into Linux-based PDAs as well. Good for them.

But here's what I really don't get. Just because they're looking into using Windows Mobile or Linux in the Treo line, where does that imply that they won't be using PalmOS? I understood from the start that they weren't thinking about replacing PalmOS and becoming an exclusively Windows Mobile vendor. I imagine they'll offer a line of Treos, some running PalmOS (possibly some with Garnet and some with Cobalt), and some running Windows Mobile, and maybe even a Linux-based model. What's wrong with consumer choice? I say if PalmOne covers their bases by offering multiple smartphone OSes, they increase their chance of dominating the smartphone market.

PalmOne verifies driver conflict

Now that the election's over, I can focus on tech stuff again. In fact, I'll probably be spending a lot more time here than Liberal Medium until my soul scars over.

First up, there were some complaints recently that loading the driver for PalmOne's new Universal Wireless Keyboard can cause a crash so severe that you can't even hard reset. Well, it turns out that the driver itself isn't at fault. There's a driver conflict between the UWK driver and PalmOne's WiFi card driver. Either by themselves are fine, but together, BAM!

There doesn't seem to be a problem with other WiFi solutions for PalmOS (Enfora, etc.), so I'd say the core problem is PalmOne's proprietary only-works-on-two-devices WiFi card driver.Link: http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2004/11/user_followup_p.html