Well, I finally plunked down my plastic and picked up a Tungsten T3. Now what? I have already downloaded:

• “Eudora Internet Suite”:http://www.eudora.com/internetsuite/download/ so I can sync my Palm with my Eudora email and
• “Avantgo”:http://www.avantgo.com/ for content on the move

  I’ve also bookmarked:

• “Palminfocenter”:http://www.palminfocenter.com/
• “Handheldnews”:http://www.handheldnews.com/ and
• “Brighthand”:http://www.brighthand.com/morenews.php?site=Palm

for news about what new stuff is coming up. Where should I be looking to find lists and reviews of the best freeware and shareware apps for my Palm? Are there any must-have applications I should run and get right away? Any I should shy away from? Where should I look for the most up-to-date news about Palm-related stuff? And where should I go for good Palm-related peer tech support?

Later: This article suggesting that there may be “no upgrade path to PalmOS 6”:http://www.brighthand.com/article/palmOne_Refuses_to_Confirm_OS_6_Upgrade for existing models has me nervous. Should I cancel my order (I ordered online and it hasn’t arrived yet)? I don’t want to be stuck with the last incarnation of a dead-end OS. On the other hand, if I waited a few months to get a new PalmOS 6 model it might be buggy… What do you think? Do you think they’ll make the top-end models of Palm upgradeable but just don’t want to guarantee anything?

Daniel Drezner cites a “Chicago Tribune article”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0312250267dec25,1,7299722.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed about Xmas in Eastern Europe which notes in passing:

The biggest obstacle credit card marketers had to overcome in Hungary was fear of fraud. But consumer concerns about the safety of their cards have led to an important security innovation made possible by the explosive growth of mobile phones in Hungary.

Each time a card is used, the cardholder immediately gets a text message on his or her cell phone confirming the transaction and notifying the cardholder of the balance. Initially developed in Hungary, the messaging system is used widely in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is now being introduced in Western Europe.

Ingenious! Not an infallible system, however – around 2% of SMSes don’t get through I seem to recall so customers should be warned that there would still be a chance their credit card transactions could be un-confirmed. Also there is a small cost per message which would eventually be passed on to customers somehow through higher fees, lower rates or whatever.

A ‘display’ that projects images in thin air? That you can actually manipulate by hand?

It exists, apparently. No word yet from its creators at “IO2 Technology”:http://www.io2technology.com/ about when we might be able to buy this…

An interesting discussion going on at the very insightful “TheFeature”:http://www.thefeature.com/ (which is all about ‘the mobile internet’). It was sparked by an article by “Howard Rheingold”:http://www.rheingold.com/ all about the potential dangers of ubiquitous location-aware devices. Some good points made about the need for sensible default settings (since few people change their defaults) and I pitched in:

Making “off” appear to be the same as “out of network range” is only a social protection as long as the technology doesn’t work reliably. The old phone excuse of “you’re breaking up I’ll call you back” really doesn’t work any more across most of the UK, for example – the network is just too good!

If your boss requires you to be locatable at all times during work hours you may not be able to pretend the technology doesn’t work – so the only protection for the individual against such harassment would be a social taboo against such behaviour – and I don’t think we can guarantee this will happen.

The only way I think this kind of thing can be prevented would be to make it illegal for a workplace to track someone’s location without a strong reason.

intro is an application for conference-goers designed to help them meet others who share their interests and attitudes (I apologize in advance for the over-Flash-y website – what do you expect from a Macromedia-led project?). I have dreamed for years of something like this, but it won’t realise its true power until you can essentially download it into your location-aware PDA/smartphone.

I wanted a USB data storage device, but it seemed a shame to get one that just did data storage. So I ended up with the Archos Ondio which has 128Mb of storage (but is expandable through MultimediaCards – yet another new storage format to deal with). But that’s not all…
* it’s also an MP3 player
* And has an FM radio…
* But (unlike most other similar players) you can record from the built in radio.
* And it is a voice recorder…
* But (unlike most other similar players) it also has a line-in jack so you can record streamed audio (or any other audio source like tape) directly into the device for later playback.
* And if you send it plain text files you can even read them on the built-in 112×64 pixel screen!
I am also happy that it works on AAA batteries instead of requiring a special charger.

Truly this is a Swiss army knife among USB storage devices!

Minor drawbacks I have come across so far
* I had some teething troubles getting the USB to connect to my home Win2k PC (but it worked trouble-free when connected to two other win2k computers, and the tech support guy I reached was pretty good)
* It did once cause a fatal system crash for no discernable reason when re-attached to a Win98 laptop.
* I can copy MP3 files over to it directly without trouble but the Musicmatch Jukebox software playlist copying doesn’t seem to function – I’ll be nagging tech support about that tomorrow.
* The radio doesn’t pull in the signal terribly well (it’s probably the last analogue radio I’ll buy!)
* The UI is a little clunky (perhaps not surprising since it is so small and has just 5 buttons to work with)
* It’s the size of a (small) mobile phone instead of being thumb-sized, but I’ve got reasonably big pockets.
* To connect it to USB you need to carry around a USB cable – it won’t plug in directly.

I’ve only had it for an afternoon so I may become more disillusioned later.

FWIW I bought it in the UK from Datamind for £120 inc VAT – the cheapest price I was able to find. I’m not amused to note it is $150 direct from Archos, but I thought having a UK supplier was worth a few quid.

P.S. Before you ask, I did consider buying a hard disk-type device instead but
1) The prices are still too high (around double?)
2) They are significantly larger/heavier and not solid state like this is.
3) I don’t think I really need that much portable storage at present and when I decide I do I can buy a storage card for it (and other things like cameras) once prices for those drop further.
4) The iPod doesn’t record or include a radio – what’s up with that?

Now here’s a gadget worth saving for – for a mere $5,000 you can have a go-anywhere heads-up display (320 by 240 pixels) so you can read email without even getting out your phone or PDA. Order now from MicroOptical (or wait until this tech gets a little cheaper!)

At a forum about spam in May, NTT in Japan warned that, “the company’s 38 million customers still receive up to 30 wireless spam messages per day” and American wireless carriers are concerned the US could be next.

“…Federal law prohibits most telemarketers from dialing cell phones, but no such regulations prevent spammers from sending messages to addresses like 2025551212@cellphonecarrier.com. Because many text services carry a per-message charge, costs to consumers could mount quickly.”

Here in Europe cellphone spam does not seem to be too bad so far a) because we have better privacy protection anyway and b) because the sender pays for each message sent instead of the receiver paying to receive so truly bulk spams would be uneconomic.

Do you Nordics have problems with cell spam?

Cory grouses that T-mobile has withdrawn support for the games built into the Sidekick PDA/communicator and in doing so can automatically delete the games from his device at the same time. He extrapolates from this that they would also remove any other data on the device if he ever left their network. I really doubt T-Mobile could or would delete all his personal data from your Sidekick without his permission. But their unilateral removal of the games does go to show just how un-web-like and closed the mobile phone operators want the mobile “Internet” to be…

[Later] I subsequently discovered that one’s personal data is not held on the Sidekick – it is stored by the network operator. So in fact you might indeed lose all your data (at least if you hadn’t backed it up elsewhere somehow) if you stop paying network charges for the device – so you’d end up with a useless lump of plastic even if you’d bought it outright. Pretty disappointing!

Howard Rheingold via Smart Mobs alerted me to an unusual case where an SMS operator in India broadcast a request for donors of a rare blood type to give blood to help save the life of a patient in Delhi. It appears to have worked. I wonder if other similar public service messages might start to be officially distributed (this appears to have been done “unofficially” as a favour). It just goes to show that even spam doesn’t always have to be a bad thing…granny oma erolog sex sex nlteen gushing orgasmscartoon pharrell createblack women pussy fattits emma watsonshairy open pussies wideunderage asian picslactating breasts men suckingwives cheating black white cockgay videos suck self