B. Mann Consulting

The picture definition on Japanese camera-phones is now so high that people can stand in a shop, surreptitiously photograph the pages of a magazine and then later read their ill-gotten literature from the screens of their mobile phones.
The Times, June 5, 2004, p.2W, no link available

As seen on Marginal Revolution. Kind of makes you wonder about Brad's thoughts on separating content from delivery, and how books aren't facing this problem yet.

So Java is pretty far from its "write once, run anywhere" promise, especially when it comes to handhelds/phones. But, it is the only viable "platform" versus the MS/VBScript/.NET juggernaut.

Russell Beattie seems to agree while responding to an interview with David Nagle of PalmSource:

So that shows you where Palm is when it comes to Java: PDA Profile didn't turn out like they wanted it to and so now they're passing on J2ME. Oof. J2ME's not my favorite, but to pass on it (and Java) wholesale is a real loss. Nagle talks about competing with M$ but then blows off the primary weapon when it comes to Enterprise customers. What does he think, some corporate code jockey is going to write all of their custom code in non-portable C for the PalmOS?

In my recent post about North America's need to build a wireless network, I admitted that I had been wrong about Palm. That they really were doomed. Turns out, The Inquirer has an article that agrees.

My view is that the rise of smartphones, with Symbian as the likeliest OS, is going to make Palm's market disappear. Those who need digital organizers will carry phones that include those features. The higher end is being staked out by much more capable devices, especially as computers become smaller and more portable while retaining their range of features and power (here's where tablets come in).

Russell Beattie sits down and sketches out a categorization of different types of smartphones. I always find this incredibly useful for both explaining to myself and others different concepts that have a spectrum of capabilities.

Delineating Devices: Current Generation, Multimedia Mobiles and Intelliphones
I was struggling to explain to my wife recently what I was working on and the devices I was targeting. In that discussion, I ended up coming up with a sort of categorization that I'll talk about here. It's really helped me understand what I'm working on and for who.

Todd Bailey emailed me asking for my recommendations on what PDA to buy. I thought it might be interesting for others to chime in as well, plus I'd have my thoughts on it here for posterity.

Will it be up or down for the iPod in capacity and size?

BrightHand reports that Sony is preparing WiFi adapters in MemoryStick format. They already produced some CF adapters for their really high-end series, but this means that all the (recent) Clies should be able to do WiFi.

Yes, please. Ship it right over when you've got it finished.

Yay! Allows you to sync your OS X Mail.app with your Palm. Choose as many folders as you want, select whether you want everything or only unread messages, and you're done. The one caveat is that Mail has to be running when you perform a sync.