Gadgetopia

Palm Will Team With Microsoft for the Next Version of the Treo Organizer: Stick a fork in Palm Source, they appear to be done. Microsoft will achieve one of its longest-held ambitions on Monday when its rival Palm Computing plans to announce that it will use Microsoft's Windows Mobile software ...

What's in a Name?: ..so Palm addressed [licensees'] concerns by dividing Palm, Inc. into two business units, Palm Solutions Group, which would make handhelds, and PalmSource, which would develop and license the Palm platform. They created a 'Chinese wall' between the entities, with the Solutions Group becoming a licensee of ...

News: Palm reveals new company name: follow up on this post. "In preparation for its split into two separate companies, Palm has come up with a name for its new, hardware-only self: PalmOne." Via Gizmodo.

Acrocat Software - AcroWiki Overview: Write a Wiki on your Palm, then sync it to the Web. AcroWiki is yet another implementation of WikiWiki, this time for Palm Pilot. There are several variations of the WikiWiki syntax, the one we used is the same one that is used in the ...

Singapore-made OS ready to launch: They re big into OSs over there the last couple of days. Two Singapore inventors who say they ve created an operating system that can run programs written for Windows, Linux and Palm will formally launch the product this month. The MXI OS apparently allows a ...

Prompted by Microsoft's generosity, I've started reading e-books, and I think I'm addicted. I read a book last year called "The Social Life of Information" which put forth all sorts of reasons why e-books weren't going to work. I agreed with it then, but after actually trying it, I'm hooked. ...

I m kind of a building / engineering / architecture groupie, and I m starting to learn how Dubai is Ground Zero these days for magnificent buildings. There s simply nothing they can t or won t build. The picture above is a rendering of the Burj Dubai, which is currently under construction. It s ...

Adobe Digital Media Store: Adobe has started selling e-books in order to pump up its PDF format as a viable alternative to formats from Microsoft and Palm. They may be able to fill some of the vacuum left by Barnes and Noble when they left the market.

BeOS Max Homepage: BeOS lives on, it seems. A new version of the OS was just released. Apparrently, Be made a free "personal edition" of BeOS, and when Be died, programmers took it and kept working with it. Palm owns the rights now, and here's to hoping they stay back ...

Microsoft launches cool new Origami; immediately cripples it: Kevin Maney takes exception to the fact that Origami needs to boot up. A gadget like this MUST have instant on and off, like a Palm. Pull it out while in line at Starbucks to check e-mail, and -- boom -- it's ...

Microsoft, Competitor Reach Settlement: Here's the last gasp of a dying man Be is a dead company, having sold about everything to Palm last year. "Microsoft Corp. agreed Friday to pay $23.3 million to Be Inc. to settle an antitrust lawsuit that claimed the software giant negotiated deals with ...

Mozilla Thunderbird: Thunderbird 0.4 is out. The attachment icon (the paper clip) has been broken out to its own column (instead of being overlad on the envelope you could never see it) so you can sort on it now, and the envelope now includes "forwarded" and "replied" arrows like ...

High-tech 'repo man' keeps car payments coming: This seems like a really great solution to keep people honest about their car payments. A new gizmo is upping the odds that even the most hard-knock customer will come up with the car payment. Hooked into the ignition system, the gadget comes ...

Adding style to substance: A good article on the resurgence of innovative design in product development. "'When everything else is commoditized, design is the one area where you can add value,'' says Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, the Palo Alto industrial design studio which has crafted everything from the Palm ...

Bubble Bursts for E-Books: While it seems negative, there's a positive undercurrent in this story. It's all about expectations they were so high for e-books that reality seemed like a failure. Now that people have had time to shift their expecations back, the market is still there, it's just ...

Emotion and Design: This is another essay from Don Norman that's very similar to the previous one we talked about a few months ago. This quote is interesting, and I wish I had it back when I had to defend my black-and-white Palm V from the PocketPC drones at my ...

Seductive Electronic Gadgets Are Soon Forgotten: Here's a newsflash: we buy gadgets that we never use. I'm shocked. "Gadgets bought and barely used are the technology world's equivalent of exercise equipment. Often purchased in a well-intentioned bout of self-improvement, they are opened, used once or twice, then abandoned. Sometimes they ...

MP3 Insider has taken a look at the evolution of the iPod's innovative scroll wheel, considered by many to be it's most innovative feature, and the key to it's success. The scrollwheel has been through three iterations. The first one actually rotated; then there was the touch-sensitive one; and finally ...

When was your a-ha! moment about the Internet? Think back to the early days: can you remember a moment when you thought: Whoa, this thing may really take off? I was pondering this the other day, and I can remember three moments from the mid-nineties that made me sit up ...

A friend of mine sent me this joke today. Pretty funny. A cowboy was herding his herd in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL ...

I saw Casino Royale for the third or fourth time tonight. What a great, great film. I'm an old school Bond fan, and I'll state without qualification that if I had to pick one Bond film to take to a desert island with me, it'd be Casino Royale. But it's ...

The Internet has changed my desire to own things. I ve been through a distinct progression in this regard in the 10+ years I ve been online. I remember first getting online at the computer lab at Augustana College and looking up stuff about James Bond. It was all very interesting, but ...