The Digest V1 # 592

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Epoc Digest Sat, 11 Sep 2004 Volume 01 : Number 592

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Sent to: 758 subscribers

In today's Epoc Di10st messages:

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- Psion Mourners see hope in Shrunken Communicator

- Re: netbook and P800

- Luach file, Nokia 9300,

- Re: Wendat

- A wanderer returns

- Help with HTML"width"

- ebc: Upgraded to v1.09

- Coming soon: the eight-hour notebook battery

- I've seen my future - Nokia 9300

- Access in Canada

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Date: 10 Sep 2004 20:27:45 -0500

From: Manuel Campos Galvan

Subject: Psion Mourners see hope in Shrunken Communicator

From the Register...

Psion mourners see hope in shrunken Communicator

By Andrew Orlowski

Published Friday 10th September 2004 19:11 GMT

It's five years since Psion launched what proved to be its final consumer product, the Revo, and four years since the company abandoned the consumer market altogether.

On a typical European intercity train carriage in the mid 1990s, Psion computers were a common sight. How many of the business plans of subsequent years were created on these tiny computer's Sheet program, we can only guess at. Now you're likely to see a bored executive playing Solitaire on a Thinkpad: at five times the price and one hundredth of the battery life.

But Nokia's slimline 9300 is already giving mourners of the keyboard PDA cause for celebration.

"Natural successor to the Revo," writes a happy poster on My-symbian's forums. "It's clear that the Nokia 9300 Communicator is taking a lot of its design cues from the old Psion hardware," observes former Revo user, now Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson.

As you can see from this picture, the 9300 is little larger than a 6110. So does it live up to the expectations?

Superficially, it's not hard to see why users are excited. The Nokia 9300 certainly looks the part. Nokia has lost half the weight of the 9200 Communicator and reduced it to something only a little larger than a 6110. That's thanks to the incredibly-rising pixel density. Note that there's still plenty of plastic housing around the screen... The 9300 also has the curves of the 3 Series (launched in 1991, but going strong eight years later even after the launch of the Series 5).

But not having seen one ourselves, we thought we'd better ask someone who had. Matt Millar was the technical lead for the new phone's predessor, the Nokia Communicator 9200, and co-founded Mobile Innovations, a design house and integrator that does a lot of work that he can't talk about, a little infuriatingly for us.

"Why isn't anyone innovating in this area?" he asks.

"Today's gadgets are designed by people with Meccano sets who've turned them into products," he reckons. "Why do these companies think people are happy with them?" The only recent innovation that impressed him is Motorola's two-way hinged phone.

"Nokia is going in the right direction with the 9300; the 6110 was their biggest ever seller and it was a really boring business phone," he told us. The problem, he reckons, is that sales are so low that most phone companies don't see the keyboard product category as worth the trouble. That's not to say we won't see more, as people pay a premium for a keyboard-based device.

"Many of these phones are read only devices - it's what Palm got right. So you can make the screen big and you don't have worry if there's an awkward way to get data onto the device, like some freaky bizarre handwriting recognition system. Data is going to get there from a PC or via Web services."

So for old Psioneers, is the 9300 the best we'll get? Nokia has left its marketing options open - and pitched the 9300 to appeal to the traditional PDA consumer buyer as well. But if you scan the press photos for the new device, you'll see thumbs in action.

Millar told us he'd happily used a Series 90 phone, the sidelined 7700 'mediaphone' for six months, and rarely missed having a keyboard. He says

we can expect more keyboards on phones but couldn't elaborate. He left us with one intriguing prediction, though.

"The market for keyboard communicators is millions worldwide; there are simply many more people who just want to read off a device. So you can hit

a much bigger market with just a big screen. But then, frankly, it only costs a few pounds to put in a keyboard. with some good engineering. Then people will pay a premium."

"The smart guys will do a whole bunch of market skimming and put a few keyboard devices out underneath them," he says.

And why not?

*++++++++++&

Date: 10 Sep 2004 19:35:45 -0500

From: Victor Marchand

Subject: Re: netbook and P800

Re: netbook and P800

This is for Bernard Hill.

I had a P800 for a while and tried to sync it with my MC218 (5mx). You can

find a description of what I did here :

http://www.pdastreet.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36604

I never managed to do a frequent sync, just a migration and not without

effort....

good luck

Victor

*++++++++++&

Date: 10 Sep 2004 16:10:20 -0500

From: Itamar Engelsman

Subject: Luach file, Nokia 9300,

Answer to: Jack

Re.: Luach file - Thanks for the answer. The program you mentioned gives the Hebrew date for any date you enter. My agenda file has put the Hebrew date on each day of the year, together with :

- the weekly portion of the Torah (Old Testament)

- Rosh Chodesh (the new month days)

- all the festivals, fast days, etc.

- the Omer counting (counting of 49 days between the Passover and Shavuot festivals

Sofar I had 4 requests, will send it out early next week.

Answer to: Antony

Re.: Nokia 9300 - Thanks for that message. I noted this as well. However, the question is what do you really use it for. If you are looking for a machine to fully replace your 5MX/netBook/mBook and do everything on it, it sounds like a great choice. I however would like to continue using my mBook for the foreseeable future as it has larger keys, larger screen, and is still easier to use as a "working" machine. I am looking to replace my phone and palm into one unit that will be a phone and a diary, database and the like machine, with the occasional emailing or short typing. For that the P910 is IMHO a much better choice. There are also WindowsCE machines that do the same, but I think I would like to stay with Symbian software (familiarity) and a phone as small as possible. A colleague of mine has got the i-Mate on trial, looks also like a nice machine, but no thumb-board ! Still waiting to hear more from the current P800/P900 and Nokia 92xx users .....

GREAT, digest back on track again !!

Best regards,

Itamar Engelsman

London, UK

*++++++++++&

Date: 10 Sep 2004 14:46:25 -0500

From: Keith Giles

Subject: Re: Wendat

Jack wrote:

> You may like to know that Wendat0.9 opo calendars works for all > religions and until the end of times:

> http://www.tsort.demon.co.uk/psion/wendat-opl.zip

Jack, I downloaded the file - wendat-opl.s5, but there's no readme. Just what does one do with it and how do you work it?

Happy Cycling,

Keith

Sunnyvale, CA

http://ohsix827.home.comcast.net

Thought For The Day: Never argue with a fool - people might not know the difference.

All my outgoing e-mails have been checked by Norton Anti-virus.

*++++++++++&

Date: 10 Sep 2004 14:44:57 -0500

From: Alan Rabbitte

Subject: A wanderer returns

Hello there!!!

My last post to the Digest was in August 2002. Since then my 5MX screen died and - having spent a fortune replacing very many of these in the past - I sadly let it die. I replaced it with a Palm Tungsten E which I still use. It's a nice PDA and there is lots of software available for it, but the OS does not stand up to any type of comparison with EPOC. Of course, over the last 2 years, my 5MX was not the only thing to die - Psion also walked away from Symbian, dropped EPOC in their handhelds and now have nothing other than the products it inherited from Teklogix to generate future income. I wish them all the best, but I fear for the worst; I sold my pitiful shareholding in them some weeks ago and I see from their share price that I'm not the only one to fear for their future.

For myself, I want to buy a smartphone - preferably Symbian based - as soon as possible. The P910 and newly announced Nokia 9300 top my list. Maybe those still on this Digest can help me here: I have searched the net far and wide and have never found any write up comparing a 5MX to the non-phone features of any of P800/P900/P910 or any of Nokias Communicators. My own simplistic view is that EPOC on the 5MX was a ***real*** operating system whereas the newer flavours of Symbian are much dumbed down - things like no close button on applications, lack of real multitasking, etc. I would dearly love to be proven wrong!

In fact, the closest thing to such a comparison was written in this Digest by a Rolf Brunsting and, no doubt, over the last 2 years much may have been written comparing the 5 to the communicators and or P[8-9]00s. If anyone can point me to a specific digest in the archives, I'd really appreciate it.

All the best

Alan Rabbitte

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*++++++++++&

Date: 10 Sep 2004 13:57:10 -0500

From: Peter Rand

Subject: Help with HTML"width"

Many of the web-sites I view on the Revo are too broad for the Revo's screen, and I have to do a lot of left to right scrolling, which is a pain.

Does someone know of an HTML command I could paste in using Editor which would force the webpage to conform to the width of the Revo screen?

Thanks,

Peter

*++++++++++&

Date: 10 Sep 2004 09:24:02 -0500

From: Martin Guthrie

Subject: ebc: Upgraded to v1.09

Dear All,

ebc has been upgraded to v1.09. What is ebc? ebc lets you add colour support to Jason Kneen's excellent ExtraBars program for use on a netBook, Series 7, mBook, netPad, etc. Freeware of course. Further details & download at:

www.pscience5.net

Best regards,

Martin

www.pscience5.net

www.freepoc.org

www.foxpop.co.uk

*++++++++++&

Date: 10 Sep 2004 09:22:01 -0500

From: Martin Guthrie

Subject: Coming soon: the eight-hour notebook battery

This is an article published today in The Register which made me smile:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/10/battery_life/

====================================================================== IDF Fall '04 New battery technologies have the potential to take notebook battery life beyond five hours, ultimately reaching eight hours of charge by 2010.

"When we talk to people about mobile computing, battery life is the thing they most want improved," said Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of Intel’s Mobile Platforms Group. "But delivering more is tough, technically."

He outlined a three-pronged approach to improving battery life: driving down power consumption at a silicon level; working on optimising power usage at a system level; and new battery chemistry to improve capacity.

He touched on two chemistries that will deliver significant improvements. The first is a lithium polymer technology from a company called Pionics, which involves improved anode and cathode materials, although more information than that is not available at this stage.

The second comes from a company called Zinc Matrix Power (ZMP), which has developed a rechargeable zinc-alkali battery which should withstand around 500 charge cycles.

Making rechargeable zinc batteries that can cope with more than around ten recharge cycles has proved a challenge for two main reasons: zinc oxide is highly soluble in alkaline electrolyte, and zinc recharges at about the same voltage that causes water to break down into hydrogen and oxygen.

Typically what happens is that the zinc anode dissolves as the charge is dispersed. then, when the battery is recharged and the anode reforms,

it forms a needle-like deposit on the anode, called a dendrite. This gradually builds up over consecutive recharge cycles until it punctures the separator, shorting the battery out.

ZMP has introduced a zinc / plastic mix, which significantly slows dendrite formation. Happily, this also gets around the problem of hydrogen separation. More on that here (under the Zinc Solubility and Hydrogen Recombinance headings).

The company says that the batteries it produces this way have twice the charge capacity of same sized Li cousins, and as much as six times the run time.

"We've got it to 1,000 [recharge cycles] in the lab," explained Skip Zeller, president and CEO of ZMP. "In fact it seems to do better on a partial charge, unlike lithium batteries."

This is a good thing, because to fully recharge the battery, users will need to plug it in overnight. However, Zeller says, just one hour of charge time will give it juice for six hours of run-time.

Chandrasekher also announced the third iteration of the ACPI specification (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) from the Mobile PC Extended Battery Life working group, but said that further industry collaboration is needed.

ACPI is an open industry standard for OS-directed configuration and power management on laptops, desktops, and servers. ® ====================================================================

Of course, I'm emailing this from my 5 year-old technology Psion netBook which already sports an 8 hour battery (and which I'm toying with the idea of upgrading to a 12 hour battery). And yes, before anyone flames me, I'm well aware that I'm not comparing apples with apples, that PC's are a whole different kettle of fish, etc. Just ironic, that's all.

Best regards,

Martin

www.pscience5.net

www.freepoc.org

www.foxpop.co.uk

*++++++++++&

Date: 9 Sep 2004 10:08:34 -0500

From: Mike Dyer

Subject: I've seen my future - Nokia 9300

Hi all,

I've seen my future smartphone, spring 2005 the Nokia 9300 communicator. Details at www.my-symbian.com and loads of real photos including a press release from nokia themselves.

I love my p800 but I need a REAL keyboard in my pocket not an add on one, and I want my Psion office applications back.

But with COLOUR and GPRS etc :)

Finally a real Revo+/mobile phone replacement.

Thank You Nokia if you are listening.

Regards,

Mike Dyer (who is starting saving already)

*++++++++++&

Date: 9 Sep 2004 03:28:52 -0500

From: Jim Watson-Gove

Subject: Access in Canada

We just got back from a four day trip to Henderson Hot Springs in British Columbia - had a great time.

While there we stayed at a bed & breakfast. No phone in the room, but it did have an internet connection of some sort in the room.

The owner offered to let us use her phone connection in the living room for email access. I called the access numbers connection at Earthlink and found there was no connection in the "state" (sic), so ruled out checking the EMail while in BC.

On the wall, there was the connection (looked like a standard phone connection (RJ-something or other). Next to it was the sign:

To interconnect the internet from this location:

1. Plug your computer's NIC card into the wall outlet provided.

2. Windows XP users can simply access net.

3. Windows ME and 98 users must do the following:

a) Click start - run - type the following command in space:

b) Type "Winipegcfg" without quotation marks and hit enter.

c) Click on release all and wait until done then connect on Release All.

d) Click OK and close.

e) Start your internet program.

4. On any of the Windows OS, you need to reboot your computer to have net access.

Is there a possibility of accessing the internet via this setup using a MBook?

What sort of hardware interface would I need? Our stays in Canada are short enough that I can do without email, but if I can get internet access, I can pursue the POP backdoor into my email via Earthlink.