Palm's ChannelSource reseller portal has posted a substantial bit of information on several new accessory SKUs for not only the brand-new Treo Pro but the recent Treo 800w as well.

DataViz has also enhanced the PDF viewer included with their mobile office suite with this release of Documents To Go for Pocket PC. The improvements provide a clear and crisp viewing experience of all Adobe PDF file elements (rendering stays true to desktop file) and makes dramatic speed improvements when opening files so users can be more productive.

It was widely assumed that Palm would be launching the Treo Pro at this year's event, as the show's timing coincides nicely with Palm's traditional fall release schedule in October. Palm was even listed as an exhibiting sponsor prior to the cancellation announcement. It's entirely possible that the seemingly rushed Treo Pro announcement is also related to the Digital Life show's termination.

Palm is planning to launch CDMA (code division multiple access) version of Treo Pro series phone in the future for CDMA telecom service providers, like Verizon, Wireless and Sprint. The phone will also be supplied by HTC.

The Mobi Products Crystal Hard Case for the Palm Centro is available now for $14.95. Shipping starts at $5.95.

The Seidio INNODock Jr. Cradle for the Treo 800w is available now from the PIC Accessory store. It costs $29.95. Shipping starts at $5.95.

The software offers built in access to the latest podcasts and streaming media as well as functioning as a comprehensive media player with audio and video support.

SplashPhoto v5.0 is available now with a free trial period. It costs $29.95 for the full version. It is available for Palm OS 4.0 and later as well as Windows Mobile devices running wm5 or later. Desktop synchronization apps are available for both WIndows and Mac OS computers.

Taiwan-based High Tech Computer (HTC) has worked with Palm a number of times in the past and produced the Treo 650 and 700 series devices. A separate report from earlier this year confirmed that Palm has again decided to work with the leading Windows Mobile firm to produce future devices.

Enjoy this six minute video preview while we prepare our full review.

Life at the Developer Conference gives you little chance for reflection; you're rushing around, trying to meet with people, see talks, catch the exhibit floor, spend time in the labs, do some networking, and getting the occasional nap to keep your energy up.  I'm writing this early on Friday morning at the gate for my flight back to Austin; this really has been my only break since my last posting.

Wednesday morning opened with a great keynote talk by author Don Norman.  It was about the emotional aspects of design, how the shape, functionality, and aesthetics of products affect how we perceive them.  He had customized his talk a but for the Palm OS world, using examples of good and bad PDAs and smartphones, and it was both entertaining and insightful.  After Don's talk, Larry Slotnik, PalmSource CTO, talked about their OS roadmap, about what they'd done in the last year and what was coming.  There are no big surprises; they are expecting an alpha-quality release of Palm OS for Linux to licensees this fall, with the 1.0 version coming in the first part of 2006.  They had shipped Palm OS Cobalt 6.1.1 to licensees a few months ago, an update to the release last fall to fix stability and five-way navigation issues.

Mark Bercow from palmOne gave a talk later that morning, highlighting the current product line.  He commented on the reports about palmOne losing market share, noting that a lot of the reports depend on how you define the PDA or smartphone spaces.  It's good to note that we've had seven quarters of year-over-year sales growth, our margins are going up, and volume continues to increase.  Also, about 70% of Zire purchasers are buying their first PDA, showing that there's still plenty of growth room in the entry-level market.

I had my talk on NVFS on Wednesday afternoon, right after Chris Dunphy's talk on the PalmSource Installer.  I really like where the PSI format is going, and they've built some nice tools to prepare both over-the-air and desktop installer versions of your application.  Chris really showed that it's easy to setup your XML files and configure the installation process, and the PSI system will generate all the HTML pages you need to automate installation of applications from your website.  My talk went better than I expected; I'll be posting both my notes and the notes from the follow up lab session in a separate entry.

Wednesday night featured a loud and dark party, and bright and active developer labs.  Some devs were busy getting their entries ready for the PalmHack VII contest, while others were just taking advantage of the many PalmSource and palmOne engineers that were hanging around.  I was one of the hack judges, so in-between giving people CodeWarrior tips and diagnosing memory leaks, I got to see some interesting and completely wrong applications.  The judges were up past 2:00AM debating which submissions should get which prizes and what jokes we were going to make onstage, but I think the late hours were worth it.

I missed the early presentations on Thursday; I slept in an extra hour and then was working the palmOne booth.  However, I did get to catch David Fedor's excellent talk on going wireless.  The main thing I took out of that talk was to try out the AppNetLib code that's on the conference CD; this is an HTTP library that PalmSource is providing in source form for all developers, and it makes it easy for your applications to ask a web server for information.

The conference closed with Michael Mace's keynote talk about the Palm OS market.  He showed clips from several focus groups highlighting the three main markets for smartphones: communicators, information junkies, and entertainment users.  Each type of customer related to their PDA or phone in different ways: communicators tended to have a more emotional relationship with their device, but while they spent a lot of time with it, they didn't use a lot of extra applications.  The information junkies were most likely to use vertical applications and load their devices with data, but they viewed them more as tools and not something they used for fun.  The entertainment market was younger and easily bored; they saw a PDA as a necessary tool, but also something that they could use to keep stimulated during the day.

After the keynote was announcements of various contests.  I'm glad that my friend Scott Maxwell won the Aceeca virtual sheep shearing contest.  For PalmHack, we gave our grand prizes to a "Crazy Clock" application for Palm OS Cobalt and a WiFi Theremin application on Palm OS Garnet that varied the sound playback based on the current WiFi network signal strength.  A dishonorable mention was made of Scott Corley's "Sock Monkey Knife Fight" game which wowed the crowd with bloody puppets jumping around the LifeDrive's screen.  Scott had left already, so I accepted his award doing my best rabid monkey impersonation.

The first full day of the conference brought a lot of news and some good sessions.  The big deal was the announcement of palmOne's new license agreement for Palm OS, and their purchase of the name "Palm" from PalmSource.  I don't have any details outside of the press release; it looks like palmOne will be changing its name back to Palm in the near future, and that PalmSource has a few years to rebrand itself and its OS.

Outside that note, this morning's keynote address wasn't very surprising.  I caught a bit of the palmOne talk with new Senior VP Mark Bercow which mainly was about our product line strategy and how we rely on developers to produce interesting software.  While working the palmOne booth on the exhibit floor, the most common questions were "can I play with a LifeDrive?" and "what's the difference between the different Treo 650s you're selling in the store?".

This evening was fun; I was one of the on-stage experts for the "Stump the Experts" panel.  We didn't have a huge number of questions from the audience, but it was enough to fill the hour, and I got to pitch in on some NVFS and Sony questions.  After that, I hung out at the hardware labs and mostly answered CodeWarrior questions.  I also helped one of the PalmSource engineers get their PalmRC compiler plugin for CodeWarrior working better; this is one of the tools available as part of the PalmSource Inside Track program, and it's pretty nice for people who want to use the XRD format with the CW V9 tools.

I've registered here at the PalmSource 2005 Developer Conference, and my first impressions are good.  They are still getting a lot of the conference space setup, but attendence is high, and the talk schedule looks good.  Of course, the most important first impression for a conference is what kind of free stuff you get as an attendee.  The 2004 PalmSource conference bag was pretty sparse, but this year the contents are looking a lot better.

First, there's the bag itself.  It's a black backpack with the "Palm Powered" and "PalmSource" logos on it, but no mention of the event.  I guess that lets PalmSource reuse any leftovers.  It has a rubberized bottom, two deep side pockets suitable for holding water bottles or laptop power adapters, a primary holding area with a laptop pouch, space for papers in the main flap, and  a front pocket with a snap-off organizer.  All of the zippers have zip pulls, and the back straps look to be well constructed with lots of stitching..  I think it will be a useful addition to my collection of show bags, and I'll probably switch to it as my day-to-day laptop bag.

In the backpack was a variety of papers, gadgets, and software included:

• Don Norman - a trade paperback copy of his book "Emotional Design"
• Motricity - notepad
• Cingular - vinyl notepad and pen
• palmOne - a Treo-labeled pen
• Garmin - a CD with their latest iQue SDK
• BlackBerry - a small four-port USB 1.1 hub in translucent blue
• iambic - a DVD-case copy of their Agendus Professional application for both Palm OS and Windows
• PalmGear - a non-slip pad for your car that grips to your dashboard
• DataViz - a flyer for a free copy of their RoadSync over-the-air email sync program for talking with Microsoft Exchange 2003 servers
• Audible.com - a card for a free month of membership in their audiobook store
• Ultrasoft - flyer for free copy of Ultrasoft DataShield

Tonight is the Palm OS Users Group meeting, and tomorrow morning is the opening keynote.  It looks like David Nagel will still be delivering the talk, even though he resigned as CEO of PalmSource over the weekend.

Both the Tungsten T5 and the new LifeDrive have an application on them called "Files".  This is the file manager that lets you navigate the collection of files that's on your SD card or on the internal volume.  To support opening files on external media, palmOne has extended the Exchange Manager by defining some new values.

Traditionally, an application registers for a file extension or MIME type and says that it will process items that match that registration when they are received via a beam or some other exchange library.  This is done using the Exchange Manager function ExgRegisterDatatype along with one of the constants exgRegExtensionID or exgRegTypeID.  In the palmOne SDK, the header file "common/libraries/filebrowser/FileBrowserLibCommon.h" defines these values:

#define exgRegEditCreatorID     0xff7b // creator ID registry
#define exgRegEditExtensionID   0xff7d // filename extension registry
#define exgRegEditTypeID        0xff7e // MIME type registry

These are new values you can pass to ExgRegisterDatatype to tell the system that your application can handle opening files on a VFS volume that match a particular creator ID, extension, or MIME type. More details on registering to handle files on external media, how to register icons to go with those types, and what to do when the system tells you to open a file are in the palmOne Developer Guide in the "File Browser API" section. On devices with this API, there's also several shared library calls that you can use to present "open file" and "save file" dialogs.

While the file browser APIs are palmOne-specific, the methods of registering with Exchange Manager and having a file browser application activate registered programs have been submitted back to PalmSource for standardization in their Palm OS APIs. The scheme isn't too bad and fits in with the other uses of Exchange Manager, so I hope they accept it as an OS-wide standard.

[Note: if any of you are developers of software that have the ability to unzip files, adding support for this would be a very, very, very cool thing. Hint, hint.]

You should have seen the palmOne announcement of our new LifeDrive mobile manager handheld this week.  It's been in the rumor mill for a while, and I enjoyed reading the slightly inaccurant rantings from the Palm OS enthusiast community.  The LifeDrive is new technology in the PDA space; it doesn't do everything you'd want it to do the speed isn't as good as I'd like, and I wish the hard drive was at least 20GB, but I already think it is really, really useful in its current configuration.

The LifeDrive works pretty well as an external hard drive for your laptop or desktop system.  It's got a FAT32 file system and enough space to store a lot of documents.  This tends to change the synchronization paradigm a lot; where before, you had conduits that reformatted or excerpted data between your PC and your device, now you can just have the data in one place -- on the LifeDrive -- and have your PC directly modify that data.  This opens up some real opportunities in the application development space for the PDA.

In particular, I'd love to see more applications that can parse and manage data from desktop apps.  I use Eudora for my email, and I think it would be really good to see an update to Eudora for Palm OS that works off VFS storage.  Eudora already is very portable from PC to PC, and being able to keep the same mail store when I'm mobile would be really, really nice.  I could see similar things for PC databases and vertical applications.

John Marshall just put out the notice on the emulator forum about a major update to the Palm OS Emulator source code to fix issues with building it with recent compilers and libraries.  It doesn't update POSE to handle Palm OS 5 or ARM code, it's just a fix for "bitrot", as John puts it.  Here's the text of his announcement:

To: "Palm OS Emulator Forum"
Subject: Patches for building with recent GCC and FLTK on Linux

There have been several threads over the last few months noting that the current Emulator source code does not compile on modern Linux (or other Unix variants). That's because the last Emulator release was three years ago :-(, we're all using tools (GCC, FLTK) that are much more recent than that, and the Emulator code has bitrotted somewhat.

At http://sourceforge.net/projects/pose/ you'll find a patch that fixes all this bitrot. With this patch, the Emulator should be compilable with any GCC (2.95.x or later) and any 1.0.x or 1.1.x FLTK. I've tested it successfully with GCC 3.4.2 and 4.0.0 and with FLTK 1.0.7, 1.0.11, 1.1.0, the current 1.1.6 release, and current 1.1.x CVS. I haven't tested it with earlier versions of GCC, but I would not expect the patch's changes to introduce any new problems with older GCCs.

When compiled with GCC 3.4.x or 4.0.x, this results in a working poser. In particular, the miscompilation with GCC 3.3.x described in http://news.palmos.com/read/messages?id=153083 has gone away. This may mean that this in fact was a bug in 3.3.x's optimisation and I was wrong to point fingers at aliasing violations in EmPoint.cpp :-), but it warrants further study. If you are using GCC 3.3.x, you will likely want to arrange for EmPoint.cpp to be compiled with -fno-strict-aliasing in order to get a working poser. Or use a more recent GCC. See that thread for details.

The patch addresses the following main issues:

• Renaming of filename_ext() to fl_filename_ext() etc, in line with the renaming in FLTK 1.1.x (trivial);
• Removal of spurious braces in struct initialisations, about which the compiler is more strict than it used to be (trivial);
• Various C++ obscurities about which the compiler is more strict than it used to be (decidedly non-trivial :-));

For obscure reasons involving the FLTK changes to configure.in and subverting automake, I've included a couple of build-related patches that I've had lying around for a few years. The only interesting effect of this is that building in a separate directory (even more separate than BuildUnix) now works.

The patch is recent-gcc-fltk.diff in the patches area at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pose/.

John

Ton van Overbeek's done it again.  The developer of the prc-tools patch for supporting debugging of multiple code sections now has developed a TCP/IP-to-USB bridge program for Linux and Cygwin, similar to the one that Florent Pillet did on Mac OS X.  This enables direct debugging USB-based devices on those systems, and it also bypasses PalmSource's USBPort.dll meaning it works around some bugs that prevent CodeWarrior or Palm OS Debugger from talking to some devices that don't identify their debug channels correctly.

I've quoted Ton's message about this below.  If you're using those tools, I'd urge you to check it out and provide feedback to him.

Subject: [ANN] tcpusb-0.1: USB debugging for m68k-palmos-gdb

Finally you can use m68k-palmos-gdb with USB devices.

I made a tcp-usb bridge (same idea as Florent Pillet's bridge for MacOS) which works both under Cygwin and Linux. For the impatient: the files are on http://www.v-overbeek.nl/tcpusb.

Since I have no way to test all combinations of USB devices and Windows and Linux versions, I need your help to try this out. The best way to send comments is to post them on the PalmSource tools-forum (http://news.palmos.com/read/?forum=tools-forum) and/or sent them to the prc-tools-devel mailinglist at sourceforge (prc-tools-devel@lists.sourceforge.net). When the code turns out to be usable with many devices I might integrate it directly into m68k-palmos-gdb, so you could say something like "target palmos usb:".

I have tried tcpusb 0.1 with a Tungsten T and T3 on WinXP/SP2, Win2K, Linux 2.4.27, 2.6.8 and 2.6.11. Also some limited testing with a Handspring Visor was done.

One caveat for Linux: The 2.6.11-rcx versions do not work due to a bug in the usbfs code. The major distribution affected by this is Knoppix 3.8.x which uses 2.6.11-rc3.

Enjoy.
Ton van Overbeek

I support a "Update my Application" feature in my SXSW 2005 schedule application.  I do this by setting up a series of URLs on my webserver, one for each version of the program that was released with the web update feature:

• http://2005.sxsw.com/pda/includes/downloads/update_4.1.0.html
• http://2005.sxsw.com/pda/includes/downloads/update_4.2.0.html

The application turns its own version string (retrieved from its 'tver' #1000 resource) into a URL using the format string "http://2005.sxsw.com/pda/includes/downloads/update_%s.html" and then it uses that to launch the device's web browser using code derived from the Web Browser Manager sample code in the PalmSource KB.

A user with an current version of the application gets directed to a "you're using the latest version" message, while a user with an older version gets a link to the PRC download. I could also have used HTML auto-refresh to just start the download automatically, using HTML code like <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="5; URL=http://2005.sxsw.com/pda/includes/downloads/sxsw_2005.prc" /> embedded in the <head> part of the update page.

PALMADDICT IS GIVING AWAY A TREO PRO AND A TUNGSTEN T|X BUT THE CONTEST COULD END AT ANY TIME

OK, we are not having a throwaway this time, we are going to have a contest. One lucky PalmAddict reader will win a TreoPro, the fantastic new smartphone from Palm. Obviously they are not available yet but as soon as they are, I will personally fund a TreoPro to one lucky winner. The TreoPro is open to US readers only, I will also give away as a prize for those outside of the US, a new Tungsten TX, so there will be two winners for this contest.

It's a total random drawing and you just send me a user thought or mobile opinion maybe something on how you use your mobile device or something on the same lines but importantly make it positive. A couple of quick guidelines. Questions to readers or opinions wanted from readers go in the forum [they are not entered]; no self site or software promotions or you will not be entered and nothing you have sent before or used elsewhere. No personal plea's as to why you want the TreoPro or what you will do with it as they are trashed immediately we want to hear your mobile thoughts and how your using your mobile device. Importantly give your user thought a title, or again you will not be entered. If your writing about a program then you must include the link so others can enjoy the program.

Open to readers and writers [writers post as normal and I'll post on the front page when you need to send me your post counts]. As mentioned previously I appreciate the people who add kind words to me in their email, a small percentage just send their thought without even saying hi or how are you, they take it for granted that they are entered into the hat, so your thoughts with add on messages are always welcome and certainly entered. Please put TREOPRO in your subject line if your entering for the TreoPro or TX if you want me to enter you in the Tungsten TX draw, IMPORTANTLY give your user thought [or we will not enter you] a title, and then email - sammymcloughlin@gmail.com

The throwaway can end at any time, so you need to get your user thoughts and opinions into me sooner rather than later and have fun.

Have you been following the controversial iPhone ad in U.K.? As some of you who have, you must have your own arguments on is it right or not for Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to banned the iPhone ad because it's "miss-leading".

The lack of Flash and Java support in iPhone's Safari web browser has caused a painful back-lash for Apple, especially for Steve Jobs who was strongly expressed his will not to allow those two of the most used proprietary technologies (from 3rd party software developers) in almost every websites nowadays.

It's the: "You'll never know which part of the internet you'll need" and "all parts of the internet are on the iPhone" lines said in the ad that made ASA to pull it off from airing. Watch the ad for yourself below, in the YouTube video I've embedded in this post.

Like the Apple we know, the Cupertino-based company quickly responsed to the accusation that the ad is referring to every website availability, rather than technical details or specific appearances. But ASA doesn't agree, and based on two complaints from local viewers, they said: "We concluded that the ad gave a misleading impression of the internet capabilities of the iPhone."

"Because the iPhone doesn't support Flash or Java, you couldn't really see the internet in its full glory," said Olivia Campbell, a spokesperson for the ASA. "They made a very general claim that you can see the internet in its entirety, and actually that's not quite true - so we've upheld."

Apple, a.k.a. Steve Jobs; has their/his own reason on why the Flash & Java are not supported in iPhone's Safari web browser. And ASA, which represent the mass local viewers right; has their own reason on pulling off the ad.

It's a tough world out there, a chaotic population that's filled with over-lapping rules fueled by certain interests from big companies. So I'm not gonna post my own oppinion on this one, it's better if I let you decide for yourself which is the right one; Apple or ASA? And whether or not the news is "miss-leading" you to see the 'bare-necessity' of mobile world. ;-)

Sources are from:

• Apple iPhone ad banned in UK due to "misleading" claims (AppleInsider)
• Why the UK was Wrong to Ban the iPhone ?Just the Internet? Ad! (the iPhone Blog)
• iPhone ad rapped as 'misleading' (BBC News)

[blogged with my Treo 750v]

If you've listened to PA Official Podcast #127 by Tyler Faux, or read the news that Android won't be having Bluetooth feature in its first official SDK v1.0; then here are some more heart-breaker news coming right at you.

The Android Dev Team has posted the decision not to include Google Talk into Android platform, for now. At first they were about to put GTalk into Android, but then they realized  the GTalkService has some fundamental security problems. Rich Cannings, one of Android security researchers explain the security issues in Android Dev Blog as:

"Although we would have loved to ship this service, in the end, the Android team decided to pull the API instead of exposing users to risk and breaking compatibility with a future, more secure version of the feature. ... As a final note, I want to point out that since the GTalkService was always a Google "value-added" service anyway, it was never guaranteed that it would be present on every Android device. That is, GTalkService was never part of core Android. As a result this change actually allows us the potential to build a new system that is part of the core of a future version of Android."

Personally, I think the reason is more than security issue but because there's a good probability that GTalk could jeopardize the quick adoption of Android platform by wireless carriers around the globe. Why? Cuz if we can use GTalk to talk with our friends, then we won't be using the wireless carrier's voice plan anymore, no? The same reason why Nokia has pulled off its VoIP feature in N96 & N78.

And the Android Dev Team also explains on why there's no Bluetooth feature in current release of Android: "The reason is that we plain ran out of time. The Android Bluetooth API was pretty far along, but needs some clean-up before we can commit to it for the SDK. Keep in mind that putting it in the 1.0 SDK would have locked us into that API for years to come. "

On a personal note, Nick adds, "I would love nothing more than to start seeing some neat third-party applications and games over Bluetooth. In my opinion, Bluetooth is completely under-utilized on most mobile platforms and I'm excited to someday see what the developer community can do with Android."

I'm definitely bummed about these API removals. I was particularly looking forward to the P2P capabilities offered by GTalkService, but, as always, user security and privacy must come first.

[blogged with my Treo 750v]

I had one of those most tiring days last night and today, where I felt so tired even though I hadn't go through too much of a hectic schedule but my eyes just wanted to shut down no matter what.

And so is today, after two cup of coffee; at last my eyes are fully opened. Too bad my stomach doesn't quite agree with them ~LOL~

Anyway, so far I've been using my Treo to call and send text messages from last night till this morning. And when I saw Tyler Faux's podcast is finally up at PalmAddict, I rush to my computer and downloaded it immediately; then I transfered the PA Podcast #127 to my Treo so I can listen to it while on the go.

I know I could download it via OTA, but the wireless data network of my carrier hasn't been good over these past 4 days. I only get slow GPRS connection, not the usual 3G no more. My cup of mobile joy is depleted, it's not the same without fast data connection. So I guess it's best to get the podcast in old fashion way ;-p  How about you, how's your data connection these days?

[blogged with my Treo 750v]

[MP3] Download Palm Addict in the usual mp3 format or just listen through streaming normal.

[RSS] You can subscribe to the Official Palm Addict Podcast RSS feed here and have the Podcast delivered to you in your RSS aggregator.

[SUBSCRIBE:] Remember you can subscribe via i-Tunes and never miss an episode.

?We are excited to further develop our long standing relationship with Palm, allowing us to provide mobile professionals access to Line of Business (LOB) applications on the Treo Pro smartphone, so the user can take full advantage of its capabilities as a true business tool,? said Joe Watterson, VP of Sales Operations at CommonTime. ?Increasing numbers of mobile professionals are requiring more than just PIM and email on their smartphone devices to remain productive while out of the office. Our mSuite platform provides organizations the tools they need to accommodate their mobile workforce in a highly secure and manageable fashion.?

CommonTime?s mSuite Platform provides enterprise organizations with:
Fast access to Lotus Notes PIM and email and LOB applications
Two free mobile applications as part of every mSuite license; mExpense and mTimeSheets
Free SDK to develop any custom mobile application
End-to-end enterprise class, FIPS cmpliant security
Seamless connectivity via any cradle, WiFi or Carrier Network
?Treo Pro is a great device to help enterprises deliver mobility tools that provide access to not only corporate email, but also business-critical mobile applications,? said Jonathan Wall, director of Developer Relations at Palm, Inc. ?CommonTime?s mSuite extends the capabilities of Treo Pro for organizations that rely on Lotus Notes, and we?re excited to work with them on this effort.? For further information on CommonTime?s software and services visit www.commontime.com

Lots of stuff going on, but not close enough to release to share. Will keep you up on the latest as best I can. I will also post info on our blog, Mobile Evolution.

It's almost time for the kids to go back to school, and this year I have 3 other schedules to keep track of on top of my own. My wife is a teacher, and both kids go to different schools, so everyone has different days off, open houses, half-day's, etc... to schedule around. We sat down the other night with all 3 school calendars and got all of the major events for the year covered. For a long sit-down planning events like this I use Agendus. I have everyone in the family assigned a different color, and a unique icon. That way even if I'm looking at a month-view, I can quickly see who has an event that day. For day-to-day scheduling and looking at my calendar, I still prefer to use 2day by ShSh. For the quick look, or quick add of a meeting/task/reminder, it's much easier for me than navigating directly to Agendus. What I love is that my Agendus Icons also show up in 2day! Looks like it's going to be a busy year! Thankfully I should be able to keep on top of it all with the help of my trusty Treo and 2 of my favorite programs.

DataViz has also enhanced the PDF viewer included with their mobile office suite with this release of Documents To Go for Pocket PC. The improvements provide a clear and crisp viewing experience of all Adobe (R) PDF file elements (rendering stays true to desktop file) and makes dramatic speed improvements when opening files so users can be more productive.

Other features include support for password protected Word and Excel files, InTact(TM) Technology for retaining 100% file formatting when editing files on the device, the ability to view, edit and create Excel charts and decompress, zip and send e-mail attachments. Documents To Go is available for a wide variety of Windows Mobile Pocket PC devices such as the AT&T Tilt, Palm Treo 750 and Palm Treo 800w to name a few. An optimized version to support high resolution screen devices such the HTC Touch Pro and HTC Touch Diamond will be available in the next several weeks.

"We are pleased to see DataViz bring its highly regarded mobile Office suite, Documents To Go, to the Windows Mobile Pocket PC platform," said David Schoenbach, Vice President -- Business Development, MobiHand, Inc. "As a leading distributor of mobile smartphone content, our customers can now enjoy the benefits of this powerful wireless office solution, enhancing their productivity and work quality when out of the office."

"We are excited to expand our product line to include Windows Mobile Pocket PC devices," said Danny Tu, Product Manager, DataViz, Inc. "Our latest release is an answer to our many customer requests to develop for this platform."

Pricing & Availability
Pricing starts at $29.99 USD per license with volume licenses available for five or more users. Documents To Go Premium Edition 3.0 for Windows Mobile 6.x Professional and 5.0 Pocket PC for Phone Edition is available for purchase direct from DataViz ( www.dataviz.com), as well as from Handango ( www.handango.com), MobiHand ( www.mobihand.com) and the network of DataViz resellers and distributors worldwide. A complete list of resellers and distributors is available online at www.dataviz.com/wheretobuy. For more information and to download a free evaluation copy, visit www.dataviz.com/dtgpocketpc.

Hi Sammy and all the addicts. Greetings from waterlogged Florida. We made it through TS Fay. It wasn?t a very strong storm, but it moved slowly and brought a lot of rain. It is good to finally see some sunshine.

Now that things are back to normal, school has started back. I am taking 4 online classes at one of the local colleges. Online classes are not necessarily harder than their brick and mortar counterparts, but they do require you to be a bit more self-disciplined and have a good schedule. To help me keep a good schedule, I have been using Due Yesterday and Due Yesterday Desktop. Both are free programs. Due Yesterday is a ?student-centric? PIM for the Palm OS. It allows you keep track of course info, assignments, exam dates, and grades. Due Yesterday Desktop is the companion program that runs on the desktop, of course. Both programs come with good, easy to follow instructions. The Desktop program is a very small java app. It has a small and very clean-cut (if not boring) interface, but it?s quick and gets the job done. The program does not have a built-in alarm feature, but it does have an auto-export feature. This will automatically export your due items to either your Date Book, which will alarm if you choose, or to your To Do List. There are some other free programs that are similar to Due Yesterday, and I might give them a try just to compare features. But, So far, I?m happy with Due Yesterday.

Secondary battery with charger and speaker for iPhone 3G / iPhone 2G.
Specifications:
- Capacity: 2400mAh
- Charging Time: ~3hrs
- Discharging time (to iPhone): ~3hrs
- Power of amplifier speaker: <1.5W
- Input Voltage: 4.8 ~ 5.5V
- Current input: 500-1000mA
- Output Voltage: 5.0 ~ 5.5V
- Current output: 100-1000mA
- Quiescent power drain: <50uA
- Weight: 93g

Instructions:
- On/Off button to access the secondary battery when on, off use iPhone battery.
- iPower will turn off automatically after 60s idle status. Or your can turn it off/on by press and hold the button for 3s.
- Connect the charge cable to charge the iPhone and secondary battery simultaneously.
- If iPower's power is below 10%, the 1st LED will remind you by flickering fast. If bwlow 5%, iPower will stop charging iPhone and providing power for it ; the speaker could keep on playing for about 7hours at this condition.
- iPower (3G version) has the volume control button on its right. Ten levels in total. Press and hold up button, volume will increase until Max, press and hold down button, volume will decrease until Mute.

The guys at Treonauts have reviewed the excellent Kinoma Play. "Overall, Kinoma Play is a terrific (albeit not quite yet perfect) application and there?s no doubt that it sets a new standard for streaming and on-board media files. The program is ultra-fast and smooth, offers one of the richest and vastest set of online media sources to choose from as well as delivering a truly complete set of functionalities. Finally, I believe that Kinoma Play offers a perfect demonstration of the significant improvements that an increasing number of Windows Mobile developers have made in the consumer space ? easily matching those found on the iPhone for example ? and it may be one of the best examples of things to come." Andrew at Treonauts has the full read.