Double-Whammy from Bell Mobility

Say "Hi" to the Treo 700p.

Income trust taxation issues? Who cares! Let's just release another Treo!

That's what I think is going on at Bell's HQ because they just dropped another Treo on our Great Northern Land. The Palm Treo 700p is out on Bell's CDMA network now, with support for some really high-speed EvDO mobile internet. I've fooled around with one for a while, and while I prefer my 650 because it has support for the rather unsightly Enfora WiFi Sled for my 802.11b needs, if you can afford an EvDO-enabled data plan, you will go nuts over the 700p.

Don't like the antenna? No worries, there are some folks at TreoCentral that have started producing short ones, for all the 700-series Treos and the 650. A review of one of those when mine arrives!

In other news, Telus is also slated to get the Treo 700p. Leaked marketing materials confirm this (account required for link). When? Soon enough I suppose. Now that both Telus and Bell have two new Treos each (the Treo 700wx and the Treo 700p), and at price points lower than Rogers' insane $549 for an old-school Treo 650, what's a GSM-lover to do?

Canuck Treo 680: Sooner Than We Think?

Got a tip earlier today that the Treo 680 might be released on Rogers next week. Likely? Not sure. Take this with a grain of salt. It has, however, been long-rumoured and speculated that Rogers will get the 680, as well as a few other HTC offerings for their new HSDPA network. Does that also open doors for an HSDPA-enabled 750 to come? I would wager a "yes".

So, the wait continues!

Treo 680 Released In the US

The Treo 680 has been unleashed! Cingular in the US of A is now selling this puppy for US$199 with a two-year contract and a data plan. Unlocked versions in all the colours are on sale for US$349 on Palm's site. Graphite (grey) is the only colour offered for Cingular-branded units.

So the question now is, Telus and Bell just got the 700wx, when will Rogers fight back with the 680? We know it's coming, but when?

List - A Simple Database

List the freeware database program by Andrew Low (Roo) is an amazingly simple, amazingly useful database program. It is quite likely the very first freeware program I added to my very first Palm. Andrew Low has released a new version of List. You can download version 1.1.2 here. It has been tested for compatiblity with: Zire 72; Tungsten E2; Tungsten T3; Tungsten C; TX; Treo 650; LifeDrive; Tungsten E; Tapwave Zodiac2; XPlore M68; Palm M515.

Try it, I know you'll like it! And, it's Canadian!

Here is some of the information from Roo's "about" page:

List started as a project back when the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000 were first available. For more information on the history of the Palm I suggest you start with the wikipedia entry. At the time there was no easy development environment, I relied on resouces hosted by Darrin Massena. The original code was intended to be a CD List application limited to storing information about my music collection - I had done quite a bit of work in assembly using Pila as a GCC port had not been done yet.

Before long GCC was made available, and moving to C was an obvious step. While doing this re-write I made the code more generic to allow for any type of simple list. The first official release of List was on 19 April 1998. Very little has changed from the original design since then, the goals were to make it a very Palm-like application - simple and intuiative to use. It only supports 3 fields, two which can be customized and a note field.

The number of users, and uses of the List program have continued to amaze me. Now there are other database programs for PalmOS that are freely available and provide much more functionality - but List seems to have a particular niche.

Up until 2003 I was able to maintain a single version of List that supported all of the PalmOS devices. This included all of the legacy devices back to the Pilot 1000. However, with the introduction of newer devices it become more difficult to have a single code base that supported the new features that users were looking for, and maintained backwards compatibility. The download page will always have links to older versions for anyone who’s got an very old device, but more recent versions will target the devices that are current.

MIT Working on Broadcast Power

The following is part of an article by Tim Gray on Sci-Tech-Today. According to this, it won't be long until we won't even have to plug in our PDAs to charge them. Even more freedom for us!

Scientists have known for nearly two hundred years that certain kinds of energy can be transferred without wires, but light energy from the Sun for solar power or the transfer of microwaves for communication involves relatively low levels of energy. The MIT researchers are working on a project to transfer much higher levels of energy for powering consumer-electronics devices.

We might be approaching one of the final frontiers in the wireless world as researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they have developed a wireless power transfer device that would enable wireless charging of consumer-electronic devices, such as mobile phones, MP3 players, and laptops.

While the need for cables and wires to operate notebook Relevant Products/Services PCs and connect to the Internet has slowly disappeared in recent years, with audio and data transmissions being piped through the air, cables have been needed to recharge portable devices.

The concept behind this new device is not new, said Marin Soljacic, an assistant professor in MIT's Department of Physics and Research Laboratory of Electronics, who co-authored the study.

Scientists have known for nearly two hundred years that energy can be transferred without wires. This wireless transfer of energy, such as light energy from the Sun for solar power or the transfer of microwaves from transmitters for communication, involves relatively low levels of energy.

However, recharging devices like laptops requires a much higher concentration of energy that, if run through the air, could be dangerous.

The researchers have built a prototype that can exploit the resonance of electromagnetic waves, including radio waves, infrared, and X-rays. It is capable of transferring energy over approximately 10 to 15 feet wirelessly, according to the researchers.

Although a consumer device has not been built, in theory it would have a lock-and-key mechanism in which the transmitter and receiver are both tuned to the same frequency range that enables energy to be transferred only to the target, according to researchers.

You can read the entire article here on Sci-Tech-Today.

PGP is 15 Years Old

Thanks to this SlashDot article, I learned that PGP, today's most used cryptography software, is now 15 years old.

Here's the introduction to the article on HelpNetSecurity. They also have an interview with Jon Callas, CTO and CSO of PGP Corporation that covers The Story of PGP: Past, Present and Future.

PGP Corporation salutes the 15th anniversary of PGP encryption technology. Developed and released in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann, Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 set the standard for safe, accessible technology to protect and share online information. Used by millions of users and tens of thousands of companies around the world, PGP technology continues to be recognised for its contributions to the software industry, Internet commerce, and the protection of privacy. Recently, PGP encryption technology was named one of the top 25 most influential products of the first 25 years of enterprise personal computing.

Men flashing fancy mobiles to pick up girls
Is that a phone in your pocket or... ?

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Monday 13 November 2006

Forget the cheesy chat-up lines, flash car or dodgy dancing, men are now whipping out their mobiles to attract the ladies, research from Sheffield Hallam University reveals.

The research also found men actively display their phones more than women in social situations to look important and popular and also to show off to male peers.

Dr Simeon Yates, director of the Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute at Sheffield Hallam who headed up the research, told silicon.com the situation is "much more complicated and more to do with how we use the phones".

Yates said men might fiddle with mobiles because they don't have handbags or anywhere else to store them and the phones can also act as a point of conversation with one's peers. "But they could just be showing off," he added.

Yates said both men and women will try to 'maintain face' in same sex groups by checking caller IDs - with women double checking an intimate call isn't incoming and blokes worried it could be their mums on the other end of the line.

The two-year study observed men and women in various public locations including restaurants, bars and coffee shops.

Yates has also completed research on how the different sexes text each other, finding that women write texts to other women that are twice as long as male-to-male text correspondence.

From silicon.com

Well well, I type texts that are twice as long as my female friends, because I have a Treo, and I suppose I am also guilty of showing off, because I have a Treo. A Black Tie Treo. Bwahaha!