Tuxtops

This is supposed to be the "smartphone for the masses" selling at around $400 without a contract in US (the phone hasn't been released officially in US yet so it's rare to find). Here's a comprehensive review of the unit at GSMArena with plenty of pictures.

The device comes with a recent build of Symbian OS v7. Pros: GPRS class 10, EDGE class 5, 1.3 MP camera, Bluetooth, includes a 32 MB MMC card, FM radio, image/video editor, Real player, hi-res screen, email, XHTML browser. Drawbacks: It seems to be using a rare kind of MMC (about $55 for 256 MB), only 6 MBs of internal memory, earphones only deliver mono sound for mp3 playback and they don't seem reliable.

Leaving competitors in the dust, Archos' due-out-shortly AV700 portable media viewer offers a whopping 7" display coupled with up to 100 GB of storage.

PalmOne released the Tungsten E2 which offers Bluetooth and a bigger battery. It has a 320x320 display with 30% brighter and 40% better color saturation, 32 MB of NVFS memory (26 MB available to the user). NVFS memory holds information without a charge or power. It runs at 200 Mhz, it has a headphone jack but lacks a microphone. It runs PalmOS 5.4.7. Reviews here, here and here.

"Microsoft aims to kill BlackBerry," an insider told CRN. "Every corporate type has a BlackBerry, and they all have Outlook. What is the cost going to be to RIM Server when Exchange Service Pack and Magneto come out and they're not priced? Microsoft is giving it away for free." Read the article at TheRegister.

This is a quick HOWTO for those using Linux to access the Internet from a Great North Eastern Railway train in UK. There is a bit of an assumption in this HOWTO that you have a functioning WiFi setup on your Linux Laptop.

Geeks.com has another great deal (note: we are not affiliated with geeks.com in any way): this time they sell the Dell Axim X5-Advanced model for $179, and the deal includes as extras a Belkin case, foldable keyboard and a sync/charge cable/car-charger. The X5 has 64 MB RAM, 400 Mhz XScale CPU and 48 MB ROM, SD/CF slots. It runs Windows Mobile 2002, but there is a neat hack to upgrade it to Windows 2003 manually.

According to this recent study, in total, 13 percent of mobile subscribers in USA reported accessing news and information via a mobile browser in February 2005.

According to the survey, 63 percent of participants wanted to keep cell phone restrictions in place, while 21 percent favored cell phone use during flights.

In the past two years, Wind River Systems got over its scorn for Linux. Now it's up to Ken Klein, chief executive for 15 months, to do more than embrace the open-source operating system: He's got to find a way to profit from it.

Jørgen Sundgot snuggles up to Samsung's WIP-6050M, a wireless phone that relies on blazing Wi-Fi 802.11g rather than GSM or CDMA for a line out.