Tuxtops

Motorola is introducing three new Linux-based devices: the Motorola A910, A728 and A732. These new handsets are designed to deliver a seamless mobile office experience for professional users.

The global market for smart mobile devices continued its rise in Q2 2005 according to estimates released by research firm Canalys. Nokia once again saw its smart phone shipments increase at more than twice the average market rate. Palm still leads the handheld segment, with 31% market share, but its handheld shipments declined 32% year on year, resulting in a 1% unit decline overall. Handheld shipments fell in most regions, with North America down by 36%, while Latin America and Asia Pacific fell 12% and 21% respectively.

Motorola has announced a smartphone that is clearly intended to take sales away from the Treo and BlackBerry.

This is the year of the slider, and Pocket PC phones are no exception. The Samsung i730 features a slide-out thumb keyboard which marries the tactile feedback and excellent ergonomics of the Treo 650's keyboard with the slider design first seen on the HTC Blue Angel and Harrier series of devices.

There's been a lot of talk lately about how phones with mp3 functionality will inevitably take over the mp3 player market. Consolidation seems to be the word. The folks at Geeks.com sent OSNews the US edition of the (unlocked) Nokia 3300 mp3 phone -- one of the first of its kind -- and they put it to test.

FingerGear is introducing the Computer-On-a-Stick Flash Drive. The Computer-On-a-Stick is a bootable USB 2.0 Flash Drive featuring a complete onboard Operating System. Based on Linux 2.6.x Kernel with Gnome GUI Desktop, the device comes in configurations with 256MB, 512MB, 1G, 2G, 4G, and 8GB.

The Pepper Pad, a Linux-based webpad and remote control, is too limited in functionality and costs too much, says Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. Before panning the Pepper Pad, however, Mossberg pans the concept of webpads in general, making his review a little suspect, says LinuxDevices.

Initiates Linux on Laptops Forum based on user requests
 

Linux On Laptops (LoL)
team is proud to announce that the number of published Linux laptop
reports on the site have recently exceeded 3000.
 
These reports are contributed by users, and reflect their experience on
installing and configuring Linux on a particular laptop model. The team
thanks these contributors, as their contribution has helped thousands

of other
users to get Linux properly working on their laptops.

 

Based on user input the team has also launched beta version of Linux On
Laptops forum:

 

        href="http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/forum/">http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/forum/

 

Team is currently soliciting user feedback on above forum.

 

Contact: linuxonlaptops (at) gmail.com

         href="http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/">http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/

By far the best solution viewing video on a 5xxx Zaurus is TheKompany's tkcVideo application. We tried it against Opie's media-player2 and an mplayer port and here is what we found.

In our tests, trying a QVGA .wmv & Divx video and a 320x184 mpeg1 file we found tkcVideo the fastest of all. Mplayer would simply refuse to play more than 1 frame per 8 seconds of our QVGA DivX "The Matrix" trailer (we got a warning on the command line saying: "your machine is too slow") and same was for Opie's Xine-based media player. On the other hand, tkcVideo would deliver about 8-10 frames per second, which is considerably faster than its competition. You might think that this is not great either, but the Zaurus 5500 does not have any kind of floating point unit, and so decoding takes more time than on similar but newer ARM devices (e.g. the newly released Tungsten E2 at 200 Mhz is much faster than the Zaurus at 206 Mhz).

TheKompany gave us a tip regarding QVGA divx videos: encode your 320x240 DivX videos at 15 fps, which is still a very watchable frame rate, and the Zaurus should be able to decode that much easier.

Regarding mpeg1 at 320x184 we found it very watchable and it was only dropping frames only here and there. Regarding the QVGA WMV video we tried, it would deliver about 5-6 fps, but without any sound.

The application can do full screen video and it can also place the video in preview mode above the video playlist (it will search on your CF and RAM for videos, but not on SDs due to a Zaurus bug). It also supports Real Video 1.0, Raw video, mjpeg, mpeg2, mp2/3. The UI is easy to figure out too, everything is done via icons, stop, play/pause, seek, move to the next/previous video, go to fullscreen and "open new video file".

We heard that a tkcVideo customer with a Zaurus 5600 was able to play similar videos full frame, however the 5600 model is 400 Mhz, not 206. We conclude that tkcVideo is definetely a great buy if you own the 5600 model and a recommended buy if you own a 5500 but you are very careful what you are trying to decode each time.

Overall: 8/10

Linux Devices just posted a review of this Linux-based product that retails for US$99 and does multi-IM via WiFi.