Tuxtops

It seems that the era of the mobile Web is here if we are to judge by the announcement of the first US web design house, Mobits.com, which only accepts jobs for developing mobile web sites! Their portfolio & demos show some nice screenshots of a number of mobile browsers being supported by the company and this begs the question: how does YOUR web site look like on a phone or a PDA? And if you do have a mobile site, is the user get redirected automatically to it?

Manage your schedule, contacts and to-do lists, in addition to reading e-mail with this Royal Linea16 Handheld PDA: It features 16 MB memory, a touchscreen LCD screen with 160x200 resolution, it's compatible with Microsoft Outlook, has handwriting recognition, and a Lithium-ion rechargeable battery. With a built-in 56K modem, the Linea16 lets you send or receive emails at home or on the road (use rss2email to get news from the web on your PDA as the device can only use its included modem for POP3 email). Geeks.com currently sell it for less than 25 US dollars!

There is also an optional keyboard for it as you can see from this high-res picture of the PDA (couldn't find where to buy it though).

Is it possible that Linux missed a huge opportunity to completely take over an operating system market? OSNews discusses the possibility that this might have happened around 2001 when the first smartphones appeared in the market. Since then, Symbian is thriving, Windows is slowly taking them over and PalmOS is fighting an uphill battle. And Linux has barely 1% of that market even if it's more capable than any of these embedded OSes.

"Yes, the Pepper Pad has some nice specifications (8.4" touchscreen, Intel PXA270 (624MHz) processor, 20GB HDD, QWERTY keyboard, SD/MMC slot, 802.11b and Bluetooth), but I definitely wouldn't call it compact, nor would I be substituting my Pocket PC for this. If anything, I'd use it as a complement, but then that's what my laptop is for, right? Anyone liking this $949, all-in-one device?" Read the discussion here.

"As many of our readers know, I am a major proponent of mobile-friendly web design and browsing. Very few browsers in the mobile world are powerful enough to support modern w3c technologies (IE, NetFront, Opera & OpenWave) however they are good enough to do some basic browsing and even have SSL support. But especially in the case of IE (which is used a lot with PocketPCs & WinCE), Microsoft is still bundling IE 5.0x with these OSes. And we all know how unsecure 5.0.x is." Read more at OSNews.com.

The Opie Project is pleased to announce the availability of version 1.2 with many new features.

A beta version of Magneto leaked out: This version of the OS, which is expected to be called Windows Mobile 2005, will have a number of significant changes from the current one.

The new Treo smartphone is GNU/Linux compatible and comes with Bluetooth connectivity--here's how you can set it up for your network.

This article introduces a network camera based on embedded Linux, an open FPGA, and a free, open codec called Ogg Theora. Author Andrey Filippov, who designed the camera, says it is the first high-resolution, high frame-rate digital camera to offer a low bit rate.

Want a good smartphone on the cheap? Jørgen Sundgot has a quick play with Nokia's 3230, and thinks it might be just the ticket - and a good-looking one at that.