Tuxtops

PalmSource, France Telecom's Orange and several other companies plan on Monday to announce an effort to standardize aspects of Linux running on mobile phones.

iGlance is a "presence" communication utility for Windows, incorporating push to talk, video, audio and text. It is open source under the OVPL license.

OpenSync is a synchronization framework that is platform and distribution independent. It consists of several plugins that can be used to connect to devices (e.g. phones, PDAs etc), a sync-engine and the framework itself. It is capable of synchronizing any type of data, including contacts, calendar, tasks, notes and files. Version 0.18 was released a few days ago and its team and KDE's have joined forces.

Chris Rioux of Noctemware has successfully brought Quake III to the Intel 2700g accelerated device, apparently achieving speeds of 15-20 FPS. The embedded 16MB 3D card is to be found on Dell's high-end PDAs Axim x50v and x51v. This is the first "seriously heavy" 3D game to be ported to any PDA (there is a port of older Quake too).

The Windows Mobile 5.0 based MyPal A636 (above) and A632 make their way to retail stores next week and come jam packed with goodies and neat little touches. They have GPS and other great features, but they lack Bluetooth.

Bulk be gone; Samsung's SGH-D800 and SGH-D820 slider handsets offer high-resolution displays, 1.3 Megapixel cameras and audio players - and one even sports microSD expansion. At 14.9 mm, Samsung claims its new SGH-Z510 and SGH-Z540 handsets as the righteous heirs to the throne of thin, complete with 3G, high-resolution displays and 1.3 MP cameras.

As handset producers look harder at open source, the pressure is building on software makers Symbian and Microsoft.

Popular blogger and Yahoo! manager Russell Beattie reveals some astounding networking numbers for Japanese mobile phone user: about 95% of these users are using their cellphones to connect to the web and retrieve information or just surf. We don't have numbers for the Europeans, but in USA the number went down to 10.9% from 12.7% in April this year.

This intriguing guest editorial discusses the current legal landscape surrounding the SDIO and MMC specifications, and explains why no open source SDIO host controller drivers exist.

The new Gmini 402 Camcorder from Archos tacks a 1.2 Megapixel camera onto the 20 GB of storage, 2.2-inch screen and audio/video playback capabilities of its predecessor.