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“Personally, when I hear of a product from Archos, the first thing I think of is a multi-functional personal media player (PMP), with a beefy-ish hard drive and a large color display for all my movies. That’s why it’s a little off putting for me when I hear about the company’s latest release, the XS104, because it is a fairly basic MP3 player for a non-bargain basement price.You do get 4GB of storage space from the included microdrive, putting it in the same market as the iPod nano, so that should be enough space for most people who want their tunes on the go. The 1.5-inch OLED display is adequate, but not huge. The XS104 does support picture viewing (JPEG), don’t expect any video support on this player. Instead, you’ll have to stick to your audio fix for the most part, enjoying your MP3, WMA and WAV collection.Measuring 91 x 43 x 14mm and tipping the scales at 80 grams, the Archos XS104 is available now for $230 through Cyberport”. via mobilemag.com

“If you ever dreamed of a Pocket PC phone edition PDA with a 2.1Mpix Camera, Bluetooth and Wifi, Radio Tuner, which can only be used as a worldwide TV… Well you should definitively take a return ticket to Taiwan where GIGABYTE will sell the g-Smart i, a Pocket PC Phone Edition with WM5… and a PAL/NTSC TV Tuner… So how it works? Well like any kind of TV, you just have to plug an antenna on the side of your phone and here you go!… Also do not forget to remove the antenna while using the phone feature since you may look a little bit silly here.” More photos at akihabaranews.com

“Software tends to bloat over time. It has happened to PC software and it seems to be happening to our product. I’m actually very proud when there is courage in the organization to drop some old features and I want to encourage doing it more often, especially when better usability is achieved. One example is dropping of Wallet application. Now we have also decided to drop resolution support for 176×208 and double of that from 3rd Edition FP1 onward. QVGA is becoming widely used standard resolution in smartphones. Display component prices are dropping and supporting reduced set of resolutions makes life in platform development easier, less verification and testing and I’m sure it helps also in 3rd party application development and testing. There is an inbuilt scalable UI framework in the platform need for it is not going away. Market demand is for higher resolutions such as HVGA and VGA and platform is developing to this direction. We also have to keep in mind that platform is flexible and our customers, licensees, can finally implement something different and use scalability function. Nokia 5500 is a good example about this. It has 208×208 display resolution. I see feature dropping, SW cleaning, very positively. Then there is solid ground to build up new functionality. To bloat it again someone would say.” via blogs.s60.com

“Noticeably smaller than the first-generation model, the Gigabeat S boasts a 2.4-inch, 320×240-pixel, 65,000-color QVGA screen; an excellent FM tuner with 30 autoscannable presets; and a video-out jack. Directly under the portrait-oriented display are the Back and Windows Start buttons, which takes you to the main menu no matter what you’re doing and, for example, without pausing a video that you are watching. The cross-hair-style, five-way primary controller is tactile and delicate–basic navigation on the Gigabeat S is a breeze, though the controller is placed a bit low, thanks to the elongated screen. The placement of the iPod’s Click Wheel is more natural.Most other buttons are on the Toshiba Gigabeat S’s right spine. We criticized an early version of the Gigabeat because the small buttons were unlabeled. Now they are, and they include (going from top to bottom) power, a dedicated volume rocker, and reverse, play/pause, forward. As with the Cowon iAudio X5, the placement of the play controls away from the primary navigation isn’t the most intuitive setup, but on the other hand, it’s nice to have two distinct controllers: one for playback and the other for menu navigation. iPod users don’t get purely dedicated controls.” Read this review here:

“Help Gold Miner Joe explore the legendary four-shafted gold mine in this cartoon-style jump and run game. Collect the gold and be sure and avoid the sneaky Kentucky brothers who won’t hesitate to fire your rump full of salt. Yeehaa! ” Gold Miner Joe for Palm / PocketPC is the official port of Arcade Lab‘s “Gold Miner Joe” for PC and Mac: http://www.arcadelab.com/Check out this nice game at www.viex.org

“Microsoft is continuing its slow assault on the VoIP market by signing a new deal with LG-Nortel to work together on VoIP products based on the next generation of WinCE. LG-Nortel is a joint venture between Nortel and cell phone manufacturer LG Electronics. The deal between Microsoft and LG-Nortel is a memorandum of understanding (MOU) covering joint research and development, marketing, and licensing for WinCE 6. It extends an existing agreement between the two companies in which LG-Nortel developed a WinCE 5-based multimedia SIP phone. The final agreement will be hammered out over the next several months, when designs for new WinCE 6-based IP phones will be announced. WinCE 6, code-named Yamazaki, is Microsoft’s new development environment for the next generation of smart devices and smart phones. The announcement is not getting much press, but this is a much more important deal than most people realize. Microsoft hasn’t gotten a great deal of traction in the mobile phone market, and it’s only just starting to make noise about VoIP. ” Read more here:

“Handmark has really given ol’ Tetris an impressive facelift this time around. Attractive splash title & high score screens give a positive graphical impression from the start. And, yes, the fancy Roger Dean Tetris logo is still present in this version… Nicely drawn static backdrops showcase typical Russian scenes (Kremlin, outer space etc) during the game. A minor annoyance that cannot be toggled off is the distracting checkerboard patters in the block well. The Tetromino blocks are nicely shaded for a slight 3d effect with smooth animation during block rotation and dropping. Another disappointment was when I realized the actual playfield & game graphics were designed only for 320 x 320 screens. Tetris 2.0 “supports” HVGA 320 x 480 screens but it only minimizes the DIA area while leaving black borders at the top and bottom of the screen. Perhaps Handmark intends Treo owners as the primary purchasers of Tetris 2.0? At any rate, while I was really hoping the game would utilize the full screen size on my Palm TX a bit better, it’s still a huge improvement over Tetris 1.x on Palm OS. .” Read this review at palminfocenter.com

“I love my iPod, but I do not love that it’s basically a PC accessory. No PC (or Mac) nearby means no content on the iPod, and no updates. There’s got to be a better way. I’ve previously covered a company, Music Gremlin, that’s building a Wi-Fi-enabled music player. And at the D4 conference this morning, a new company, Zing, is rolling out a service that enables other companies (like its partners Sirius and Yahoo) to build their own complete music infrastructures–content to player–that work just fine without a PC connection. The Zing prototype shown at D4 had both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios built in. The radios are used to download music and to upload data about what you are listening to. If you have one of these players, you can do cool things, like see what your friends are listening to, then play samples of those tracks, or buy songs and albums directly from the player. If you try buy items when you’re not in range of a Wi-Fi access point, the product will queue up your requests and batch-process them when you do eventually connect.” Read more at reviews.cnet.com

“The Nintendo Wii isn’t the only motion sensing game in town. Sony has already announced that they will be integrating some form of the technology in their next-generation PlayStation 3 controllers, but even before they hit the shelves in November, you can enjoy motion sensing goodness in a cell phone. A video has recently been released of the Samsung SCH-S310 announced last year, showing how the phone reacts to your movements.The demonstration is fairly basic, as it only includes a simple dice application wherein the user gives the phone a good shake and the dice reacts accordingly. Samsung is claiming another “world’s first” for the S310, saying that this phone is the first to include “movement recognition.” They’re reporting that the handset can calculate spatial movement in 3 dimensions, as well as the speed of the movement.Imagine performing text entry with this thing, writing in the air, or the possible video game applications. Outside of the motion sensing, the Samsung SCH-S310 also features a 1.3 megapixel camera, GPS, and an integrated music player.” via mobilemag.com

“Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, in order to enable mobile phones to serve content on the World Wide Web. Many mobile phones today have more processing power than early Internet servers, suggesting that “there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones,” according to the company. The technique could also be used on Linux mobile phones.Nokia says it’s “Raccoon” project started out with the Unix version of Apache, and exploited Symbian’s POSIX layer in making the port. In addition to the basic Apache httpd daemon, Nokia ported mod_python, in order to enable dynamic pages generated from both Python scripts and PSP (python server pages). Other built-in modules include mod_alias, mod_auth, mod_autoindex, mod_dav, mod_dav_fs, mod_dir, mod_log_config, mod_mime, mod_rewrite, and mod_setenvif. Nokia says it installed its experimental port, initially, on a Nokia 6630, which it then accessed over a Bluetooth PAN (personal area network). This proved somewhat useful, in that it brought “the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard.” However, the project’s goal was to enable access to the phone of the cellular network. This proved challenging due to firewalls explicitly deployed by operators to prevent such access.Ultimately, Nokia says it was able to develop a gateway application, released under the open source Apache2 license, said to be capable of providing a webserver on a mobile phone with a URL accessible from any Internet browser. “In a sense, the mobile phone has now finally become a full member of the Internet,” Nokia says. ” Read more at linuxdevices.com