WHAT’S NEW
The Palm Pilot has become a must-have fashion accessory as well as a pocket-sized organiser for millions of people. It is a combined electronic notepad, address book, diary and To Do list with facilities to download e-mail and other goodies. The latest version is the Palm 3c, which hit the streets this week. It adds a colour screen to the Palm’s familiar assets and has the new 3.5 operating system, with 8megabyte of memory.
The backlit screen is bright and stunningly easy to read (much better than previous Palms) and very user-friendly. You simply flip open the top, press the on button and today’s diary, split into hours, fills the screen. It’s easy to see why it has swept the United States, culminating in last week’s flotation which valued the company at a dizzy $45-billion on Friday.
The few people in Britain who have managed to lay their hands on a WAP (wireless application protocol – a very simplified Web) cellphone have a funky new service to play with from Virgin Radio. In what the station is claiming is a world first, listeners will be able to interact with the station while on the move.
The most interesting feature is one which allows listeners to find out which song is playing at the moment, and even buy the music online, thus ending any reliance on some tiresome DJ telling you what he or she has just played.
There’s also scheduling information, Virgin’s playlist and interactive games and competitions.
New Scientist magazine reported recently that an age-old Namibian technique for cleaning teeth matches the efficacy of modern toothpaste. Namibians chew on muthala sticks (Diospyros lyciodes), which turns out to contain no less than six antibacterial compounds. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Stellenbosch made the discovery.
Lucent Technologies has released the PhoneBrowser, which reads the Web to you in response to voice commands. It’s on trial in the US at the moment. It’s likely to be made redundant soon as wireless services expand their data capacity.