innovations
Handspring is taking its range of personal digital assistants (PDAs) upmarket with a pair of highly specified new models. Available from Handspring’s website now (www.handspring.com) and due in the stores in November are the company’s first colour PDA, the $449 Handspring Visor Prism, and its fastest model, the $299 Handspring Visor Platinum. The products are the first PDAs to use Motorola’s more powerful VZ 33MHz Dragonball processor. The Visor Prism boasts 16-bit colour and can display more than 65 000 colours. Its makers claim the colour processing will significantly enhance applications such as games, Web browsing and digital cameras. Unlike previous Visor models, which use standard AAA batteries, the Prism comes with rechargeable batteries. Handspring is billing the Visor Platinum as the fastest Palm OS compatible hand-held computer on the market, claiming it is twice as quick as the Handspring Visor Deluxe and most other Palm OS products. Both new editions of Visor come with 8MB of RAM, USB support, Mac OS compatibility and the innovative Springboard expansion slot.
Cracked it: A Swedish team has broken all 10 of the codes set as a 10 000 challenge in Simon Singh’s The Code Book (www.4th estate.co.uk/cipherchallenge), a history of codes and code-breaking published almost a decade ago. The team, led by Fredrik Almgren of Across Wireless, explains how they did it at http://codebook.org/codebook_solution.html. The cracking of the final 256-bit code was well-timed, coming before the end of Channel 4’s current series, The Science of Secrecy. Singh has a website at www.simonsingh.com
Your song: Old webheads will remember Ringo, an MIT Media Lab site that used “collaborative filtering” to recommend music you might enjoy. If you told Ringo what you liked, it would tell you about other music highly rated by other people who liked the same things as you. Ringo morphed into Firefly and HOMR (Helpful Online Music Recommendation Service) before finally being snapped up by Microsoft and never heard of again. Now SongExplorer offers the same sort of service via a somewhat overweight space-themed website. SongExplorer is backed by Edison Media Research, which supplies music-preference research to the radio industry “to help determine what gets played”. If you want to learn about the background technology, you can read Social Information Filtering: Algorithms for Automating “Word of Mouth” by the Media Labs’ Upendra Shardanand and Pattie Maes.
Fold@Home: Now you can put your PC’s wasted processing power to use to help unravel the mystery of how proteins put themselves together. The Fold@Home project has been launched by researchers at Stanford University, California, with software for PCs and Linux. It follows the popularity of Berkeley’s SETI@Home project, where home computers are being used in Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the Golem Project.
Reality bites: AllTrue.com has started to assemble the world’s biggest collection of “reality-video clips”, and encouraging the creation of clips of the sort that fuel downmarket TV channels. But even sleaze does not come cheap. The start-up is backed by $8-million in venture capital and the site design can bring an ADSL connection to its knees.
Mystery: Halloween always stimulates a flurry of activity in the US-centric parts of the Web, and this year’s offerings include an online whodunnit. Suspicion of Murder works like a commercial game, but it is online, and free, at www.suspicion-of-murder.com.
Word search: Perplexed by “bombe”, “palilogy”, “aegrotat”, “ylem” or “thalweg”? Search out the meanings, pronunciation or etymology of these and less obscure words at the online Microsoft Dictionary (dictionary. msn.com), the Language portal (www.dictionary.com), A Word A Day (www.wordsmith. org/awad), the Anagram Server (www.wordsmith.org/anagram), or the 1908 edition of Fowler’s, (www.bartleby.com/116).
Focus with your phone: Coming this month to a shop near you in Tokyo … what is claimed to be the first mobile phone with a built-in colour camera making it possible to dispatch freshly taken photos by e-mail. Released by J-Phone Communications, the J-SH04, pictured here, can also be used to produce instant prints through a Sharp colour mobile printer. It promises high-quality printing with 65 536 colours and 203-dpi resolution. The phone also plays back voice and sounds from musical instruments and is compatible with FM sound sources and 16-harmony sampling sound. Price unknown.
Goodmans spins MP3: British budget hi-fi company Goodmans is set to become the unlikely hero of MP3 fans who feel frustrated by the tiny storage capacity of most personal players. It is the first manufacturer to offer a personal CD player, the 80 (about R800) CDMP350, that also plays MP3s stored on a CD-Rom. Users can save around 10 hours’ worth of MP3 formated music on one CD-Rom – enough to archive the entire Beatles catalogue. The model also plays back conventional CDs and boasts random play, a 1-bit digital/analogue converter and a bass-boost option.
Sharp PC talks back: In Japan, Sharp has unveiled what it is billing as the simplest PC to use yet. The PC-DJ10M/S combines a basic spec PC 566MHz Intel Celeron processor, 64MB RAM, 10 gigabyte hard disk) with a 30cm TFT LCD screen.
Its secret weapon is Liquiy, a voice-activated on-screen navigation system that uses IBM’s ViaVoice engine and Sharp’s Associative Retrieval Technology. Users can ask Liquiy how to operate the PC’s basic functions and it will respond with a mixture of voice commands and on-screen prompts. They can also ask questions about where to find pages on the Internet and Liquiy then displays answers provided by search engines.
ENDS