George Capalbo would like to announce that the Boston PDA Developers will be meeting 28Jul98 (Tuesday) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their monthly forum to discuss issues related to programming "all" handheld platforms from a shareware to a "vertical market" perspective. The location is MIT (Cambridge, MA) in room 3-133.
Reuters is reporting that Finland had more mobile phones conversations in 1997 then traditional land-line phone conversations. The number of mobile phones operating in Finland grew by 47% in 1997.
Jakob Nielsen has posted an article entitled "Electronic books are a bad idea" to his AlertBox site. The article (26Jul98) is in response to the recent wave of electronic book news that has been circulating in print and on the Internet. It is an interesting read and definitely not as negative as the title would imply. [SOURCE: Dave Winer's DaveNet]
The Economist published on 18-24Jul98 has a look at Carnegie Mellon University's Local Area Network (LAN) that has impressive wireless connectivity throughout the campus. The article was summarized by Edupage.
Herb Bethoney at PC Week Labs has a review entitled "Color Screen Gives Phenom Ultra a Lift: But handheld PC's VGA display is no match for NEC Mobile Pro's" on page 37 of PC Week published on 27Jul98.
Canon has begun shipping two new portable color and black and white inkjet printers: BJC-50 (IrDA, 2-lbs., lithium ion battery), and BJC-80 (IrDA, 3.1-lbs.).
SanDisk has begun shipping their 48MB Compact Flash Memory Card and their "ImageMate" Compact Flash External Drive (Windows 95 support, does not require external power adapter).
Avi Drissman has announced the release of two new freeware Newton solutions: Avi's Backdrop 1.2 for Newton OS 2.0 devices and Scribble Pad ("Write, Draw, Doodle"). Both can be downloaded now.
NS BASIC Corporation has announced that all of the tech notes for their NS BASIC for the Newton programming language have been put into an easy to use Newton book. Many of the topics will also be of use to users of NewtCard. This will allow programmers to reference any of the 46 Tech Notes directly on their Newton device. The Tech Notes consist of over 275 pages of information, on favorite topics such "How to send IR to a CD Player", "NS BASIC and the Internet", "Benchmarks", and the ever popular "How to make NS BASIC go Poof!". For more info, check out www.nsbasic.com.
The Hong Kong Newton User Group has noted the immediate availability of the "We are different." T-shirt. The shirts are available worldwide at US$19.99 (plus S&H) per shirt; a sample of the shirt could be viewed on the T-shirt homepage. For more information send e-mail to hknug@hkstar.com.
-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)