WirelessDoc

Palm's profit tops Wall Street estimates

After the Wall Street Journal did their piece about how Palm increased their advertising for the Treo in light of the BlackBerry patent dispute, now MSNBC via AP reports that "profits surged in its fiscal third quarter, fueled by strong shipments of its Treo smart phones."

This resulted in the stock price increase of 6%. In the quarter reported, overly 1/2 million Treos were shipped, more than double from the past year.

Cellphone messaging during an epidemic

I just finished reading China Syndrome, a book about the SARS epidemic and I cam across this passage, page 339:

Amid this news vacuum [referring the Chinese Ministry of Health reluctance to release information], Beijingers were text-messaging one another rumors and SARS aphorisms at the rate of twenty-five million sends a day.

In other passages in this book, mention is made of the fact that this is the most reliable and pervasive method for communicating in a society where censorship and surveillance is an ongoing concern.

Taking Advantage of BlackBerry's Patent Troubles

This story in today's WSJ is about the stepped-up effort by Palm to advertise its Treo smartphone in light of the recently resolved patent dispute that BlackBerry was undergoing.

This is really an old story considering the full-page ads in the WSJ, and the  large billboards in Manhattan (Times Square too, but no longer) I'd been seeing in the past couple of months.
While doing business in the city, I'm seeing more and more Treos, and I don't think this is entirely to BB's patent trouble. I do think that word-of-mouth advertising has turned people to its multi-functionality.

The Sprint Treo 700P with broadband access should be coming soon.

Here's a photo from last November in Times Square

Multi-Touch Interaction Research

This Web page has an embedded QuickTime movie of a experimental video monitor that allows you to use all your fingers to move, resize, and edit images on the screen. You can also play a sort of digital finger painting. This is how the video opens, but you should watch it till you see how the user manipulates digital aerial photos to get the full capability of this invention.