NetFront 3.0 for Pocket PCs on sale ... finally

I can't remember how long ago it was since I tried the 30 day beta trial of the Access NetFront Browserfor Pocket PCs, but the Japanese version is finally on sale. (There is no information on their English web site about the product yet except a short press announcement so all links are to the Japanese site). You can see from the Pocket IE comparison table that the product is claim to fame is it's support for a wide range of standards. They also make a lot out of the multiple window functionality which admittedly is a missing needed feature in Pocket IE. Although the support for all the latest and greatest standards is good and there are a few other nify features I'm really dubious how many people are going to be willing to pay for this extra functionality unless there is some sort of realted killer app. The only sites I miss not having on my Pocket PC are www.rikai.com and www.jisyo.org but when I tried NetFront with these two pages it didn't perform any better than Pocket IE. Luckily there will be a trial download so you can try it yourself. Post to the mailing list and let everyone know how you find it.

3GB CompactFlash and Half Size MMC Flash Memory Cards

A couple of interesting headlines I saw today in the PocketPC peripheral genre. Pretec are claiming they can provide CompactFlash cards with a capacity of up to 3Gb. At $2,499 I'll be waiting for a price drop before buying but I'm sure this evolution will make lower capacity CF cards cheaper. In separate news Hitachi announced they will be releasing half size MMC cards. This is certainly evolution rather than revolution and I'm not sure there is really a need for yet another format when MMC/SD cards are already so small. Soon they are going to be too small to handle. Wonder what the inventors will come up with then? Finally a note that SD card prices continue to drop slowly in Japan with 256MB cards at 16,500 yen and 512MB cards at 36,900 yen.

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Japanese E-books and Pocket PC

If you are interested in this subject there are an increasing number of sites out there. PDAbook sells books which are compatible with the T-Time Reader software which is bundled with many Pocket PCs in Japan and is specially designed for reading Japanese text. Kunikuniya also has a book store and I just came accross this interesting looking software, G-Book (see graphic below from the site), which seems to be a combination of multimedia, navigation and e-book software.

As a none native Japanese reader I wish that I could find a Japanese e-book reader that had a good integrated Japanese-English or even Japanese-Japanese dictionary.

Use your Pocket PC as a phone in Japan

Using the Air "H Compact Flash communications card, not only can you get a flat rate 128kbps data connection, but you can also use your Pocket PC PDA to make and receive calls. The PDA will receive calls even when switched off. Of course there will be issues like battery life that will make it a less than perfect product, but it's a big step in PDA-Phone convergence and shows the strength of the Pocket PC which is primarily a PDA device.

ATOK for Pocket PC

ATOK a popular Japanese character input method will be available for the Pocket PC from November 22nd. I couldn't find any good information in English on ATOK so if anyone has any links please post them to the mailing list.