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April 03, 2005
Package Tracking by RSS
10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (7) ~ Biz - Internet
Bloglines an online RSS reader (recently purchased by Ask Jeeves which in turn is being aquired by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp) announced last week that Bloglines is First to Go Beyond the Blog with Unique-to-Me Info Updates. What does that mean?
Starting today, people can track the shipping progress of package deliveries from some of the world’s largest parcel shipping companies—FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service within their Bloglines MyFeeds page. Package tracking in Bloglines encompasses international shipments, in English. Bloglines readers can look forward to collecting more kinds of unique-to-me information on Bloglines in the near future, such as neighborhood weather updates and stock portfolio tracking.
You can check out the package tracking here.
With IE7 rumored to have a built-in RSS reader, services like Blogline’s package tracking and My Yahoo!’s RSS integration, RSS (or some type of syndication… why do we have RSS, Atom, et al.?) sure seems like it will be mainstream pretty soon.
Two New PocketPC-based QWERTY Mobiles
09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (8) ~ Biz - Mobile
There’s a couple of new QWERTY-keyboard equipped PocketPC-based mobiles out in the market (or will be soon).
The Orange SPV M2000 has pretty much everything… WiFi, Bluetooth and a side-out QWERTY keyboard. Unfortunately, it’s not as small as the HTC Magician. Since this is an Orange phone, it’s only available in Europe (or maybe you’ll be able to gray market it someday from sites like this).
HP’s iPaq Mobile Messenger h6500 is due out in April. It’s got an integrated QWERTY keyboard similar to the Treo. It trades built-in WiFi for GPS which seems like an odd trade off to me. However, you will be able to add a WiFi card through the SD/IO slot (it as another slot for miniSD), and you’ll have the benefit of being able to break the antenna end of the card off. Add-in WiFi-card solutions suck… like so 1999. Additionally, the screen is fairly low resolution at 240×240. It’s mostly smaller than the M2000, but not close to the Magician.
| Product | Length | Width | Thickness |
| M2000 | 4.92” | 3.00” | 0.74” |
| h6500 | 4.65” | 2.80” | 0.83” |
| Magician | 4.25” | 2.28” | 0.71” |
| Audiovox SMT5600* | 4.25” | 1.81” | 0.63” |
| Treo** | 4.40” | 2.30” | 0.90” |
| *MS SmartPhone | |||
| **Dimensions not including external antenna |
I’m still waiting for a PocketPC mobile the size of the Magician that has a built-in QWERTY keyboard, WiFi and Bluetooth. GPS is highly optional for me.
Update: 2005_04_05
To partially solve the problem of SD WiFi cards sticking out of the slot, here’s a stubby one from Spectec.