BoxWave announced the release of a new Mobile Mounting Kit. The Mobile Mounting Kit is an all inclusive kit that provides everything that you need to mount your mobile device in the car. It includes a universal cradle, a swivel windshield suction mounting pedestal, and a set of vent mounting clips. The Mobile Mounting Kit holds most mobile devices as the arms of the cradle extends approximately 2 inches to 3.4 inches in width.

Laaaaaadies and gentlemen! Today we bring you one of the biggest, no-holds-barred battles of all time! Going at it with all they’ve got are seven of the all-time meanest, toughest, most informative iPod books you’ll ever encounter. Which book will win? Which book will prove itself worthy of your hard-earned dollars and attention? Which book will score the knockout punch? It’s a player book playbook and you’re invited for a ring-side seat.

Read this Computing Unplugged article.

Canon is betting billions that a new technology called surface-conduction electron-emitter display, or SED, will enable the company to muscle into the flat-screen-TV market. SED technology, developed in conjunction with Toshiba, yields images of superior quality to liquid-crystal or plasma screens while consuming far less power. The company has invested $1.8 billion in developing the technology for the screens and building the factories to produce them. It plans to roll out the first 55-inch screens for consumers in Japan later this year. Canon CEO Fujio Mitarai says he wants to offer the screens for about the same price as LCD and plasma TVs of comparable size.

Creative Algorithms, developer of Trip Boss travel manager, in conjunction with PDA247, and Palm Addict, announced Randy Jones as the winner of the Trip Boss Birthday Contest. Randy has chosen a Dell Axim X51v, along with some accessories, as his prize. All the valuable travel related articles that were entered, including the two prize-winning entries, can be viewed at Creative Algorithms’ Web site. In addition, all entries will automatically be entered in the PDA247 4th Birthday Contest, which includes prizes of PDA accessories and software.

In an unprecedented move, Stanford University is collaborating with Apple Computer to allow public access to a wide range of lectures, speeches, debates and other university content through iTunes. No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student. The nearly 500 tracks that constitute “Stanford on iTunes” are available to anyone willing to spend the few minutes it takes to download them from the Internet.

An 80-centimeter robotic hand that can covert spoken words and simple phrases into sign language has been developed in a town in Fukuoka Prefecture. The robotic hand was shown at a two-legged robot tournament held at the Fukuoka Prefecture Education Center in Sasagurimachi, where it won applause from appreciative spectators. A microchip in the robot recognizes the 50-character hiragana syllabary and about 10 simple phrases such as “ohayo” (good morning) and sends the information to a central computer, which sends commands to 18 micromotors in the joints of the robotic hand, translating the sound it hears into sign language.

MetaView Soft’s open source PDF document viewer has now reached version 1.0. PalmPDF is a free native PDF file viewer for Palm OS 5 devices. PalmPDF enables users to view native Adobe PDF documents on your mobile device. It has support for anti-alaising and truetype fonts and five way navigation. It is based on the open source Xpdf program.

FileMaker announced FileMaker Mobile 8, a companion to FileMaker Pro 8 designed specifically for Palm OS and Pocket PC handheld devices. The new FileMaker Mobile 8 now goes beyond synchronizing with local desktop databases only. For the first time, it allows users to synchronize handhelds with databases on FileMaker Server 8 and FileMaker Server 8 Advanced. FileMaker Mobile 8 supports a range of applications as simple as lists to more complex solutions such as inventory records, customer information, student records, work orders, research notes, or help-desk records. In addition to providing one-button, two-way synchronization, FileMaker Mobile 8 allows flexible data entry and viewing features.

Is Palm’s Treo device a smartphone? Not according to U.S. wireless carrier Cingular, which says the wireless device is a PDA. But do consumers really care? Yankee Group analyst John Jackson said that the millions of people using Treo devices do not care whether it is classified as a PDA or as a smartphone.

Opera Software released a final version of its new browser for wireless handsets, known as Mini, and said it hopes to spur increased use of the mobile Internet by distributing the application free of charge. The browser was designed as a simplified version of the Norwegian software maker’s previous wireless offering, Opera Mobile Browser, which is meant to run on so-called smartphones, or sophisticated wireless devices that offer the memory to store and run such applications. Mini claims to deliver a better Web experience to more low-end devices, or any handset capable of running Java-based mobile applications, which includes many popular phones already in the hands of consumers.