Jason Brooks

There has arisen among Palm OS device users a cult of Graffiti—Ive heard some joke that they frequently break into the arcane Palm script while writing with pen and paper. For those whove yet to adopt Graffiti as a second language, however, portable keyboards offer a swifter route to total data input nirvana, and in […]

In recent months, Linux has gained strength as a server operating system and has made slow but steady progress on the client desktop. However, a less apparent but perhaps more lucrative stage on which Linux may shine is that of the handheld device. Devices running handheld operating systems from Palm Inc. and Microsoft Corp. incur […]

Opera 5.0 for Linux has arrived, complete with a banner-ads-bearing free version whose forced viewing will at long last allow Linux users to ease their guilt over using free software. Opera has always been a speedy performer, and Version 5.0 for Linux is no exception. In my tests, the Web browser rendered pages crisply and […]

Like any company bringing new products or services to market, Snap Appliances Inc. caps development of its server appliance products with rigorous beta testing. However, the periodic nature of beta tests, along with the need for accurate input from a products users, can make in-house beta testing an unwieldy task for IT departments to manage […]

Built around Intel Corp.s new 860 chip set, Dell Computer Corp.s Precision 530 is the first workstation eWeek Labs has seen that supports Intels Pentium 4-based processor architecture in dual-chip configurations. The system we tested shipped with two Intel Xeon processors, each of which ran at 1.7GHz and featured a 400MHz system bus. The new […]

Spend an afternoon sifting through Readme and documentation files to figure out why that bleeding-edge Linux package refuses to compile, and youll come up with this conclusion: Peoples talents tend to be parceled out unequally, which is why we sometimes end up with very bright developers who never seem to express themselves in English as […]

Smart phones have been growing smarter for some time, blurring the lines between PDAs and handsets. However, even the brainiest of phones have been closed-box devices—with the exception of a few, more infuriating ring tones, users havent been able to change the application makeup of their phones. Motorolas i85s cellular phone changes this. Its the […]

There’s something likable and self-effacing about an operating system that grants its users and developers leave to pop the hood and make modifications-the closed-box designs of Mac OS and Windows both seem to say that Cupertino and Redmond, respectively, know best. With Linux, there’s no part of the operating system’s codey underbelly with which you […]

After struggling through hours of compiling code and sorting through recursive dependencies to get GNOME 1.4 up and running for my review of the Linux desktop environment in the April 23 issue of eWeek, I recommended that users hold off on installing the new interface until Ximian released its own GNOME distribution. Well, Ximian GNOME […]

Boasting boosted screen resolution and two peripheral expansion slots, the Palm OS-based HandEra 330 stands out as one of the most flexible handheld devices available, meriting an eWeek Labs Analysts Choice designation. The $349 handheld computer that HandEra Inc. (formerly TRG Products Inc.) shipped last week features a gray-scale LCD with a resolution of 240 […]

Microsoft Corp.s recent announcement that Windows XP will ship without native support for Bluetooth sent a wave of concern through a tech community eager to see the fledgling short-distance wireless technology emerge from its trade-show demo stage to the point when solid Bluetooth products become widespread. Despite the heavy buzz that Bluetooth has garnered over […]

Exhibiting steady improvement over previous versions, The GNOME Projects GNOME 1.4 and KDE Projects KDE 2.1.1 each go a long way toward making Linux a viable replacement for Windows on mainstream corporate desktops. But neither desktop interface has yet reached parity with the established players—pervasive support for features such as cut and paste across the […]