Shiny New E-Book Gizmo: The Amazon Kindle


View Full Version : Do WAP Shoobee Do WAP


mogui
10-01-2007, 04:20 AM
Bob started a thread here about reading on a cellphone (How to read e-books on (almost) any phone (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13790)). maybe it is a good idea. Maybe it is not. But it got my technohormones flowing. I put books on my Moto V186 with its miserly 128x128 screen. I thought it was cool in a geeky sort of way.

Then I had a brilliant idea! Spend more money! Yes, I went out and bought a gaoxinqi GXQ NT6306. See the thread linked above. The eBook reader on the device is just garbage, but I signed up for GPRS today. Now I can read!

I can browse the web and find news articles, and . . . well you know what there is out there. I even found this thread posted last December (Reading ebooks with a cell phone (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8946&highlight=wap)). The guy only left us the one post, but he really did us a service. You can read books over the web on your phone. It really works! Try it at http://mobile.tx2ph.com or http:/wap.tx2ph.com. You can sign up for a free account at the main website here (http://www.tx2ph.com/).

The site seems to keep track of what book you are reading and where you left off. So now who needs a reader?

So you are wondering, "Did mogui start this thread just to blather about old threads?" Actually no. Maybe the title of this thread gives you a hint. I really wish Mobileread made the posts here available as a WAP site so I could read in the bathroom on my GPRS enabled smartphone. Yes. Really.

And maybe the uploaded books could be made available as WAP-readable too? :)

See also this thread (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=101526#post101526).

mogui
10-01-2007, 05:24 AM
I discovered I can view Mobileread on my smartphone here: http://go.fdm8.com/gngtn

Try it! It is quite usable!

Now for the WAP-readable books :)

NatCh
10-01-2007, 12:13 PM
A mobile version of MobileRead is something that's been on Alex's plate for some time, but there have been some other things recently that have pushed it aside. I'm pretty sure it's still in the works, though -- he's commented on how painful it is to read the site on his Blackberry. :wink:

mogui
10-04-2007, 02:54 AM
A mobile version of MobileRead is something that's been on Alex's plate for some time, but there have been some other things recently that have pushed it aside. I'm pretty sure it's still in the works, though -- he's commented on how painful it is to read the site on his Blackberry. :wink:
It seems you and Alex are right NatCh. I'm finding GPRS internet access to be quite slow and cumbersome. Many clicks are often required to navigate and it feels like I have a 300 baud modem again. It seems to take forever to reach any real content. I also get quite a few timeouts.

I found a site on which I can read eBooks. I went here to sign up (http://www.tx2ph.com/), and read part of a novel. But I have yet to successfully connect to it with my smartphone. Maybe those of you in the west will have a better result.

There is a free site creation site called "wappy" (http://wappy.to/web/), but so far it hasn't liked the page I created well enough to show it to me on my smartphone. There is another site called "tagtag" (http://tagtag.com/), which allows you to store 1M of content for download. It is not a webpage per se, but just a storage place.

I have unearthed a huge number of WAP sites. Some of them appear to have been abandoned, but there are many out there providing content. There are really only two things that would make WAP a winner for me. One would be a good reading experience, and the other would be access to my email without changing my email address.

I can get Mobileread on my smartphone, but I think I am spoiled by the big screen experience. Still, I have found that GPRS doesn't restrict me to my home city, and the ability to find anything at all is better than staring at the back of the seat in front of me.

Note: While I have been composing this post, I have been trying to retrieve an article. Just as I am ready to click on the "Save Changes" control, the article is ready to read.

I would be most interested in the experience of others with WAP and reading on the web.

Alexander Turcic
10-06-2007, 11:16 AM
I know, I know it's something I've been looking for so long ... to bring a mobile version of MobileRead to life. Everything there is something else getting in between but I'll try hard to focus on this project next. Since I can call a BlackBerry my own I know how painful it is to visit a site that's not optimized for mobile devices. :smash:

yvanleterrible
10-06-2007, 01:19 PM
I know, I know it's something I've been looking for so long ... to bring a mobile version of MobileRead to life. Everything there is something else getting in between but I'll try hard to focus on this project next. Since I can call a BlackBerry my own I know how painful it is to visit a site that's not optimized for mobile devices. :smash:

Say Alex, what happened to the weekly reader version you were planning?
I still have the two you posted and I remember liking to read them on the PRS.

mogui
10-06-2007, 11:00 PM
It would be good to be able to reach content without too many clicks. The URL for Mobileread I posted above is not too bad that way. You can try it here: http://go.fdm8.com/gngtn . Maybe a lot of work is not necessary. But a quick-access digest would be really nice. Again -- a lot of work!

CommanderROR
10-07-2007, 04:05 AM
I actually browsed mobileread.com a lot during the long train trips to and from auditions and found it to be quite okay on my smartphone. That was before the "design change" and there was a little linke called "mobile version" that gave me good results.
I have not really tried much, but since the design change it seems to be working a it slower but still does work.
I'm using a WM5 smartphone with a small, square screen (look up the Fujitsu-Siemens T830) and mostly I have a GPRS connections since UMTS is not that widespread here...yet... ;)
But a more WAP optimzed version would not do any harm... :D

Alexander Turcic
10-07-2007, 04:06 AM
Say Alex, what happened to the weekly reader version you were planning?
I still have the two you posted and I remember liking to read them on the PRS.

Ahhh... the newsletter! Thank you, Yvan, you're absolutely right. It's something I wanted to do and promised you guys. My apologies... I must really put down a to-do list with priorities attached to each item! :rolleyes: There are a couple of things we really have to do first, which I expect to take till the end of this month, but after that I hope we can focus on the mobile site and the newsletter again.