Quote:
Originally Posted by ColdSun
Do you have a favorite PDA for reading with? I have an iPAQ for a while that had a VGA screen and was 4". It wasn't bad at all. I would still use it but I need a larger screen. This is why I'm so excited for the Nook Color I have on order. It couldn't get here soon enough to be honest.
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It's mentioned in the text below my avatar. It's a Tapwave Zodiac 2, which is a PalmOS device. The Tapwave folks were trying to make a PalmOS PDA that was also a handheld gaming platform, so it has things you don't expect, like a 320x480 screen driven by an ATI video chip with 2D acceleration and 8MB video RAM, Yamaha stereo with actual (tiny) stereo speakers on device, 128MB of RAM, and two SD card slots, one of which is SDIO, so I can go online with a Wifi SD card.
Tapwave never got the critical mass of game developers on board, and the marketing made it hard to notice it was a killer PDA, too. They went under in July, 2005, but I have three of them and am unconcerned.
I started reading ebooks on a PDA when my then employer decided all IT staffers should have PDAs, and a Handspring Visor Deluxe appeared in inter-office mail. It wasn't clear what I was supposed to do with it, so I went looking for stuff that would aid me as a sysadmin. One thing I found was Plucker, and offline HTML viewer for Palm devices. The Plucker desktop is cross-platform, written in Python, and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS/X. It's intended to "pluck" web pages for offline reading and convert them to the form used by the PDA viewer, but it works fine on local content, too. Most of the documentation for the stuff I dealt with was in HTML, so I could have a documentation library in my pocket.
The Visor Deluxe got replaced by a Visor Pro, then a Tungsten E, and finally the Zodiac, but Plucker has been a constant. Bf preference, I get content in HTML, convert to Plucker, and put it on an SD card in my device. I have a lot of Project Gutenberg stuff, a lot of Creative Commons licensed material, and the complete Baen Free Library among other things. I also have several hundred Mobipocket volumes, courtesy of the MR Patricia Clark Memorial Library, plus stuff in eReader, PDF, Word, RTF, and text format, for about 4,000 books all told, occupying most of a 2GB SD card.
As icing on the cake, the open source FBReader ebook viewer app handles Plucker and Mobi documents, so I have a duplicate of the PDA library on my old notebook under Windows and Linux.
The killer app for the Zodiac is the Palm port of TCPMP, The Core Pocket Media Player, an open source media player for mobile devices. The Zodiac community took up a collection to get the Palm developer a Zodiac to develop on, and he responded with support for the ATI chip. There are reams written elsewhere about the best way to rip your movies on DVD to a format you can put on an SD card and play on a Zodiac with TCPMP. It does MPEG and AVI, plays MP3s and Ogg Vorbis audio files, and various other things. If Tapwave had realized they had a killer handheld media platform instead of wearing games blinders, they might still be in business.
I'd
like a larger screen, but haven't seen anything thus far that has one and does all the Zodiac will do. I'm interested in the raft of tablets and netbooks using ARM CPUs and running Android in the platform - one of those might be my next device. The nook color looks nice, but I'd want to be able to get root on it, and install stuff not offered through B&N. We'll see.
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Dennis