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Originally Posted by Sweetpea
My old Loox (600) was 320x200, and I thought that was enough... Untill I got my current Loox (720), with the same screensize, but double the resolution. What a shocker! (but the Loox's are Windows devices, not Palm). Now, I doubt I want a lesser resolution on a screen of that size  |
My first PDA was a Handspring Visor Deluxe, courtesy of a then employer who decided all IT staffers should have PDAs. It was a mono unit with a 160x160 screen, and a whopping 8MB of RAM. I went looking for things I could do with it that would help me in my work, and one discovery was Plucker, an open source offline HTML viewer for Palm OS. Most of the documentation for the systems I dealt with was in HTML form, so I could convert for the PDA and carry a documentation library in my pocket. I got an expansion card adapter for additional storage and off I went. I didn't think I'd appreciate fiction on the device, but it turned out I did.
The Deluxe got replaced by a Visor Pro, that got replaced by a Tungsten E, and that got replaced by a Tapwave Zodiac 2, which I still use. One of the reasons for the Zodiac was the larger screen, as I did things like work with spreadsheets that needed the additional real estate.
Palm devices had ports of MobiPocket and eReader, plus an excellent open source PDF viewer, and I had viewers for Word docs and RTF files as well as plain text, so there isn't a lot (save ePub) I
can't read on the PDA. (And ePub can be converted to Mobi via Calibre.)
The biggest recent win has been FBReader, an open source, cross platform ebook viewer device. FBReader reads Plucker files (as well as ePub, Mobi, and various other things), so my collection of Plucker files is readable on a Linux system (and promptly got transferred to the old notebook I put Linux on.)
I need support for color, and the ability to do other things besides view ebooks, so a dedicated reader doesn't work for me. I'm not one of the folks who has problems reading on and LCD screen, and the longer battery life is a non-issue: I've gotten into the habit of topping of my cell phone and PDA nightly. Adding another device to the list isn't a problem, and chargers for them live in a travel case with other electronic gear.
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I'm still not sure of that. Let's say it was available, if I would be able to get my hand on a 5, 6 or 7 inch transflective touchscreen LCD screen, I'd get it. No matter the OS. But I'd also love a larger screen, 10 to 12 inch.
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I looked with interest at the early ASUS eee netbook, but passed because I wanted a larger screen. The fact that it ran Linux wasn't an issue. I've been a Linux admin, and multiboot it here.
Current generations of netbooks have the screen, but what I want is Linux and a solid state drive. The stuff in the form factor I like all seems to have WinXP/7 and a 160GB HD. I don't need the drive capacity, as there isn't all that much that would live on the device.
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But I'd need Windows on that (XP or 7). I'd love to be able to take my National Geographics with me...
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Comes on a DVD, with a Windows specific viewer app? On Linux, I'd look at Wine, which is specifically intended to let you run Windows apps under Linux. The issue you'll run into is that Wine is intended for Linux on X86 hardware. The new generation of tablets and other things Android runs on are all based on ARM processors.
You might drop a note to the folks who produced the collection mentioning that there's a whole new market of folks using devices that don't run Windows, and an Android port of their software might be a good idea.
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On a basic reader, I wouldn't mind Android that much. But as stated above, if I had a larger screen, I'd use it mostly for my National Geographic collection. And that would require windows...
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I have no problem with Android at all. It's Linux based, and there is a flood of software being developed for it. One lack at the moment is FBReader: there's an Android version, but it's based on a rewrite in Java, and the Java app doesn't yet support all the formats the original C language version does.
Something like a 10" tablet with a touch screen and a folding BT keyboard might be just the ticket.
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Dennis