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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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.)
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I only read mobi on my PDA... I still haven't found a reader application that works for me except mobipocket (I like to highlight mistakes in my books so I can correct them later).
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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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They only have half the screen... Only the transparent part, not the reflective part. And I've given up all hope on any PixelQi screens in the near future in a form factor and processor type device that I'd like to have...
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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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They hardly update the windows and mac versions even though they're not really perfected yet... Let alone other OS's!
Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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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It's not that I have a problem with it, I just don't know it and have no idea how it would fit me (considering everybody always talks about android together with internet access, which is something I won't have, except some wifi at home).