New to PDA's e-books and the Palm M105 (long)
Electragician
As the header say's, I'm new to the world of PDA's and I now own a Palm M105
and I have a few questions as well as comments:
I bought the M105 mainly for reading E-books downloaded from the 'net
(Project Gutenburg, as well as purchased titles). I've also downloaded a few
interesting applications from www.palmgear.com and a few other sites. I also
play alot of video games (mainly Everquest, nowadays) and was delighted to
find some pre-made spell databases for different EQ classes, which I use
with MobileDBlt.
I'm looking for links to other sites that have useful
shareware/freeware/commercial applications for the Palm OS. I'm sure that
there are some that I haven't found yet, which I might enjoy and I'd
appreciate any help you folks could give me. I'm not terribly interested in
games for the Palm, though I wouldn't mind checking out gaming links either
as I suppose I could find something I like.
I'm an electrician by trade, and I've heard of apps that do electrical trade
calculations (conduit fill capacities, wiring ampacities guidelines, etc..)
I'd appreciate a link to these if anyone knows of their location, I don't
care if they are freeware or commercial... I don't mind paying folks for
useful utilities.
Questions:
I currently use Makedoc to process text files to palm docs which I read with
the Palm Reader, and this works relatively well. Is there a better
application to use for this though?
Is there an application that is able to process full-on webpages into
something that an App on the Palm can read? Something capable of getting
linked pages and making them accessible as well? Handling tables and
graphics as well would be much preferred. The Mobipocket reader/publisher
can do a few of these things to an extent, but it has as few to many bugs in
it for my taste.
How about PDF readers that also handle pdf documents that have graphics -
Which ones work well, and are easy to use? I have the National Electrical
Code in PDF format and it would be useful to put some of the charts and
tables on my Palm.
Comments/Rants:
The M105 seems to be a great little machine for the price. The screen is a
bit small for reading e-books, but is very clear and the contrast makes for
very nice reading, all things considered. I often read in bed while the wife
is asleep and the backlighting performs admirably, with very little battery
drain. I'd guess that so far I have several hours of actual use on the M105
(working on my 4th novel) and at least 2 of those hours were with the
backlight on. The battery indicator is still at 80% which seems to be very
good for the constant use. All in all it's the best machine I've used so far
for reading e-books... it's not perfect, but it gets the job done at a
decent price.
The other e-book reader that I tried was the Franklin E-bookman 901. Quite
frankly (pun intended) it sucked. I have NEVER been more disappointed with a
company or a product (read buggy/poorly manufactured POS). I bought the
first one, and after about 5 hours of actual use, the batteries were
getting low... I changed them out as per instructions and it dumped
everything (including the OS). I did some reading on Franklin's website and
discovered this was a known problem with some units. I returned it for
another and it had the same problem. I then called Franklin and they sent me
a unit to replace it via FedEx. This unit was unable to accept even the OS
install, due evidently to bad memory, judging from the errors and lockups
during the OS install. I finally gave up on them and said the hell with it
and sent the unit back.
I should also comment on the E-bookman's backlighting feature for nightime
reading. While the backlight works well enough, it's a bit hard to
concentrate on reading a good book while the discharging capacitors in the
unit are squealing like an entire herd of irritated piglets. I've heard
alarm clocks that made less noise. The M105 makes a little bit of a humming
noise when the backlight is on, but is hardly noticeable even when held
close.
Even overlooking the mechanical flaws of the E-bookman, the unit is still
poorly conceived. Sure the screen is large and quite nice, but when it
crashes every 30 minutes it doesn't really matter. The thing is supposed to
be a book-reader at heart and the only decent reader app for it presently is
the Mobipocket reader which is still quite beta for the Franklin OS and
prone to crashing on the two units I had. With the Mobipocket reader I had
to chop novels in half and read them that way, as it wouldn't show the
second half of a good sized book for some reason, even with plenty of
available space left in memory. The supplied reader from Franklin can only
read books purchased from the 'net in it's proprietary format, and the other
included basic text/html reader doesn't even have variable fonts, so you are
stuck scrolling much more than necessary with the default oversized fonts. I
think you can convert documents to the Franklin readers format, but it
requires a Unix emulator install on a Windows based PC to run the VERY hard
to understand publishing utility. (What wonderful judgement they used there)
Also with the M105 you actually get 8 megs of usable ram for databases,
apps and other content. With the Franklin unit's the 8 megs advertised are
also used by the OS. After a default OS/app install you only have around 4
megs left for your own content, but you can manually uninstall unwanted
parts of the OS to clear up a meg or two.
I wrote the above as a warning to anyone thinking of buying one of these
units. Maybe you'll get a good one and be happy with it, but I highly advise
buying somewhere locally with a good return policy (Staples, etc...), just
in case.
Regards,
Matt K
Byron Collins
"Electragician" <electr...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:9fblbh$ppb$1...@news.xmission.com...
> (cross-posted to two groups that are relevant as far as I can tell)
>
> As the header say's, I'm new to the world of PDA's and I now own a Palm
M105
> and I have a few questions as well as comments:
>
> I bought the M105 mainly for reading E-books downloaded from the 'net
> (Project Gutenburg, as well as purchased titles). I've also downloaded a
few
> interesting applications from www.palmgear.com and a few other sites. I
also
> play alot of video games (mainly Everquest, nowadays) and was delighted to
> find some pre-made spell databases for different EQ classes, which I use
> with MobileDBlt.
>
Hi Matt,
Check out http://www.memoware.com
I also maintain a e-list for folks using e-books on PDA's.
Cheers,
Byron Collins
---
Byron's Emporium - Cool eBooks for PDA's
ENJOYOUREAD Production
http://home.clarksville.com/~bcollins/index.htm
---
Kathryn Hudson
Kathryn
--
http://www.sinpalm.com
The world's first FREE adult entertainment portal for all PDAs. Get your
AvantGo channel or Palm VII PQA by visiting our site today!
See how it works at: http://www.sinpalm.com/sinpalm_demo.html
David E. Johnson
http://www.palmgear.com. I've seen utilities such as those you are
asking about, there.
On Sat, 2 Jun 2001 15:21:57 -0600, "Electragician"
<electr...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>(cross-posted to two groups that are relevant as far as I can tell)
>
>As the header say's, I'm new to the world of PDA's and I now own a Palm M105
>and I have a few questions as well as comments:
[deletia...]
>
>I'm looking for links to other sites that have useful
>shareware/freeware/commercial applications for the Palm OS. I'm sure that
>there are some that I haven't found yet, which I might enjoy and I'd
>appreciate any help you folks could give me. I'm not terribly interested in
>games for the Palm, though I wouldn't mind checking out gaming links either
>as I suppose I could find something I like.
>
>I'm an electrician by trade, and I've heard of apps that do electrical trade
>calculations (conduit fill capacities, wiring ampacities guidelines, etc..)
>I'd appreciate a link to these if anyone knows of their location, I don't
>care if they are freeware or commercial... I don't mind paying folks for
>useful utilities.
[deletia...]
_______________________________________________________________
David E. Johnson
Always expect the worst - that way, you'll never be disappointed
Bruce and Patti Fisher
"David E. Johnson" <dej257@.NOSPAM.worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:3b1d0f90.1119687@localhost...