Tag Archives: PDA

Viewing the Web on a PDA (or phone)

So it’s always a hassle to view web sites on your phone / PDA. Google has been making this smarter when you search from their mobile site. If you search for “gary said” you get this list and when you click my link (which is first) you get a pretty nice stripped down page. Now I offer my site as a PDA/cell phone version but the graphics are still full, I noticed Google strips them down a bit and removes animated gifs (which is a mostly good thing). The other thing is Google continues to alter the pages as you follow links keeping your browsing experience zippy (I don’t do this but my lower pages are sort of small screen friendly).

Some PDA’s do not come with a cradle…

carboardcradle2carboardcradleSome PDA’s do not come with a cradle to syncronize, just a cable. The solution for one magazine? Paper cradles for the cradleless Clies. “You need the cable that came with your CLIE, some cardboard paper, scissors, tape (and of course) a PDF that will be published in the Spring Mobile Press Magazine (Japan only) later this week.

Finally, a “Smart-PDA” from Apple?

It looks like Apple might be finally entering the PDA market! This is a good thing since Palm OS 6 doesn’t plan to support the Macintosh.

The odd part of this is that even though Macintosh has a small percentage of the computer market, many of the Palm OS people that I know are Mac-users. The question to me is what percentage of their sales go to Mac-users? The only reason I put Windows back into my house after 20 years was to get better synchronization with my Macintosh. I wanted some of the geekier conduits and they just didn’t exist for the Mac. Some third party company (the Missing-sync folks) will write a Mac-driver if the market is there…

But I digress:
It’ll probably have a hard drive (ala mini-iPod) and Firewire, USB and BlueTooth. The second article mentions WiFi and cell phone. There were hints of it playing music (actually downloading music while in the waiting room). Of course it’ll support QuickTime and sync with all of the iApps. And (wait for it…) it’ll support Windows. Maybe not the first week, but soon. You can’t tell me that all the Windows people who bought iPods (and considered iPods) won’t at least consider this device. I’m assuming it’s share files in a variety of ways (like target disk mode and such). The only thing I haven’t seen mentioned is a camera and GPS. I’d subscribe to .mac I think if this tied into it…

One of the articles I read said something like ‘people spend more time deciding on a phone or a PDA than any other electronic device’. I know I do, if I’m going to carry it everywhere, I’m going to be fussy about it. My 2 cents: No mini-keyboard/thumbboard. Let me use grafitti or something similar. Let it support a regular USB keyboard (or mouse) thought the USB port (or via WiFi?)

You can check out this article from MacNet2.com and part 2.