Re: [NTLK] I need a PDA, is a Newton a sane choice today?

On 3/7/2007 8:58 AM, Rene Raggl wrote:
> Hi Jan,
>
> Well, I am not satisfied with either of them. I have tried a big deal
> of PDA's (almost anything that was on the market PSION, WIN CE,
> Newton, Palm, Linux) and in one way or the other I found all of them
> lacking...
>
> Here my opinions about the two I used most:
>
> I chose to keep the Newton, because it is convenient for the way I
> work. (HWR, Pen gestures, big screen) However I am painfully missing
> the sync possibilities of the Palm. I am using the PDA for business
> and have all calculations and offers in MS Excel and Word. I sure
> would like to see a solution like Documents to go for the Newton and
> I would be ready to pay a good deal of money for a working solution.
> Also I use my PDA's as eBook Reader, but there are painstakingly few
> books available for the Newton. I purchased a lot of books from
> ereader.com and cannot open them on the Newt.
>
Well for ebooks I can make a suggestion: Don't buy ebooks that have DRM
(encryption). There are many reasons for this. The primary one is that
no company can guarantee that you will always be able to open your book
because systems, software etc may change and they may disappear from the
planet. And if that happens you are up a creek with books you purchased
and can't read. I have ran into many people that have bought ebooks
with encryption only a few months later find out they can't read them
because the software changed and for some reason won't let them read
their books. Sometimes the only way to fix this is to buy the book
again (depends on the format and the company involved)

What I do is buy ebooks from Fictionwise, Bean or other booksellers that
offer non encrypted formats (Fictionwise's is called multiformat). This
ensures that you can ALWAYS convert it to the format you require, no
matter the system or software. With Fictionwise you simply convert the
palmdoc file into plain text then create a NewtonBook from that using
Bookmaker, Press or Paperback. You can get fancy with a table of
contents or just search the book for the chapters. I prefer Bookmaker
as it allows for faster creation of a table of contents. But use the
tool you you prefer.

As for importing and exporting of Excel and Word, that is something in
work by a few developers so stay tuned. Though for now you can import
and export older versions if your software can save a version old enough
with NCU.

-Dan

-Dan

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