One Good Blog Deserves Another

Check out PalmAddict if you get a chance. It's another blog like this one, and it has a wealth of links, news and opinions about PDAs. Good stuff.

The Incredible Shrinking Palm

PalmInfocenter still has a picture of the Oslo prototype leaked by Pocket PC Thoughts (who was later asked by Palm, Inc. to remove the image). This is an OS5 device with a Graffiti area that can be hidden by sliding the case up over it. Given that Palm jumped quickly to get Pocket PC Thoughts to remove the image, chances are this is probably legit. This could be the smallest, most portable PDA yet, but it doesn't look like it has a lot else going for it.

How NOT to Run a Media Business

Salon is running out of money fast, and probably won't survive much longer despite taking in a big of cash via subscriptions. What did they do wrong?

Well, for one thing, the subscriptions ticked off more people than they signed up. Rather than adding value (like, ahem, the subscription service here at Writing On Your Palm), the Salon subscription service took a lot of content that people had gotten used to getting for free and locked it up.

Salon also seems to spend a lot more money than they need to. They've got 1.5 million bucks, which is supposed to last them about three months. I could put together a pretty nice site for 500 grand a month...

Check out the article. It's a good read, and a nice cautionary tale.

Just the Text, Ma'am...

The folks over at The Gadgeteer have posted a review of MegaMemo for Palm OS. We've all seen a ton of memo pad replacements, but this one is free, comes with a desktop conduit, and allows memos up to 32k. Not as powerful as pedit, perhaps, but cheaper. If you're only concerned about writing text on your mobile device, prefering to do formatting and cleanup on the desktop, this is certainly worth a look.

Token Anti-eBook Article

Linton Weeks wrote an article in the Washington Post last weekend that poses the now tired and too-often-asked question: why didn't ebooks work?

Frankly, I expected better of The Post. Weeks trots out some pretty tired arguments, including the following:

But maybe e-books never really caught fire because there was never a deep desire for them in the first place. The 500-year-old book -- with white paper pages and night-black ink -- is a perfectly good technology for providing word-based information.

Electronic devices, on the other hand, can deliver words and more -- voices and video and music and interactivity. You can play Scrabble on a handheld. Or chess. Or rock-and-roll. You can chat. Or e-mail. Or you can call home or surf the Internet. Why use them to read vast chunks of printed matter?

Why? I'll tell you why, Linton, since you asked.

1. Because ebooks are portable. I have over 300 books on my Pocket PC, and I carry them with me everywhere I go. Do I read all of them at the same time? No, not even close. But if I decide I want to start reading one of them now, I don't have to wait until I get home. I have my whole library with me, ready at a moment's notice.


2. Because ebooks are durable. No matter how many times I read my favorite ebooks, they never get dog-earred, the covers never fall off, the pages don't get brittle.


3. Because ebooks can do things paper books can't, like hyperlinked endnotes, fast keyword searches, even included audio and video if necessary.


4. Because ebooks are more comfortable. I can read ebooks comfortably one-handed while lying on the couch or while walking. Additionally, ClearType on my Jornada is as comfortable to my eyes as print on paper.

When will these "pot-shot" articles end? I'll agree freely that ebooks were oversold and haven't yet lived up to the early "print is dead" hype. But just because ebooks haven't taken flight, there's little real reason-- aside from journalistic bandwagoning-- to declare them DOA, either.