Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Kindle vs. iPhone vs. an old, beat up Palm....

While I was writing my previous post on the Kindle about a highly portable yet low-rent reader client that I could synch daily with periodicals and feeds, and drop the odd e-book onto when necessary, I felt a gnawing feeling of familiarity. Later that day, I realized that rather than imagining an ideal future, I was recalling the fading past... I was doing exactly what I described in the ancient era of 2003!

Back then, I had recently relocated from Los Angeles to New York City. In LA, I commuted by motorcycle, so reading on my daily trip was out of the question. In New York, I found myself with an hour's worth of downtime on the subway each day. Never a fan of ink-stained hands or managing a clumsy folding broadsheet on a crowded train, I set out to find a way to read the daily paper without ever touching paper.

I eventually settled on the combination of a Palm Tungsten T3 (an early 'large screened' Palm, with a slider body that revealed a bright 480x320 LCD screen) and an AvantGo subscription. I set up AvantGo to download the NY Times and other feeds each morning at 7:30- a few minutes before stepping out the door I'd press the 'Sync' button on my Palm cradle, the feeds would download to the device, and I'd be out the door.

Once on the subway I could browse the channels I had downloaded to the device. I also had an e-book reader - Mobipocket, I believe - so if I wanted to overpay for e-books, I had the option. Usually, however, I downloaded freely available classic books from Project Gutenberg - I burned through everything H.G. Wells ever wrote in a matter of weeks.

Nowadays I plop myself down on the train and whip out my Blackberry. In between writing and answering emails, I usually catch up with the day's news via the NY Times and Google Reader- the difference being now, in this modern age, I wait an excruciatingly long time for the tiny text files of the NY Times mobile site to slog their way through Verizon's 'high speed' EVDO network and render on the dull, cramped screen of my device. Four years ago, since the information was already downloaded to my device, it would snap instantly on to the crisp, wide screen of my Palm. So this is progress?

Sure, with the wireless connection I can now follow a link to a Wikipedia page that will take forever to load, or do a Google search for the name of the poignant, time-lost Sleestak on Land of the Lost... but I really only stand for the interminable load and terrible screen experience because I'm a captive audience for that forty minutes each morning. I'm completely out of luck when I transition from the above ground commuter train to the underground subway- a limitation I didn't have with AvantGo.

AvantGo still exists - in fact, I just tried an old username and password combination and found that my AvantGo account still exists - and it's free. For $19.95 a year I can upgrade it to an 8MB account limit (up from 2mb- of which my channels are apparently using all of 175k). My Palm Tungsten still exists- it's been collecting dust in my office since I dropped it for a dear, departed Sidekick a few years back. I turned it on for kicks the other day and I was pleasantly surprised by the clean simplicity of the OS after living in the DMV office-like interface of the Blackberry this past year.

So, while yesterday I was wistfully anticipating Apple coming to my offline reader rescue with some expensive new device, I think I'm going to get back in the e-reader business after the Thanksgiving holiday- for all of twenty bucks.*

[*To be fair, at the time I purchased it, a Palm Tungsten was $399- exactly the price of today's Kindle. However, you can pick up a brand new, equivalently featured Palm for $199 nowadays, and if you're more economically minded, it looks like T3's are going for about $120 on eBay- which I must admit seems surprisingly high to me for a 4 year old gadget.]

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Great comments, so how's this for a dilemma :
missing AvantGo on my iPhone, I found your posting while googling for a solution: on a train in the UK, using my iPhone to read your post and write this!

Ryan said...

I am just trying to decide if the screen on the iPhone is all that much nicer than the screen of my T3. Turns out they're the exact same resolution! The iPhone screen is a tad smaller.

happyrobot said...

I, too, miss the combination of AvantGo/Palm. It was perfect for subway commuting and airplanes.

Recently I became an iPhone user and have been dreaming of some sort of AvantGo client when then iPhone SDK is ever/eventually released.

Oh, and a Vindigo client would be cool as well.

Kenneth Matinale said...

Got you beat. I use a Palm TX, which has the largest screen of any such device. I am considering the new iPhone 3G and just learned that avantgo is not available. The Apple demo shows the NY Times but it appears to just be an image. The user never opens an article in a font size that would permit reading.

Argh!

Unknown said...

Brilliant post. I've been hoping that avantgo would release a version or both the blackberry and itouch. This would alleviate the need for an accessible wifi connection(due to the non cacheing itouch) and the painfully slow blackberry (even if it does have viigo). I would pay a monthly service fee to allow for qivk Pre downloaded caches rss feeds. Maybe this is the only reason I haven't sold my old still working palm tx.

Paulmer said...

I just did a search comparing the kindle to the palm and saw this blog and just had to post. Back around 2001 or 2002, I had a Palm m505 and was reading an ebook on a bad night of fishing on a northern MN lake. I remember my family laughing at me for such stupidity. "Reading a book on a small tv. Ridiculous!"

Fast forward eight years later and those same louts are touting the virtues of a Blackberry suggesting I need to get with it.

Will someone explain this huge media hype and obsession with the Kindle, iphone and ipod? Palm had most all of these same functions dating back over 10 years ago. I just don't get it and guess I need to get with it.

Eric Player said...

Palm TE and a PDF file. Simple.