PDA Mobile Websites

Over 3 years ago, I posted my small collection of websites optimized for PDA or small screen viewing. Since then I’ve had a steady stream of visitors (recently averaging about 10,000 page views per month) and some great referrals from other sites, but the page and its contents were being neglected and needed a refresh. This past week I rewrote by bookmark system from an old database to del.icio.us. A short Perl script periodically grabs my del.icio.us bookmarks and creates the page content. Now as I discover new mobile websites, I can tag in del.icio.us and they’ll be picked up…

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Why Post From a Blackberry?

Dave Winer has recently switched to a Blackberry and is (re-)discovering what it means to read news and post to your blog from a mobile device. As they say, “What’s old is new again!”. I’m glad to see some renewed attention in this area; there is still a lot of room for improvement and innovation here. Dave hits a few good points, in response to the hypothetical question of posting from a Blackberry: I’ve seen a few blog posts asking why would you want to post from a Blackberry? After all, you could carry a laptop with you, and of…

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Switched to Dell DJ30

Tired of waiting for Creative to fix the Zen Touch playback problems and update the firmware to support PlaysForSure, I got a Dell DJ30 for my birthday. So far, it’s passed the first test: after a quick firmware upgrade, I was able to download my entire Yahoo Music Engine library (most of which is from the $5/month subscription service) and it worked! Overall the feel and controls are pretty nice. Dell uses a scroll thumb wheel rather than the ‘touch’ pad on the Zen. The wheel is better because it has feedback for each click. Also the overall unit is…

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Creative Zen Touch

Very late to the portable audio party, I finally broke down and bought the Creative Zen Touch 20GB. It just arrived from Amazon tonight and I’ve been checking it out while watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees. So far it seems very solid. With USB 2.0, the songs copy from my PC really fast and the audio quality is surprisingly good. I couldn’t decide between an iPod or something else, finally choosing the Zen Touch after reading some good reviews. The iPods are really cool and the price didn’t scare me off, but I’m mostly a Windows users and…

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Google by SMS

Google just launched an SMS service for retrieving search results from a mobile phone. Basically you send specific messages to the number 46645 (GOOGL on most phones). You can do some specific searches like businesses, people, Froogle prices, and word definitions. You can also do normal searches with snippets returned to your phone. I tried this on my Treo 600 and it worked pretty well, although the messages returned arrived out of order. (Not sure whether this is Google’s or Sprint’s issue.) They number the messages (“1 of 2” and “2 of 2” in this case), so arriving out of…

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