A recent post on Hazelware (mobile device user agents) rekindled my interest in understanding the current state of mobile PDA user agent (UA) strings. Having a comprehensive list would be helpful for automatic delivery of mobile-formatted content and tracking device popularity. To learn the types of devices that are reaching my
CNET News.com (and others) are announcing that NFL will deliver game audio through Audible.com: Under terms of the agreement, Audible.com will offer MP3-compatible audio broadcasts of the Super Bowl and conference championship games. Listeners can download the entire broadcast, or selected highlights, the morning after the game. Consumers can download the games, from NFL.com, Audible.com and other online retailers, onto their MP3 players, including Apple Computer’s iPod, Audible said. This should be interesting. I can definitely see the game summaries/highlights being useful. (Ideally I’d like them that evening rather than the following morning.) I think the post-game summary on the…
Today Rob Fahrni ponders whether a Palm podcasting platform makes sense: It’s new and it’s hip. It’s the perfect time to create a new piece of hardware to support this endeavor. I myself this Palm is in the best position to make it work. Why Palm? Well for one thing you can write code to run on it! That’s absolutely critical. My question is how good is the microphone on the Treo 650? Could someone get enough recording time on the device? Why hasn’t Palm jammed a 5 GB hard drive into one yet? Is it because it would increase…
Cory Doctorow has just published a new short story on Salon.com — Anda’s Game. I haven’t read it yet, but based on Cory’s previous works, I’m sure it will be interesting. A unique twist is the licensing of the story under Creative Commons, making it redistributable in different forms. Along those lines, I dusted off my knowledge of the old Peanut Press / Palm Digital Media eBook maker and created an eReader version of the book for reading on my Palm: Anda’s Game, eReader for Palm OS format (57 KB). If you can’t track down the free reader (which is…
Jeff from Writing on Your Palm recently wrote a “howto” for Palmcasting — basically explaining what Podcasts are and how to download them to a Palm device. This is a nice summary of the steps involved and references Pocket Tunes which is shaping up to be the best media player for Palm OS. I’ve written before about Zodcasting with the Zodiac device. There’s a lot of potential here for PDAs as mobile audio players for podcasts. The achille’s heel is that last step of pushing MP3 files down to the device. I need to do some more experimenting in this…