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A PDA can be used to provide 'anywhere' access to reading materials such as lecture notes, or reference material e.g. an electronic dictionary. Entire textbooks can be made portable by using them in their electronic format. Text, small graphics or diagrams including short movies or animations can also be stored and presented on a PDA.
The benefits of electronic materials provide users with the ability to:
The problems of electronic materials are:
The limitations of using a PDA to store and present the materials are:
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Palm PDAs have a standard Memo application that allows the user to read and write pure text only files of up to 4K, which is about one A4 page of 10-point text. These text files are synchronised between the Palm and the host computer using a specified folder (e.g. My Documents). These text files can be used to store chunks of information but are not ideal for lengthy texts.
Some models of Palm devices come with Photosuite Mobile edition included in the box. This application can allow you to view various formats of images and videos. The software includes a desktop conduit, which allows files to be converted for efficient viewing on the PDA.
Photos can be transferred in one of three sizes: Small, Medium or Large. Small size allows the photo to fill the handheld device's screen, and is not zoom-able. Small is also the default selection. Medium size allows one zoom level for viewing the photo with greater detail. Large size allows two zoom levels for greatest detail.
Videos can be transferred in one of three sizes: Small, Medium or Large. Small and Medium size videos will be compressed, reducing the size of the file. This will also reduce the quality of the video.
Only the Sony Palm devices have an inbuilt audio system that allows the user to play MP3 files. Though an audio MP3 facility can be added to the Handspring models using the AudioJam springboard module and the latest Palms have a very basic speaker for sound output from .wav and other compressed audio files but this is not a real audio system.
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The Pocket PC operating system includes two applications that are capable of reading electronic text: Pocket Word and Microsoft Reader.
Microsoft Word will display a text file or pocket word file. Pocket Word files consist of colour Rich Text Formatting (RTF) with no displayed pictures or tables.
Microsoft Reader can only read eBooks in the Microsoft Reader format (.lit), which supports basic text formatting, 4 font size options, a hyperlink table of contents and small images. A free plug-in is available for Word to create Microsoft Reader files.
Multimedia
The Pocket PC PDAs usually come preloaded with Window Media player for the Pocket PC. This multimedia player will allow the user to play Window Media (version 8) video and/or audio files and MP3 audio files. The Pocket PC operating system also has an inbuilt wave audio file player.
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This simple text only eDoc reader has a search facility, auto scroll, bookmarks and screen rotation. It has the choice of justification or left alignment, hyphenation, three line spacing options and three font sizes.
A review of CspotRun by Palm Gear
This application can read eDocs with colour RTF style formatting and has basic support for tables. It has a bookmarks facility, find and the ability to rotate the screen. It is supplied with a Windows program that allows you to convert RTF/HTML/PDF/TXT files to compressed DOC format files (with embedded formatting codes).
A review of RichReader by The Gadgeteer
This is an advanced eDoc reader that supports enhanced documents with HTML-like tags for inserting TealPaint pictures, oversized scrolling bitmaps, hyperlinks, hidden bookmarks, and stylized headers. It has all the features or colour RTF and support for complex tables. The only way to produce a Teal Doc is to use an unintuitive DOS program and writing HTML-like tags with the original document. The application allows you to rotate the screen, choose from three sizes of font, and use a search facility.
A review of TealDoc by Palm Gear
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This simple to use application is available for both Pocket PC and Palm OS, its files (which are both the same format for each operating system) are compressed and take up 20% space than Palm Doc files. A free Windows desktop utility is available to transform HTML pages from a users computer or from the Internet into the iSilo format. The iSilo format allows much of HTML's formatting capacity including Colour RFT, simple, complex and nested tables, bullet points, internal hyperlinks and images. Most simple web pages can be easily made available off-line on the PDA. This program can be used to create PDA friendly educational materials from simple HTML files.
Mobipocket reader (Freeware)
This application uses eDocs with page-by-page text formatting (no scroll bars). Th documents can have full justified text with hyphenation, Bookmarks, highlights, annotations, a table of contents, cover page, indexes. You can change font size, type, text alignment and colour.
It has full text search integrated and extensible dictionaries support Multimedia. The format also supports embedded Images (BMP, GIF) and MP3 player integration (PocketPC 2002 Media Player Support). It also supports the high-resolution screens of some Palm OS devices and Pocket PC's. A free complier is available that integrates with Microsoft Office.
Also see:
Adobe Acrobat Readers for Palm and for Pocket PC
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