On 17/03/2003 at 11:45 +0000, Andy Williams \(IMAP HILLWAY\) wrote:1) Get at my email using my mobile phone as the modem..... I guess Bluetooth is the best way of doing this. 2) Read Word and Excel docs that people keep sending me.... grrrr!! 3) Read PDF docs 4) Usual calendar type stuff. 5) Games for those boring train journeys :)
Palm Tungsten Ts look nice (ie I don't have one), and do the Bluetooth thing. Down to £ 300, and come with a bundle of Documents to Go, I believe. So do some of the Sony handhelds, but they don't come with Bluetooth until they get very expensive indeed.
But be aware that their 68k / old PalmOS emujlation is a bit crap, so older applications may not work properly despite it being meant to be sdrawkcab combatible.
Personally, I'd say don't bother using a PDA for email, the interface is just crap. If you must, then use Multimail - which I *think* Palm have bought and bundle with new devices, which will send/receive via the hotsync cradle and your desktop machine*.
If you're happy using black and white and infrared, you can do all this with pretty much any low end Palm OS machine, but make sure Documents to Go gets bundled.
Reading MS documents is not really practical for the same reason that mail isn't practical - the interface simply isn't designed for that sort of document. At an absolute minimum you'll lose ALL the formatting plus any dynamic content such as automagically calculated ToCs. Forget about editing them as the software doesn't support that.
Use the right device for the task - that is, a PDA for your calendar, address book, reading books etc. Use a laptop for email and for reading weird proprietary formats.
* - on the subject of unusual mail clients, I'm trying out Mulberry. It has many interesting quirks and missing features. Like the ability to sort my mailbox without having to dick around with mouse and menus, and it doesn't seem to like syncing to an IMAP server when there are deleted messages in my inbox. It sees the messages on the server, but just plain refuses to download them. This is irritating. And it does *not* do disconnected IMAP properly like what Multimail and mailsync do. With Mulberry, you can't apply changes to both versions of your mailbox nad have it just Do The Right Thing. It seems to implement disconnected operations by recording what you do and playing it back later. Really Fucking Stupid. Changes are keyed to msgid, so if you ever have two messages in your mailbox with the same msgid (which is legal) I know that it will break horribly.
Bah. Grrr. Thankfully, I just finished recompiling the universe on my ibook - needed to get fink unstable, then upgrade about 300 packages so that that worked, and only then could I install the one package - mailsync - that I wanted. Then hopefully I'll be able to wrap real IMAP around mutt. Just one more thing to do, I need to figger out MTA-fu so that I can transparently send mail but have it queued locally until I get a network connection. It works for immediate sending, but deferred sending just drops messages on the floor. Which is irritating.
-- David Cantrell
