July 08, 2004

Soliciting Input

I've signed up for the AvantGo service for my iPAQ Pocket PC. What this means is that I can subscribe to selected online publications and have content downloaded onto my PDA. It's free, and so far the obligatory advertising is unobtrusive enough to make it worthwhile.

I'm wondering what kind of news service(s) y'all think I should get. They offer standards like The Wall St Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as Rueters and BBC. I was even pleasantly surprised to see the Christian Science Monitor available. I've got my own ideas about these, but would like to hear yours.

I'm just learning about how AvantGo actually works, but so far it's been fairly straightforward. I've successfully downloaded pages from a couple of technology pubs, plus Space.com and The Sporting News, and this morning I created a custom 'channel' for Eric McErlain's Off Wing Opinion. We'll see how that works this evening when I synchronize with my home PC.

Who needs Tetris? I've got words!

Posted by Ted at July 8, 2004 07:43 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Ted,

The nice thing is that you can put anything you want on, and change it tomorrow. I have about 20 channels on my avantgo account, some are spacey, some are blogs (like belmontclub, junkyardblog, and uss clueless), some are news. I also have scrappleface, so i can read the funnier ones to the kids at home.

Have fun.

Posted by: chris at July 8, 2004 08:32 AM

I hadn't even considered stuff like USS Clueless and Scrappleface!

Man, I am *so* loving this thing.

Posted by: Ted at July 8, 2004 09:46 AM

You shouldn't underestimate the value of Tetris, Ted.

Posted by: Victor at July 8, 2004 12:30 PM

Ted,

For pure headlines, you can get Yahoo News wires. I used to use AvantGo to get a heads up on PR Newswire press releases for work. I'd sync up before I showered, and pulled it out of the cradle as I headed out the door for the subway. 20 minutes later, I was in the office and primed to write my article of the day having already sifted through the crap of the last 24 hours. It was fantastically efficient!

This was 4 years ago though. I haven't used it since because I have to drive to work now. I think AvantGo is awesome. I used to get NYT, Salon, Wired, Yahoo News, & Yahoo Finance (filtered for only the stocks I covered or liked).

These days I have a Blackberry for work, so just reading my work email keeps me busy. I have too many gadgets on my waistband already. I have what I call 'IT plumber's crack'. That's saying something too, when all you do is sit all day.

Posted by: mapgirl at July 14, 2004 12:13 AM
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