It's my birthday today (yay me) and with my hard won loot I wanna get myself a  PDA (with acrobat reader so I can carry round my rpg pdfs).

But I'm a bit unsure as to whats out there so could any of youse with prior knowledge of the things pass on any tips, words of advice, warnings from the beyond etc.

Also any software reccomendations - especially with regards to rpgs.

cheers.

I got myself a low-end Palm Z22 a while back and I like it for what it is. Actually, I think I've barely scratched the surface in terms of add-on applications. From a hardware standpoint, the things I miss are WiFi capability (which would let me use the Internet) and a memory card slot. The latter could be important if you want to carry RPG resources around. More about that in a second. The Z22 also doesn't  have mp3 capability built-in; there's at least one freeware mp3 program that might work on it but I didn't put much effort into that since there's not enough memory to hold very many songs, plus there's no headphone jack and the speaker's kind of dinky.

About PDFs. Adobe's reader for Palm isn't that great (e.g. it sometimes inexplicably omits graphics or treats text as graphics), but it's free and I've found that sometimes it works when another application doesn't. There is a freeware third-party (fourth-party?) PDF reader that I've read good things about, but as far as I can tell you must transfer the PDFs using a memory card. Most other solutions (including Adobe's) basically have a two-step process whereby the file is first translated into a compressed format, and then moved to the Palm using the synch functionality.

At the moment I'm trying out a product called RepliGo which seems to work very nicely, if not perfectly. In a manner similar to Acrobat Pro, it allows you to "print" from your computer into a "distilled" format that can then be read with "reader" software for various platforms including Palm. One nice thing about this is that you're not limited to PDFs: anything you can print, you can move over to your palm and read it with RepliGo. However, I had problems with a couple of files which came through with a lot of junk. In those cases, I fell back on Adobe Reader if I could (i.e., if they were PDFs).

Of course, if you have a Mac or Acrobat, or some other method of creating PDFs, you might be able to do the same thing with web pages & word files--PDF them and then use Adobe Reader. I haven't tried it.

Dataviz and I think some others also have either PDF readers or other forms of "media readers". I wasn't very impressed with Dataviz's for my purposes and I haven't tried the others.

I have a Dell Axim x51v.  I don't use Adobe Reader for the PDA, I use FoxIt's mobile reader.  It renders PDFs much more effectively, IMHO, and is easier to use than adobe.   I don't recommend a PDA if you will primaraly be reading PDFs though.  The text has to be properly reflowed and designed to work on a 3" screen, or else it's a bitch to read.  I much prefer my MobiPocket and MS Reader software for things like reading.

I have two card slots, one for SD and one for CF.  Make sure you have card slots, as they are a real life saver.

Right now, I'm using an old Palm m105 with a screwy digitizer.  It's a nifty little gadget, and I love it very much, especially for AvantGo.  Not good at all for PDFs, lacks the horsepower.

Personally though, if I had the scratch, I'd be most interested in getting myself a Zaurus.  The Linux core OS results in there being a lot of great open source software being ported for the paltform.  Including a pretty decent looking PDF reader.

They're tougher to get a hole of now, as Sharp stopped supporting the US market after the SL-5500, but even though that machine is a tad aged now, it's stil pretty sweet.  Or you can import one of the newer CL devices, some of which even have micro-harddrives, which is damn sweet, though the also kind of move more in the direction of a mini-laptop than a PDA almost for the size.  Still, for performance, capability, and screen size and resolution (640x480 is huge for a PDA), they can't be beat.

There seems to be a notable shortage of them on eBay right now, oddly.  Only one of the CL models, though it's going for far cheaper than they usually go for, though there's a number of SL-5500s.

Hey, never had a PDA, but I have some nice casio calculators and I can recommend casio products.

Whatever you decide to buy, get some sort of case for it, I dropped a HP PDA from less than 2 feet onto a blacktop surface and totally destroyed it (luckily it was a work unit and not my own)

Quote from: joewolzI don't recommend a PDA if you will primaraly be reading PDFs though.  The text has to be properly reflowed and designed to work on a 3" screen, or else it's a bitch to read.

Yes, the two solutions I mentioned above each have their advantages and drawbacks in this regard. Adobe Reader basically has a mode where the text is rendered in a standard font for Palm. Repligo has a flowed mode that nevertheless somehow retains the original document font. It works more smoothly than Adobe Reader in general, but the font is antialiased-I think--essentially, they use greyscale to render the unique font in a resolution for which it wasn't designed. This can be a little hard to read until you get used to it.