Reading Usenet newsgroups on your wireless Pocket PC
A newsreader has been tested both on Pocket PC Phone Edition
(cellphone) and on Pocket PC with Wi-Fi (wireless LAN). Introduction
It is truth that web browser based discussion forums dominate nowadays
on the Internet. But historically speaking Usenet was first, and still,
mainly due to the ease of use and very distributed nature (articles
propagate to thousands of news servers), Usenet is a very attractive
and effective discussion medium!
Everybody has her/his favourite newsgroups, but it is worth to
mention, that Microsoft corporation offers newsgroup server of address
news.microsoft.com (unfortunately not all IT companies do it), where
users not only can chat with peers, but also are getting support
directly from Microsoft employees! For example for cellphones powered
with operating systems from Microsoft the following 3 newsgroups are
of interest: microsoft.public.smartphone,
microsoft.public.smartphone.developer and
microsoft.public.pocketpc.phone_edition.
Most newsreaders for Pocket PC by now were based on idea of "off line
reading", but nowadays in era of proliferation of Wi-Fi and
Internet-connected cellphones, this idea is outdated and online,
connected, newsreading is needed! Although Ink Spot CE can be used
also for off line newsreading, it is also considered one of the best
online newsreaders for Pocket PC platform.
We have tested the Ink Spot CE both on Pocket PC Phone Edition
(cellphone) and on Pocket PC with Wi-Fi (wireless LAN):
(click on the picture to zoom it; the picture presents to the left Pocket PC Phone
Edition cellphone running Ink Spot CE, and to the right regular Pocket PC with Wi-Fi
card from SMC running the same program)
While
cellphone (with GPRS) offers only transmission speeds of approximately
5 to 40 kbits, a Pocket PC with Wi-Fi offers about 1100 kbits. We
tested the program with Wi-Fi connected to ADSL line of speed 512/512
kbits (uplink/downlink) and then you can notice, that the line to
Internet (ADSL in our case) is the limit rather than Wi-Fi itself. On
the other hand downloading articles on Pocket PC phone with GPRS was
very slow (compared to Wi-Fi) and we decided in this case to limit the
number of articles per newsgroup, that are being downloaded in one
fetch operation, to 5 to make the usage bearable:
We recommend to use Wi-Fi wherever possible and Pocket PC phone outdoors and in Wi-
Fi-less places. Wi-Fi is extremely easy to use and very fast. To read newsgroups with
similar comfort on
cellphones, we will need therefore to wait for full blown introduction
of 3G.
Ink Spot CE newsreader
The program, despite being able to work online, works on the principle of downloading
of articles to the memory:
... and then reading them without reconnecting each time when an article is clicked.
Compared to newsreaders for PC, which in most cases download given article from the
server only when user clicks on it, it proves that this program can very well also be
used also for off-line newsgroups reading.
The user interface of the program is divided (not counting preferences and setup
dialogs) into 3 tabs:
... which are: "Group", "Thread" and "Article".
The "Group" tab contains list of newsgroups and numbers of read/unread articles for
each newsgroup (see picture above).
Another tab, the "Thread" tab, contains threads of dicussion with list of articles (
it is possible in the program to view the newsgroups also without threads - without
hierarchical view):
After selecting given article the next tab appears, the "Article" tab:
... where user can read the article. Please note that it is possible to select links
from the articles (and open them in Pocket Internet Explorer) and it is possible also
to reply to the article.
Of course Ink Spot CE does not have all the features of newsreaders for PC, but it
still has a lot of useful features, like searching of articles and adding disucussion
participants to the killfile, that make it very practical and useful to use it for
every day use.
To buy or download trial version of the Ink Spot CE program click
here: http://dejavusoftware.com/inkce/. Nice feature of this link is that you can download the
program directly to your Pocket PC without the need to use desktop/notebook PC! Just
go to above mentioned link, and select: "Choose your platform:" = PocketPC and in the
second selection box take "ARM/XScale (.cab)" choice.
Conclusions
Thanks to Pocket PC and newest advancements in wireless technologies:
Wi-Fi and cellphones with packet transmission (measured by amount of
data transferred and not by connection time), the comfort and
availability of mobile Usenet newsgroups reading improved totally: you no longer need
desktop PC to sync your news, but you can fetch them also outdoors and when you
travel (remember: even during holidays abroad it is possible thanks to GPRS roaming
agreements). Now
you can read your favorite newsgroups, and participate in COMMUNITY
DISCUSSIONS whenever, wherever...
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