Comments on: iSilo Document Readers For BlackBerry Enters Beta

By: iSilo Document Reader For BlackBerry Released | BerryReview

iSilo Document Reader For BlackBerry Released | BerryReview — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:46:08 +0000

[...] when we told you that iSilo for BlackBerry was in Beta? Well I was just sent a link to a Spanish blog reporting that it has been [...]

By: Luciano ES

Luciano ES — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:37:39 +0000

Holy cow, there are keyboard shortcuts for everything and they are CUSTOMIZABLE! I wasn’t quite ready for that one. Why can’t other applications do that?

By: DavidB

DavidB — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:09:00 +0000

All that, plus a great solution for all the BB’s that will be left behind by OS 4.5. ??? Isn’t 4.5 only coming to 81xx, 83xx, and 88xx? There are scads of 87xx’s out there in the corp world (that can’t have camera and can’t justify “World Edition” 88xx upgrade cost), and I still see people everywhere with 7xxx devices.

By: Luciano ES

Luciano ES — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:44:03 +0000

You make a very good point, haephaestus. This is indeed a very popular program among professionals that need a lot of reference material on them, like doctors and lawyers. This is very good news for the Blackberry indeed.
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Download it and give it a spin, Ronen. It is one very nice program. Look at how it browses the media card files smoothly! I wish there were something like that for Plucker or at least plain txt files…

By: haephaestus

haephaestus — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:06:13 +0000

Sorry for replying to my own post but I just had to add a few more points. For the Blackberry to become more of a viable device for professional use (reference material for doctors, lawyers, etc…) there needs to be a dataviewer on the Blackberry. Sure, I could surf the web for data or use Docs to Go to open MS Office documents but if you’re on the spot and need reference data fast, it’s also tied to the network filestore, something that is useless to us if we were stuck in a subway tunnel or deep in a hospital with a dodgy connection.

If anything, I think iSilo comes just in time as Blackberry is hotter than ever. It’ll definitely bring more of a PDA to the Blackberry platform and woo the Treo crowd if it hasn’t already done so.

-h

By: haephaestus

haephaestus — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:57:18 +0000

iSilo on the Palm was tremendous. When I switched to the Blackberry, there were few document/ebook readers available. I’ve tried Mobipocket reader and its conversion utility and while they’re a decent solution, the client on the Blackberry seems to keep running in the background and it looks like it’s trying to maintain some sort of ota connection as my battery has been sucking lately.

What Luciano says above is true, iSilo has been around for a long time and I’m sure there are tons of available converted books and such. Hop over to http://www.memoware.com and you’ll get an idea. I am looking forward to iSilo for the Blackberry!

-h

By: Luciano ES

Luciano ES — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:45:55 +0000

Mobipocket and iSilo are two different beasts. Converting documents for Mobi is a major pain! That is probably why you’re likely to find just commercial titles for Mobipocket. I don’t know if converting documents to the iSilo format is easier, but look around the Web and see that there are lots of free user-contributed iSilo documents all over.
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Hum, I just saw there is a Linux version of iSiloX, the software that makes iSilo documents. http://www.isilox.com/download/401/iSiloXC386.htm If it is any good and easy to use, then iSilo is indeed a very welcome addition to the Blackberry arsenal. It’s always been popular among Palm aficionados. I always preferred Plucker, but we have to work with whatever is available.