Amazon's Mobipocket

After lugging around 1000-page books on the subway for a few months, I've come to realize that it's not a practical solution in the long run. It's a hassle even when the weather's fine, so I'll probably give up when winter starts. The problem is that a book this big doesn't fit even inside my relatively large pockets, which means I either need to go about my daily life one-handed while fumbling with the book in the other hand, or get a bag to put it in. As much as I love and respect Joey, I don't share his love for man's bags, stylish though they may be.

Enter technology. I remembered hearing about Mobipocket, an e-book reader that runs on your phone and enables you to read books in digital format. I visited Mobipocket.com and had a shiny new book on my phone within minutes. Yes, I actually bought a book almost immediately, which is unusual seeing how stingy I can be. I boycott restaurants that I think are too expensive, and I hardly ever buy anything if I don't feel that I really need it. Thing is, I couldn't pass up their deal on Peter F. Hamilton's Night's dawn trilogy. If I'd bought those three books in paper form for the cheapest price I can find in Sweden, they'd sum up to 340 SEK. At Mobipocket.com, the entire trilogy in digital form is 79 SEK. Three e-books, cheaper than a single paper book. The price was worth it to just try out the software and see if I'd be comfortable reading on my mobile phone.

As it turns out, I kind of miss turning real paper pages, and the glare of the LCD screen can be irritating at times. However, there are just so many benefits. The weight, for one. I recently moved, first to a new town and then to a new apartment in the same town within a year. During that same year, I helped my parents move. The experience convinced me that a box full of books must be among the heaviest things on Earth. If all my books were digital, they would all fit in my pocket and weigh next to nothing. Secondly, I now always have a book handy, since I always take my phone with me wherever I go. No more sitting on the subway (or toilet) longing for something to read. Actually, now I can even pretend to do something relatively important and relevant with my phone during boring meetings when in fact I'm engrossed in an epic battle between organic starships and their mechanical counterparts. Third, as I've already mentioned, the price is right. Mobipocket has apparently been acquired by Amazon.com, which started out as an online bookstore and thus should have some experience in the field. Finally, as if you even needed a fourth reason, you can never lose a Mobipocket e-book since you can simply download it as many times as you want from the website. Also, e-books don't tear or get soggy, and nobody can ruin them by scribbling in them or underlining entire passages of text. Well, Mobipocket actually lets you enter notes in books, but it's purely optional and you don't have to view them, which does make it a feature as opposed to the eternal scourge of booklovers everywhere.

The only problem I have now is that I have too many books to read. My latest impulsive purchase brings me to a total of eight unread sci-fi novels. I have some catching up to do.

Mobile Office

I sat in the very back of the bus today, in the middle seat, or as I like to call it, "the bouncy office". The very bouncy office. Sitting right above the back wheels, you receive nearly all the force of the uneven Swedish roads directly into your spine, delivered via the not so subtle undulations of the shock absorbers. It kind of sucks, and it can make you a bit nauseous if you're reading a computer screen. Also, thanks to the wonders of adolescence, the ventilation on the left hand side has been cracked open and is now spewing ice cold air into my face. So make that "the ice cold, very bouncy office".

But still! Finally somewhere to completely fold out the old lap top, stretch the old legs and use the old grey matter for something not very useful, such as writing this blog post. In Notepad, of course; I still dream of the day when the bus fare will cover the price of wi-fi. Imagine each bus having a wi-fi uplink to, at the very least, a 3G/EDGE internet connection. How hard can it be? As hard as sticking a wi-fi card and a 3G SIM card reader into a lap top? Heck, the bus fare is already kind of expensive, so why not throw in some extras? What am I paying for anyway? :P

Deep in the Caribbean...

If you can't believe what you're seeing, then you're not alone. I couldn't either. But it's true! It's Monkey Island on a mobile phone. On my mobile phone! I can actually walk around with this classic in my pocket and play it any time I want. It might take some time getting used to, but I think this giddy feeling of euphoria might help me tide it over.

The porting of ScummVM to EPOC/Symbian has been in the works for a while now. I've known about it since the first EPOC patch was applied to the ScummVM CVS, but I never dared hope that they'd actually target the S60 platform. Surely, it had to be impossible?

Apparently, not so. The crazy genius who ported this made it work on my phone, and today the executables were released to the public. Well technically, it was yesterday, but time flies when you're having fun.

Now, this is ScummVM we're talking about, so suddenly I can play all sorts of games on my phone, not just LucasArts classics.

The screen is smaller than 320x200, so everything is scaled down to fit. Surprisingly, that's not at all noticeable for the graphics, but it quickly becomes painfully obvious that legibility is adversely affected. Basically, this means I can't read what anyone's saying in Beneath a Steel Sky. The font is rather narrow, and a lot of the outlines on the letters are missing. The strange love of ALL CAPS that the Revolution team exhibits in this game doesn't help matters; caps aren't exactly known for their readability.

LucasArts had a better font to start with. Their big blocky font has a nice and wide kerning. Apparently they weren't scrimping on screen estate, so their font doesn't suffer that much when it's scaled down. There's still the odd unreadable letter, but you can understand every word from context, especially if you've played the game before. On the other hand, that kind of goes for Beneath a Steel Sky too. I understood the intro dialog in BASS, since playing it again jogged memories of my three or four runs through it on the PC.

Unfortunately, the sound only has one volume setting as of yet: ear-piercingly loud. I'm hoping they'll fix this, because now I have to connect my headphones and use them as loudspeakers, which is not a great solution. On the plus side, it's sound! I can hear Michael Land's brilliant iMUSE music on my phone! I'm running out of exclamation marks!

Minor issues aside, the games work flawlessly. I can't understand how much processing power and memory my phone actually has. That these games even fit on my memory card is fantastic, and that they run without a hitch is amazing. It's ScummVM, for crying out loud! These guys know what they're doing, and it works so well you'd think the games were written for them, not reverse engineered by them.

Well... I guess it's simply a miracle.