Sharing memories on your PDA

Pda news :
y Aaron J.H. Walker

As the Christmas and holiday season begins to wind down, you have probably captured great moments as images to share with friends and family. Your Palm / Pocket PC PDA is a great place to store and share these memories for all the world to see.

Getting digital images onto your PDA is probably one of the easiest features to use. But I will urge you to use your storage cards for holding all of the files you are about to create.

Both Palm and Microsoft include a basic jpeg photo viewer application on your handheld without having to purchase third party software. Of course, if you want more than the basics, there are several applications that will let you crop, fix and otherwise manipulate your images to your heart's content

Some of those third party applications for Palm (www.palmgear.com) are: Splash Photo, Resco Photo Viewer for Palm (there is also a version for the Pocket PC) and PiPhoto Suite. Some of the applications for the Pocket PC (www.pocketgear.com) are: Photo Explorer, Spb Imageer and Pocket Image Navigator. Some of the above applications are relatively inexpensive but the price does go pretty high for some of them, especially if you want advanced photo editing capabilities on your PDA.

But we're going to stick with the basics.

Once you have your images loaded into your desktop computer, the latest Palm desktop and the Microsoft Picture Viewer will let you edit your images then downsize them for syncing to your PDA. Don't worry, your original is still safe on your hard drive for a later time.

The beauty of using the desktop conversions is that they can optimize the file sizes so they take up less memory but still display beautifully on your PDA. Both the Palm / Pocket PC photo viewers will let you rotate and create slide shows to show off to co-workers, friends and family.

Remember to keep them in a jpeg format since they take up much less storage space than other formats. You won't be able to tell much difference from a small jpeg file and a gazillion megapixel file from the latest digital cameras on the screen of your PDA, so don't sweat the files sizes. While it is true you can make them too small, both desktop programs pick a good midpoint between file size, load time and how well the image looks.

Last week I mentioned the TCPMP application for viewing video on your PDA. The free program works with both Palm and Pocket PCs. With it you can share your video memories as well.

Here's how it works.

After you've edited your video on your desktop computer, you will need to download and install the free program called Pocket Divx Encoder. Divx will take your original edited video file and shrink it down to a size that will easily fit onto your storage card. One of our 22 minute video home movies is only 14 MB after the conversion.

The program is very easy to use with simple point and click conversions for either Palm or Pocket PC. After the conversion, it will automatically send it to your storage card and leave a back-up copy on your hard drive.

Then, open and view the file using TCPMP which supports portrait and landscape mode if your PDA is so equipped. You can also create playlists of your favorite videos to play one after the other.

In general TCPMP is a very useful application. Children love watching themselves or other movies on your PDA. You can convert their favorite movies or cartoon shows with Divx, place them on a storage card, generate a playlist and let the children watch them on long drives or in other places.

One last important note that will keep your friends, family and co-workers happy; do take the time to edit down your family video epics if you want to share them with others. They will really appreciate not having to sit through two hours of the family opening Christmas gifts or the like.

Cut mercilessly and get it down to ten or fifteen minutes of highlights. A ten minute video on your PDA is a lot easier to share during your lunch hour and will keep everyone coming back for more.

Pocket PC users can get TCPMP from here: http://www.pocketpcfreewares.com/en/index.php?soft=1080

Palm users can get TCPMP from here: http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/download

PocketDivxEncoder for Pocket PC can be found here: http://www.pocketpcfreewares.com/en/index.php?soft=972

PocketDivxEncoder for Palm users can find it here: http://pocketdivxencoder.en.softonic.com/ie/42321

Aaron J.H. Walker is a staff photographer for the Daily Press and an avid PDA user. He can be reached at: awalker@vvdailypress.com