PDA blogging woes at the TSSJS

I am here in Las Vegas at the 2005 TSSJS and trying to use my Dell Axim X5 to compose this blog entry... this worked well for me at last summer's Bea World, but since then java.net has upgraded their blogging software to the Moveable Type platform. Much to my dismay, Moveable Type doesn't work with pocket IE. That's not unique to Moveable Type, blogger and gmail doen't work with Pocket IE either.

Fortunately for me, there are alternate browsers available for the Dell Axim, and I am using a 30-day trial of one called ThunderHawk from bitstream. If I decide to keep using ThunderHawk past 30 days, it will cost me $50 a year.

In general, I like ThunderHawk, but it's just different enough to knock me off my stride. The screen is rendered in landscape mode, which gives you a display that is very much like a normal desktop view (but very tiny). Unfortunately ThunderHawk seems to only support an on-screen keyboard for input... it would be nicer if I could use the standard letter recognition software, but I am happy that it works with Moveable Type. Unhappily, it does not work with Gmail (Presumably ThunderHawk doesn't support XMLHttpRequest).

Hopefully more developers will become PDA and mobile aware and keep in mind users who aren't on the latest version of IE or Firefox. Google's search tools are good role models... They detect the PDA browsers and provide an alternate web interface. Hopefully gmail and blogger will follow suit.

In the mean time, it's an interesting exercise to try and live with a PDA rather then a laptop. I'd have to say at this point that a small laptop would be a heck of a lot more useful.

Update: 10Mar05 - Gmail now provides a pure HTML interface for "unsupported browsers". Way to go Google!