Walt, Motorola uses the USB port to charge both the Razor and the Q. Doug *** Non-Public: For Internal Use Only *** -----Original Message----- From: bookport-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bookport-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Walt Smith Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2006 12:19 PM To: bookport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bookport] Re: gripes and wishes from a new subscriber Chris - My comments are placed below your own. hardware issues 1. USB power: I can see no reason not to allow USB power to operate the bookport when it is connected to a computer. In addition this would allow external battery packs or power supplies to run the bookport without having to add a power jack. *** Excellent suggestion, although I'm not so sure about using an external power supply other than the computer through the USB port. Has anyone ever actually seen this in another device? I don't doubt that it's theoretically possible, just haven't seen it. *** 2. If USB power is possible then why not charge batteries with it: This one gets slightly more tricky since if you had normal batteries in the BP you would have an issue with automatically charging via USB. A switch either software or hardware could be added to make this possible. I have a ham radio portable that has a menu choice that sets battery type and switches off the charging current when normal battery pack is selected. I realize that this suggestion does open up a support nightmare. *** Again, an excellent suggestion. And while we're on the subject of USB, we need to have USB 2.0 inplemented on a new hardware platform. *** 3. Add an SD slot or CF to SD converter card: CF is on it's way out. SD is moving up and many products and companies no longer find CF viable. I have many CF cards but the prices have probably gone as low as they will and in some cases are starting to rise on mid to high sized cards. SD is clearly moving up and with the release of the HC specc (up to 32GB) will take more and more market share since the target is video and digital cameras. *** While I firmly believe that the reports of the demise of CompactFlash are greatly exaggerated, SD has its good points. Perhaps its worst point, however, is size--those cards are just entirely too small and easy to lose. It will be interesting to see what developments in the area of the NLS digital Talking Book might lead to here, especially as we've been told that there _will_ be a BookPort capable of playing these when they become available next summer. I don't have anything personally against SD or some other card technology, but I'd be concerned about the user who might possess very limited technical or even physical skills trying to insert some of these much smaller cards that aren't as easily defined as a CF card. *** Software functions and issues. 1. File sort order: This one is a real PITA! Let's say you have file names such as 3145_01.mp3 3145_02.mp3 3145_03.mp3 3149_01.mp3 3149_02.mp3 3149_03.mp3 Now you copy all of these to the BP. They should play in sequence but in fact the last file 3149_03.mp3 will be first in the BP list. If you load several files at different times the sequence will be almost in order from each load session but the order issue remains within each group and overall causes files to play in scrambled order if you use automatic file advance. This is a major gripe since if you have a book in chapters, one per file, and the files are not sorted by name correctly you can't read the book from start to finish without user intervention. *** This is not a major issue for me. It's extremely simple to get such sequential files to load on the BP in their correct order--just select them on the computer in Windows Explorer from the bottom (last file) up rather than from the top (first file) down. If/when I want to re-sort a folder's contents on the BP, I simply use a card reader attached to my computer, dump the files from the card to the computer, then dump them all back. *** 2. Playlists: This one would in part solve item 1 but would just be nice. The ability to have a simple text file that would step the BP through files in the order the user wants would be great. Also playlists in the .m3u format are almost universal. It would also allow applications such as Winamp to generate lists to go along with the files you send to the BP. *** Totally unimportant to me and not really relevant to the fundamental purpose of the device as a reading system. I don't use the BP as an iPod and don't ever expect to do so and, as indicated in my previous response, it's already possible to load sequentially titled files so that they play in their proper order without having to rename them. *** 3. file titles from ID tags: ID v2.0 tags for .mp3 and .mp4 along with many other file types including .wav are industry standard and almost universal. I think the BP should be able to read the file name or any one of the major ID tag items such as artist, title, album, through a user menu selection. A combination of these would be even better. Example Artist, "book title", title "Chapter number and title" would be much more useful than just an alphabet soup of a file name such as THC_b1c01. *** See above comments. *** 4. ability to read text type PDF: That one doesn't need much elaboration. A PDF with text rather than picture based pages should be readable without jumping through translation hoops. *** Quite likely not possible because of the nature of a raw PDF file. That's why translation to text is required in the first place. Also, bear in mind that there will *always* be formatting issues with some PDF documents that make their reading and interpretation difficult. This is all due to the manner in which the original document was designed and coded by its author and has nothing whatever to do with the technology that might be implemented on the BookPort. Look at the contents of a raw PDF document with a text editor like Notepad and you'll see just how far from a "text" file it really is. While the ability to just load a PDF file to the Book Port and read it would be nice, I think that in the long run, translation to text on the computer first remains the best way to deal with these files, especially since you can't download a PDF document directly to the BP, anyway--that is, there's no direct download functionality on the BP and I personally wouldn't want to have to pay for such. *** 5. Better sample rates for memos: Nice to see 22,050 mono 16 bit. Huge improvement in quality and with the size of CF cards these days should not be to much trouble for many users. I run several 4gb cards and have at least two 2gb and one 1gb for stand-by. *** One of those "it would be nice, but is it *really* all that important" issues. Again, for what it was intended to do, the memo feature works just fine. If a user wants to record a classroom lecture or produce a podcast, this isn't the device for doing so, anyway. Like you said, now that CF cards are so much larger than they were when the BP was originally designed, however, an improved sampling rate probably should be implemented. Another memo-related thing that would *really* be nice would be the ability to copy selected text from the document being read into a memo. If I were a student preparing a paper on the novel I'm reading, such a feature would be worth its weight in gold to me--I could almost literally write the paper using the memo feature. *** -- Walt Smith - Clearwater, FL Walt@xxxxxxxxxx