Monday, March 10, 2008

Bible on a phone

I still count on my Dell Axim x51v handheld to carry around all my Bible resources, but the newer cell phones make access to the Bible on your phone a reality. David Ker, of Lingamish fame, also runs the lingalinga blog where he has been running a series on this topic. Here is the list he has posted so far:
Continue to check the lingalinga blog for more posts on this topic. Note that the last link is really just using a phone's web browser to view one of the online sites that carries biblical texts. As Ker indicates, it will help to go through a site like Skweezer to view a site on a phone without all the stuff that will complicate the download and viewing. A site I most often use on my PDA is Google Lite (which allows me to eliminate images altogether). Also check Google PDA and Google Mobile.

If your phone is running Windows Mobile or Palm, you can, of course, run one of the Bible programs that were designed for PDAs using these platforms. (Pocket e-Sword for Pocket PCs is a a great choice, and it is free.) The major players for Bible software in the PDA and now cell phone field are Laridian and OliveTree. Both these companies have been working hard at providing support for a wide variety of phones. Laridian (note the graphic below) is particularly notable for providing integration between the various devices you may use. That is, whether you use the Bible software on your desktop, PDA, or cell phone, you can keep all your notes in sync. For now, they provide synchronization between the Windows Desktop, PocketPC, and iPhone/iPod Touch versions of their software.Finally, since I am on this topic, did you see the little "Mobile Version" icon on the right just below the banner near the top of this page? Click on it to 'really' see how this page would look on your phone. I'm using Mofuse to create the mobile version. It is free, and absolutely all the work of conversion is handled without a problem. As they claim, you can convert your web blog into a mobile version in 5 seconds.
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3 comments:

  1. David KerMarch 11, 2008 at 5:06 PM

    mgvh, I am extremely grateful for the link to the NET Bible! I'd like to do some checking on the licensing for that one since I haven't seen mention of it on the official Go Bible site.

    We're looking at ways to convert directly between the files we use in our Bible translation software and the files used by Go Bible in hopes of creating Go Bibles for any language that has a portion of Scripture available. That's only about 15 languages in Mozambique but worldwide it's probably a couple thousand!

    Thanks again for moving this idea forward.

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  2. MGVHoffmanMarch 12, 2008 at 2:29 AM

    Hi, David,
    Actually, the link to the NET Bible for Go Bible was from a comment on your blog post on SMS. (If it is not there with the NET folks permission, let me know, and I will remove that link on my post.)

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  3. AnonymousJuly 11, 2008 at 7:21 AM

    lingamish said... he wanted to check with the NET Bible folks about the NET on GO Bible. I am the permissions director for the NET Bible and www.bible.org and I had a volunteer who was porting the NET Bible to GO Bible as an official project. If anyone would like to finish that project sent me an email at http://www.bible.org/email_form.asp?email_id=3. Also check our our free study tool at www.nextbible.org

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