Visor Finds Voice via Audible, Card Access Deal
Springboard add-on to PDA accepts downloadable audio books, publications, music.Tom Mainelli, PCWorld.com
The increasingly versatile Handspring Visor can now read you a book. Audible and Card Access have released the Audible Advisor, a Handspring Springboard module that lets you download and play audio books, newspapers, and other content through Audible's online service.
The device costs $129 at Audible.com, but you can get it for $50 if you sign up for the site's BasicListener flat-rate monthly membership plan, says Jonathan Korzen, spokesperson for Audible. That basic membership lets you download one audio book and gives you a subscription to one audio newspaper or magazine for $12.95 monthly. The Audible Advisor is just the latest in a handful of mobile-friendly devices that let you take Audible's content on the road.
The Audible Advisor has 16MB of storage capacity, which can hold 4.4 hours of audio, he says. Audible offers audio in a wide range of compressions, and while a more compressed clip means a shorter download and less storage space, it affects audio quality. The service offers five basic compressions: Format one is the most compressed and four is the least (format five is specific to Sony products). The Audible Advisor lets you store and play audio in formats two and three.
Audio format two is roughly FM-quality sound; format three is analog-quality sound--almost as good as CD-quality, Korzen says.
Update as You Go
To get Audible content onto your Visor, you must sign up for service, pick out your content, and set up the Audible manager on your Internet-connected desktop. Then, the next time you place your Visor in its syncing cradle, you can collect your new audio content, Korzen says.
The Audible Advisor keeps track of what you listen to each day, and the next time you sync, it gets rid of the content you've already heard and replaces it with new material, he says. So, for example, if you've listened to two hours of the latest John Grisham novel, it ditches that content and moves two hours of new content into storage on the device. It works the same way with daily news.
Since the Audible Advisor doesn't have its own batteries, all this listening will drain your Handspring's batteries, but not at a greatly increased rate, says Scott Boekweg, a Card Access spokesperson.
In fact, if you listen to the device with Handspring's display turned off, you'll get about 30 hours of playback time out of fresh alkaline batteries, he says. That's significantly better battery life than some add-on MP3 players have offered when connected to a Handspring.
And the Audible Advisor is software-upgradeable, Boekweg says. For example, at some point the company could offer a free download to turn the device into a voice recorder, he says.