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PDA Street | April 17, 2007

Glide Linux Media Across Multiple Desktop, Mobile Platforms

By James Alan Miller

The folks over at TransMedia today added support for Linux desktops and mobile handsets to Glide, its platform for accessing, editing and sharing content—video, music, documents, photos, contacts, bookmarks, calendars, e-mail, etc.—accross a multitude of devices (desktop and mobile) running on a number of different operating systems.

With Glide, for example, you can alter a file in one context (i.e. a PC) and the changes are automatically reflected in another context (on a smartphone or cell phone, for instance). Content is seamlessly formatted for the device it is being accessed on.

Here's how Glide works:

All content streams through TransMedia's hosted servers on the way from one device to the other. Through Glide's transcoding engines, users may even view media in formats supported by the device it was created on but not the one it is being viewed or edited from. Originals are stored in Glide along with the transcoded versions.

The point, according to TransMedia, is to provide a unified file and information management system and productivity suite for all your computing needs.

"Glide Sync solves the problem of too many devices and separate and incompatible data management systems that people are forced to contend with on a daily basis," TransMedia's CEO Donald Leka explained to PDAStreet a few months back. "For the first time, it is possible to access everything, at anytime and from anywhere on all of your devices."

In addition to Linux, Glide supports Windows and Mac desktops and RIM BlackBerry, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Sidekick and Symbian smartphones and handhelds as well as a number of feature phones.