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Blog By Ron Miller | April 20, 2007
http://byronmiller.typepad.com

Transmedia Glide Goes Linux

By Ron Miller

Transmedia announced this week that it was releasing a version of its Glide system for Linux, marking the first time you can access Linux files easily from a mobile device.

Donald Leka, CEO at Transmedia, says this a big step forward for Linux users. "If you are a Linux user, you don’t have an easy way to access data on cell phone." He says, what his company has done is to create a desktop-type interface for the cell phone, and he says, this puts Linux in a position to be a consumer option and a business option. Supported phones include the Blackberry, Palm Treo, all LG phones, Motorola Razr and many more popular phones.

Leka says, the new Glide Linux system enables users to communicate with Linux PCs directly through the portable device, regardless of the underlying network provider. "You can access video, music, photos, calendars and bookmarks and pull it all into Glide," Leka says.

Glideui What's more the interface is designed to do everything via a touch interface using a finger including such tasks as cropping photos, moving files or converting files. The screnshot shown here shows the Glide home page where you can access all of the Glide functions in a simple, intuitive, icon-driven interface. This is a huge step forward from earlier versions of Glide and enables users to learn how to use the system quickly.

And you get all of this without the "Windows tax," the cost of including Microsoft Windows on the device. "The economics are much different than the Microsoft Windows equation," he says. "Linux is free and Glide is much less expensive than Windows," Leka says.

If you haven't tried Glide yet, I strongly encourage you to check it out. It enables you access, store and share files and play back multimedia files without worrying about the underlying format. This means, Glide will play the music, video or photo without regard to the underlying file type. This in itself is huge, but it also provides a nice interface for interacting with media files, setting up web pages or using online applications and it's all simple, fast and intuitive.