Trolling for Cellphone/E-reader Ideas

Not sure if this is the best place to put this question but I spend about 90 minutes on the train and bus and I'm looking at trying to find ways of making the time semi-productive. I do take books on the T, but something electronic would be nice.

My company is willing to reimburse me for a basic cell phone plan (I'm looking at T-mobile because of their MyFaves deal. I only need a few contacts and at least with the MyFaves I can do that without burning cell minutes). My true geekdom days are long gone so I dont even really know whats out there and talking to sales staff at the cellphone places is useless.

I am working with a VERY limited budget (as a former Cincinnatian. the cost of housing in Boston just blows my mind), but I would be interested in finding some cellphone that could serve as an e-reader. Ideally, Id like to find a phone that I could transfer pdfs or word docs from my computer (I'd like to avoid paying for internet access) and be able to read them. However, I dont know if this is even practical even for light reading. Yeah, I've seen the full blown e-readers from Sony or Amazon, but I dont have that kind of cash to blow. I see a lot of teenagers with the T-mobile Sidekicks and the business oriented BlackBerry Wings look interesting but the upper end ones are out of my price range.

Does anyone have a suggestion that is cheap? If a cell phone is impractical (as I think it might be), does anyone have another suggestion?

Thanks,
Brian

 

How about Palm Treo?

I read books on my palm all the time and it is actually very comfortable.

There is great free program that I use to read books, it supports word formats (doc, rtf), it is called PalmFiction.
Most books I could find on the internet are in .lit format, which is the format the microsoft portable reader uses. The software called ABClit can convert those into doc or rtf so that palmfiction can understand them. It can't read PDFs but you can either use ABClit to convert those into word format, or use Adobe Acrobat Portable (which is quite slow on palms, so converting a pdf into word is faster, since PDF books need to be converted to portable PDFs anyway)

 

Try www.howardforums.com. There is a lot of information on phones there, they should be able to help you with what you're looking for.