Unfortunately, the user interface is pretty bad; nevertheless, once you figure it out it’s a great tool.

It’s a little confusing to use, but I found that it works to use the 3GP setting for Nokia/NEC/Siemens.”
I’ve tried it and it converts the videos beautifully. The AAC LC Audio Codec works fine to get quality audio.

I did a bit more experimenting and I came up with a nice solution that made text onscreen actually readable. You were on the right track when you mention that you tried to open the text file you copied over with the browser. Here’s what I did:

I took a Word document (but it could have been any text format) and save the file from Word as HTML Filtered. The “Filtered” option in Word 2007 strips out all the nast Microsoft specifice code that might not render properly in the Sync’s browser. I then copied the file to my MicroSD card and popped it into the phone. I navigated to the file using “My Stuff” file browser and opened the file. Because it was an HTML file it opened directly in the browser. This result had two consequences that were an improvement over the Picsel file viewer. First, the text was sized properly for reading on the small screen, and second, the text flowed vertically properly and wrapped nicely so that no side-to-side scrolling was necessary.

The end result was that this method certainly makes the Sync a viable eBook reader. All you need to do is take a text file and convert it to HTML. Thanks again for the original question, Matt. I never would have tried this out if you hadn’t asked it. I think I’ll promote this discussion to a full fledged post now.

–Clay

Thanks for the comment. You ask an interesting question. I guess I never considered the possibility of reading eBooks on the Sync. The screen is soooo small, it just doesn’t seem like something I would want to try. But I got curious when you asked about it.

Because I had trouble initially getting files on and off the phone using the USB cable (my carrier is AT&T, by the way) I purchased a 1 GB TransFlash (MicroSD) card and have been using that to store pictures I snap and to hold music and video for playback on the phone. So I tried putting a plain text file on the card to see if I could see and open it from the File Browser. It turns out that I do see the text file and, when I select it, it opens in software called the Picsel File Viewer. The text renders very nicely onscreen, but it is tiny, tiny, tiny. You can zoom in and pan around but this is just a terrible reading experience. The screen on the sync is just too small to make this worthwhile in my opinion. As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, I’ve used my PSP and even an iPod to read eBooks, but nothing beats the dedicated Sony PRS-500 eBook reader for a solid eBook reading experience.