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This is the Sasol eBirds that I referred to which is a really good pda programme and runs without any hitches and is very user friendly. I sent them a sd card and within a week it was returned to me with the software loaded on it and for this I paid R313.50.

I would expect most people to have a satisfactory experience with any business, but my experience was, admittedly, made worse by the distance involved.

It's a long story, so I won't go into detail, but sitting around an industrial park for several hours on my holiday waiting for someone to turn up to a pre-arranged and agreed appointment, with no apology for inconvenience caused, was sufficient to get my back up enough to criticise this company publically (which is something I would not normally do).

DB: Just dug out the receipt and was charged R876.32 for eBirds on a 128mb SD card. Card was sent by FedEX, which cost a further R250. Also paid R275 for the program we didn't want and eTrax still doesn't work. R1597.50 is, therefore, quite a lot to spend on birding software!

I saw a SASOL eBirds in our local Incredible connections store once. On subsequent visits it was not there anymore only the Roberts software.

I believe that the software can be purchased from a number of different places, but as the program was written by PDA Solutions, all technical queries will ultimately have to go through them.

I should reiterate, my problem was not with eBirds: it is a fantastic piece of software and works perfectly with my PDA. The problem was with eTrax, which would not work with my GPS (it would show the GPS was switched on, but would not show the co-ordinates when logging whatever you were tracking - without this, the software is useless because logging co-ordinates is the whole point of the software!). I emailed and phoned and was promised answers, but none were forthcoming. They didn't phone me back (fair do's - it would have been an international call and potentially very expensive, so that didn't bother me too much) and were not responding to emails I sent them. Time was getting short so I was emailing them every 2 days trying to prompt a response. They finally said they had no idea what the problem was and asked if I could visit them in Craighall Park, Joburg. I said I could only on the coming Saturday (the day we arrived in SA) as all our holiday was being spent up north. There was some to-ing and fro-ing over times as their offices were not normally open on a Saturday, but they assured me that someone would be there up until 12. We arrived at their offices at 10.45, fresh off our flight, and waited until nearly 2. Nobody answered at the door or on the phone. Eventually someone who works in another business in the same building came to the door and said that they had been there but left at 10am! He tried various numbers to get hold of someone with no luck. He took our SA mobile number and said he would pass it onto them on Monday. Nobody called.

Have any of you seen this!
PDA software

It seems that this software can be used on any mobile that has Windows Mobile operating system. My SO says phones on the SA market that has this, includes I-Mate and HP Ipaq (unfortunately comes with a hefty price tag ).
This is truly amazing. Here are some extracts from their website:

Just received this new software notification. All looks good.

Dynamic Pocket Solutions.

you can also get it in England
Software on 128Mb SD Card £79.95 UK & EU
Non EU £68.00

http://www.wildsounds.co.uk/

go to search and type ebirds
and click on eBirds: Birds of Southern Africa for Pocket PC v2

take care

My question is whether the PDA software works on all PDAs? I gather that there are differences between the Palm and the HP PDAs in terms of OS and what software they can run?

I am looking to buy a Palm Treo with combines a PDA and a cell phone and seems a preactical solution for my needs. I would be interested in some of the software packages if they can be run on a Palm PDA.

So far I haven't been able to figure this out for myself, probably because I still know very little about PDAs

I was seriously thinking about buying a PDA, but with the advances in cellphones, (bigger screens and taking 512mb multi media cards), I think PDA's will be overtaken by cellphones pretty soon. j-ms has already loaded our bird calls on his cell, which is what we wanted from the PDA.

Can you use GPS software on mobile phone's yet? This is one of my favorite uses of my PDA.

I don't think I'd like to have everything on a mobile. I'd worry too much about being mugged whilst using it for a telephone call, or leaving it somewhere! At least with a PDA, you can keep it hidden when you're not using it, and you can back everything up from your phone just in case it does get stolen.

I just get the feeling that Symbian OS on mobile phones has gained such a footprint so quickly and is attracting such a large pool of developers (especially Java developers) that Palm OS is going to lose out.

Youngsters have become used to the two thumbs keyboards of mobile phone that any advantages that the stylus approach that Palm uses has been lost. In fact, we have a friend who desperately wants a mobile phone type keyboard for his PC because it is more natural for him than a QWERTY keyboard.

This software is the latest offering from Dynamic Pocket Solutions, the company which recently released the SANParks Kruger National Park software reviewed by myself and DinkyBird on this forum.

Like the SANParks software, this guide is multifunctional and enables the user to ID trees using a number of criteria, as well as to log sightings using GPS and find out more about uses of the tree and its various components. The guide covers 300 trees (as per the Briza book), so is not comprehensive, however provides a wealth of useful information in a very handy package.

The format of the guide will be familiar to anyone who has used the animal guide in the SANParks software. From the main menu, selecting “Reference Guideâ€Â

We received the sasol e-bird software yesterday
and it's looks very nice
the pic's are nice and also the sounds is great
and its works very easy

It's also nice to be able to export your sightings log to your pc as a permanent record.

I just bought version 2 of the Roberts PDA software. I haven't had much time to play with it yet, but it looks great. There is a feature to assist with identification that seems useful - once I've figured out exactly how to use it. I'll post a review once I've used it more.