Mazingo RIP

[Dave]

Mazingo has decided enough is enough and cannot continue it's service due to costs outweighing the money they are bringing in with subscriptions. This is another big spotlight pointed on the FREE internet. There's nothing free anymore, people can't offer anything for free and not have costs behind it that need to be picked up as many of you have seen recently with Pocket GPS and our adverts we have introduced. The statement from Mazingo reads..."Mazingo would like to thank everyone who has been involved with developing and using the Mazingo service. Regrettably, the service can no longer be offered due to the cost of content versus the revenue derived. "

The only offline reader now will be AvantGo Custom Channels, but I suspect most people are probably using GPRS connected mobiles now to surf the web when on the move.

[Dave]

I started using Mazingo in the very early beta's before it went public, and Mazingo although it did have it's ups and downs with very buggy code, providing you knew how to overcome this, it was a great service. TBH I haven't used Mazingo over the past year, my life style with Pocket GPS has changed and my hectic lifestyle has very little time left, even my ebook reading I used to love on a daily basis has gone out the window, and I'm lucky to get to read a chapter a week.

Mazingo was always plagued with long download times for little content, most of this was down to the files it was writing to disk not clearing up after themselves and the client getting very confused and sending itself into loops. Providing you wiped your Mazingo directory prior to each download you were okay, but still on broadband connection speeds, Mazingo seemed to crawl. I can see why AvantGo imposed a 2mb limit on personal channels, this wasn't only to protect them, but it was to protect yourself. My average Mazingo download was in the region of 30mb a day, and at best it would take about an hour to download. Most of the content hadn't been updated when I downloaded on a daily basis, so I was just wasting time downloading the content again.

It's a shame, Mazingo had a bright future, and the subscription based service was a way forward, and I had subscribed for a year, getting the comics under the subscription services was worth the money, but it seems that Mazingo couldn't get enough subscriptions in to pay for their running costs.

Mazingo are offering up the code for anyone to make it a going concern, I wonder if someone's going to come up with a better service ?

[Cessquill]

I'd used it a couple of times, but it had too much of an american bias for it to be anything more than a bit of a novelty. The first time I sync'd with it, my storage card filled up with trailors from Sony.

I still use Avantgo (although that seems to be getting slower), since GPRS is still a little expensive and slow.

Roll on wireless networking providers...

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