Wednesday 28 January 2009

Mobile readers


Uing the T-Mobile G1 as an eBook reader


by Chris Gampat posted on January 27, 2009 11:39 am

Recently, a company name atrus123 started to release eBooks for the G1 via the Android App Market. I downloaded Dracula and Alice in Wonderland the other day for a test drive to see how they work and how the G1 functions as an eBook reader.

The G1 works out to be an excellent e-book reader on low power settings providing that you keep your finger on the screen and read fast (or set it to not time out.) The text looks great, even better than E-Ink. Users may set the size of the text depending on their preference. With a dimmed screen, text is still very readable.


Users can always keep their power management settings optimized for reading, but their battery may not last long enough to do other things like making a call. In this case, turning off Wifi, 3G, Bluetooth, and GPS could work to the user’s advantage.


Turning pages is as easy as flicking your finger across the arrows along the bottom of the screen. There is even a sound built in for pages being turned. This can be turned on or off. Don’t flick through pages too quickly though as the app may crash your G1 or make it force quit.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to turn the page without using the touchscreen although scrolling through pages can be done with the ball. Users will get a different experience opening up the keyboard and reading the books horizontally. It’s not quite as nice as reading it vertically, but it does allow a user to pause for a longer period of time without having to scroll down often.
Whenever you exit the app and restart the book, you can immediately pick back up from where you were as the app remembers where you left off. This is nice when you need to switch back and forth between IMs, email, or browsing the web if you’d like to look a word up. If not, the books have a table of contents and you can select whatever page you would like to view. Additionally, users can share their opinions about the book with other users.
It’s not all perfect though, the app can be slow to load at times and also can be laggy. Android may also force quit the app at any time for no real reason.


It is extremely pleasing to use the G1 as an eBook reader though, if it is plugged in then users can get even more power to their screen without having to worry about draining battery.
I’m not sure if this is a problem with the touchscreen or the app, but sometimes scrolling through a page can be a pain to do. The app (or the screen) doesn’t always seem to be very responsive. My guess would be that it is the app as it can be faulty at times.
The main drawback to using your G1 as an eBook reader is (as I’ve mentioned) battery drainage. It isn’t terrible, but if you’re using the power manager app you’ll steadily start to see the power level go down.


There are only three eBooks out at the time of writing this article for the G1: Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, and Call of the Wild. All of these books are public domain, so that means that more public domain titles should be coming to the G1. As far as other books go, we have yet to see if they will be available for download in the App Market as the market only allows for free downloads.


Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor
 

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