I've got alot of ebooks that I woukd like to read on a portable device. So probably looking at a PDA. I am currently looking at a Palm lifedrive because they can display in ladnscape and seem reasonably cheap on ebay.

However abit of digging around and viewing PDFs on small devices isnt that straight-forward, many need to go through conversion, some cant handle graphics in the PDF etc., Im just after anyones experiences really.

Cheers

Gary

 

Can't be much help but there was an app written for the PSP which reads PDF's floating around. The source was included too if you wanted to have a play with it. PSP would be a good sized screen to read ebooks from. Otherwise Adobe do Acrobat Reader for Symbian OS, so you could read them on a Nokia N80 or similar.

 

Best thing would be a tablet PC, because you need the screen space. £££ though

Edit: ebook coverage here http://crunchgear.com/?s=ebook

 

http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/26/p...e-book-reader/

 

Have got the Adobe Acrobat reader installed on my PDA (M$ PocketPC 2003). Seems to work well enough.

 

My P990 phone does this - cracking screen too!

 

Palm's are great in my opinion. The following is one of the best PDF viewers for Palm and it's free (certainly better than the official Adobe offering)

http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/8...-1.1-released/

Also, if you get a later model Sony Clie, most come with Picsel and this views PDFs too. It was my favourite PDF viewer but you can't seem to buy Picsel seperately.

I had a Lifedrive and was disappointed. The 4GB built in a hard drive was good, but it wasn't very fast or stable. A T|X would be better with a large SD Card. However, if you can live without viewing PDFs and just want to view text and HTML then an old school Palm m500 (about £20 from eBay) + iSilo reader + 1GB SDCard will see you having a full library and hours of reading time between recharges. I've had the latest model PDAs (palm and Windows) and keep going back to my trusty m500.

Regards
James


Regards
James

 

Thanks guys, what Im primarily interested in is

a) Can I view a PDF in landscape mode and fit the page to the screen (no scrolling)
b) When I move through the document is the performance going to be acceptable?

Cheers

Gary

 

Picasa can do this with PDFs (look on eBay for Sony models TJ35, TJ37 and TH55). Performance is good as far as the TJ35's and TJ37's I had. Never had a TH55.

 

Thanks for all your advice.

In the end I went out and bought a HP iPaq 1950 and a 1GB SD card.

For viewing PDFs I got something called repligo which is absolutely superb. It has a feature called flow-text which if your doc has lots of pictures or diagrams isnt great as they get stripped out but it means it wraps the text to fit the screen and you can adjust font size etc and lets you view in either portrait or landscape, great piece of software. It can also convert any office document and webpages for optimum viewing.

Gary

 

I just upgraded my mobile to the Nokia N73 which has the capability to view Acrobat files, as well as MS Word / Excel docs too.

 

I use an old PowerBook G3 which has my electronic workshop manauals on for when I'm in the garage and it works a treat. Pick them up on ebay for about £50 and has a nice big screen too



AllanB