What’s this? Has NokNok turned into the London Review of Books? Ah, well, no – we haven’t decided to review Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as a book. We think that particular area has probably been covered. No, we just thought that this would be as good a moment as any to take a look at Offscreen Technology’s line of ebooks for Symbian S60 5th Edition smartphones. With that in mind, find out how well ‘A Christmas Carol’ review reads on our Nokia N97…

Amazingly (especially given the size of the screen), there isn’t a decent general-purpose text reader app for the Nokia N97 or Nokia 5800. This is especially tragic given that there are literally thousands of public domain books, poems and plays out there thanks to sites like Project Gutenberg. One glimmer of hope comes in the form of Offscreen’s range of ebooks which takes these free classics and gives them a sprinkle of S60 fairy dust to turn them into standalone applications.

Firing up the app shows you a title page – a bitmap of a brown ‘leather effect’ book cover bearing the title and author and a little copyright info (for the app, not the book). Give it a tap and you drop straight into page one, rendered in a serif font that looks appropriately old-fashioned if nothing else. The text is clear and readable, although the size and font are fixed with no option to adjust.

Pages are ‘turned’ (actually, scrolled right-left with a pleasingly smooth animation) with a tap, although if you prefer to ‘flick’ as you might on Certain Other mobile operating systems then that seems to work too. You can also jump to chapters by sliding a very thin scroll bar along the bottom of each page, which pops up a speech bubble showing the current chapter when touched. The only other controls are an X to exit in the top-right and a chapter index icon in the top-left.

Its all very simple, as it should be. No bookmarking is on offer, but the ‘book’ will remember where you are when you quit, which is almost as good.

Offscreen has done a decent job here – not perfect, but certainly adequate and for a freebie you can’t really complain. It does beg the question though – where is the general-purpose ebook reader app? It would be pretty simple for Offscreen to extend their ebook apps so they could read any TXT (or HTML even) file you throw at them so why not? We would even pay for it – consider our ebook whistle well and truly whetted.

Details
Size: 0.39 MB
Price: Free
DOWNLOAD: A Christmas Carol

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