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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Does a good PDF reader for Android exist?



I want to get an Android tablet. I've been looking at the Notion Ink Adam for months now. I think it looks like the strongest Android tab to hit the market in the near future.

Last month I was given an iPad as a gift. Despite it's lack of Flash, multi tasking (which I hear is being fixed this week?), and all the other goodness found in Android, the iPad does most of what I want, very well thanks to the apps.

One of the things I do is read a lot of PDF e-books. Mostly stuff like Adobe documentation or text books with a pdf version on the companion CD. The iPad does this well, even the free iBooks app which is what I use most makes reading PDFs a treat.

On my Droid X I've tried a few readers, including Adobe's official reader, and from my experience... they all kind of stink.

Adobe's official reader is pretty good for small documents. It's quick and smooth but doesn't remember where I left or allow me to even set a bookmark which is a problem with 600 page e-books.

Beam reader trial just seems clumsy. It would rather bounce at the bottom of the page than continue to the next one. In text view you can't even get to the next page by flicking. There seems to be some sort of glitch in PDF view where the pages that were loaded into memory already start to look like TV static. It does seem to remember what page you exited on though. The $10 price tag seems high to me as well considering the bugs.

The quick office reader seems pretty OK. The bookmarks let you easily jump to chapters and you can manually input the page but it doesn't remember what page you exited on or allow you to create a bookmark.

There are some other pay options but I can't see paying for an app that may not work. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind buying apps, but I do mind buying apps that don't work. At some point I'd like to start developing for the Android so this would be a good project but until then, anyone have any input? Loading the last page read is a huge thing for me.


3 comments:

  1. Yey, friend!

    I just have installed two:
    - vudroid
    - adobe reader.

    Both remember the page and save a list of files. Try!
    Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Have you found anything regarding this? I have the same issue with a hacked nook.

    ReplyDelete
  3. On another forum someone said, "I think your wanting a ereader that reads PDF's Wordplayer is one that i use on my EVO as well as Zinio and Kobo. There are a couple of others out there but I haven't tried them."

    I haven't tried them though.
    GL

    ReplyDelete