Russell Beattie

Yeah! I downloaded this free doc reader yesterday called ReadM and it rocks. I can't believe it's free because it's so great and so polished. It has all the features you want in an ebook reader. It'll read text files, zip files, Palm Doc files AND it'll play MP3s (which is weird, but it's in there to support Audio Books). It even comes with a well written PDF help file. It's just amazing.

The features are great: It allows you to have a library of documents to choose from, create bookmarks, highlight text in various colors, add annotations, copy, search and it allows you to flip the screen 90 degrees and change the font and style. It scrolls when you're reading by whole screens which is nice as well (it doesn't seem like a feature, but after reading using Doris and NetFront, it's a real bonus). What else? Oh - you can autoscroll the text as well, in case you don't feel like clicking to flip the page. Can I gush more?

The screenshot above doesn't do the app justice, really. First, you can change the type to a smaller version which puts A LOT more text on the screen. And you can flip the screen to read at 208 pixels which is a sufficiently comfortable size for reading in my experience. If the screen was only physically bigger, reading on the 7650 would actually be much better than reading on most Palms - especially since it has a backlight (which you can set to not turn off - or to turn off after 5 minutes) and color.

I loaded the app up on my 7650 last night (it's 123kb) and then grabbed an old Douglas Adams Restaurant at the End of the Universe .txt file I had hanging around, I formatted it for the Palm using a DocMaker into a 160kb PRC and used GZip (WinZip isn't supported) to zip it down to 110kb. Both worked fine without problems, which is great, because I've got some more Palm books around here. If only I could extract the Peanut Press (now Palm Media) books that I've purchased! I still haven't read one of them!

The only problem I found was that when I send the books to my phone, the email app wouldn't detach the files because it doesn't detect the MIME type correctly. There's a work around on his site, but I can't understand just yet how to get it to work. Since I have the PC File Manager, in theory I should just be able to copy the text document where I want it and work around all this OBEX transfer to Inbox to ReadM... but I can't figure out where the saved text files go! I've spent the last 15 minutes searching every single folder on the phone, so I'll have to work this out a bit. So the only way to read the doc is to save the OBEX message into another mailbox folder and ReadM detects it in there and will open it for you. Obviously I haven't grokked all of my 7650s file system mojo just yet. ;-)

Anyways, if you have a Series 60 phone, this is definitely to be on the list.

-Russ