Shelf Life

The Good:
Since I don’t have a data plan with AT&T for my Blackberry the most important feature for an e-book reader for me is the ability to download e-books to my computer and send them to the phone. Mobipocket does that very well. You can browse several e-book stores and a large collection of free news feeds from the desktop and you can set it up to automatically push content to the phone when it is docked.

The app is free, which is another good thing. The books however are not. Current titles are priced like audiobooks, which is to say expensive. A recent release science fiction novel cost me $24.00. There are free downloads of books out of copyright available through one of the Mobipocket stores but modern books are going to cost you.

Navigation is fairly simple and the program responds pretty quickly. That makes reading easier. You can set colors and font size and there are several pre-sets for quickly changing the screen if ambient conditions change.

The Bad:
Navigating the stores could be easier. There is a keyword search but the categories are overly broad and there is no breakdown into sub categories so you may end up having to go through dozens of screens to find what you want.

Menu navigation is not entirely intuitive. Making a book mark is easy but it took a little fiddling to figure out how to get back to it (bookmarks are kept in an “annotations” list).

The Ugly:
The program can’t find the SD card in my phone so it is using main memory which cannot hold much. I have e-mailed support but have not heard anything. If this problem isn’t resolved quickly I will have to find another reader.

By Mr. Doyle

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