RepliGo Reader for BlackBerry Smartphones

"It's like Adobe® Reader® for your BlackBerry!"

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. This file format, created by Adobe Systems, dates back to 1993. So after 16 years, it's safe to say we've all stumbled across at least a couple (thousand) PDFs. Look at the name again, the P in particular, P for portable. With devices such as our BlackBerrys, portable information has become part of our everyday lives. When we were given applications such as Word To Go, a new world opened up for me. I was equally excited with Sheet and Slideshow. A solution for PDFs seemed to elude me, I simply wasn't able to view them just right.

RepliGo Reader allows you to view native PDF files, in desktop-like style, which are stored on your Berry or Media Card. Rewind back to WES 2008, and head to booth #601. For those who attended WES 2008 (lucky buggers), you may have caught a glimpse of RepliGo Reader. If you haven't seen the application yet, now's the time; RepliGo Reader is currently in version 1.1. This version boasts a few new features, let's have a look.

A brief look behind RepliGo Reader

RepliGo Reader is brought to you by Cerience Corporation, a BlackBerry Alliance Member. Since being founded in 2000, they have provided BlackBerry users with mobile document solutions, both for enterprises and consumers. RepliGo Reader is but a portion of their amazing RepliGo platform.

The View

RepliGo Reader currently supports the Storm, Bold, Curve (83xx and 89xx series), Pearl (81xx and 82xx series), the 88xx series and 8700 series and the 88xx series.

Why have PDFs on the go? Countless reasons come to mind. There are PDFs for almost everything, travel brochures, company overviews, and more. Download the PDFs now and read them later.

Before we get into the application, I have to point out that the RepliGo icon looks very similar to the icons for Word, Slideshow and Sheet To Go. I moved RepliGo over to the Applications folder, so it will feel right at home.

just one of the gang

The quality of the PDFs I've viewed is amazing, the clarity and vivid colours immediately stood out. Some PDFs did take a minute to load and optimize, but the results are worth the wait. What you first see is the Page View, where the PDF is shown in its original, Whole Page, form. The quality can't really be seen in this view, but you have a few options. RepliGo has multiple zooming levels, from the Page View, Page Width, all the way up to 300%. Another zooming option let's you zoom in on a specific section of the PDF. Use the trackball to scroll through highlighted sections in Page View, once you find a section of interest, then go through the previously mentioned zoom options.

oooo...pretty...

You can also switch from Page View to Reading View. In Reading View, RepliGo's page recognition technology trims the page's content down into a single column, for easy reading and less zooming.

RepliGo Reader helps you find specific text within the PDF. In the menu, choose Find and in the Pop Up, type in what you want to find, choosing to match case or the whole
word only. The search results will be highlighted in green, and you can choose skip to the next result if there are multiple entries found. If you have large PDFs in hand, they may contain bookmarks, which RepliGo can help you use to navigate through the document.

use the Find feature to jump to any relevant information

While impressed with RepliGo Reader on my Bold, I have seen it being used on a Storm or two. All I can say is wow, well, that and hurry up and roll out Storms for the rest of us!

Conclusion

With only the time taken to load and optimize PDFs as the only downfall, I highly recommend giving RepliGo Reader a look. It offers more zoom options and more font support than other applications out there. I was glad to see the ability to switch from Page View and Reader view, giving you access to easy to read content. I'm definitely hanging onto this application. Cerience offers a free 10 day trial for RepliGo Reader and, once you are sold, pick up the application for $19.95.

For more information on RepliGo Reader, check out www.cerience.com.

Pros