Ramblings of an Internetaholic

For a long time I’ve been used to reading ebooks from my phone. Its a lot easier than carrying around heavy books with me and I can always read the current book I’m reading during my free time no matter where I am.

I’ve always been a Nokia Symbian Series 60 fan and I’ve used the free Mobipocket reader to read ebooks. Up till the end of last week I’ve been using a Nokia N95 8GB but traded that in for a Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic for the bigger display that would mean I can read books more comfortably. But to my disappointment what do I find? Mobipocket reader doesn’t support the Symbian S60 5th Edition (that means the touch enabled version). – Insert long rant to Amazon with a lot of profanity for acquiring Mobipocket and cutting the development of it because it directly competes with their Kindle reader here — I managed to install Mobipocket on this phone despite the incompatibility warning and found that I can work with it with a few sacrifices. Because its not designed for a touchscreen when I switch to the fullscreen mode there’s no way to switch back. But because I couldn’t find a better alternative I sighed and settled for what I had.

And today while I was dejectedly still looking for an alternative ebook reader I stumbled across this article. It seems lots of other people had the same problem I had. And going through the comments what do I find none other than ZXReader (Translated version here). At first I was dubious whether to try this even. The website was completely Russian and looked dodgy. Anyway I decided to download the latest beta release of the software and installed it. And let me tell you, it was beyond my wildest expectations. This little piece of software could blow Mobipocket reader and any other reader in existence right out of the water. The following is a short review of ZXReader.

ZXReader is basically a text reader. But with a lot of customization options to suit your liking giving you the best reading experience. Along with all the features of Mobipocket like changing text colour, size and background colour, ZXReader also gives options to control screen brightness for the program only (very useful), finger scrolling, screen zones for tap navigation and text antialiasing. Yes, you saw that right. It has antialiasing.

All right. Enough with the words. Here are a few screenshots of the program in action taken on my 5800 Xpressmusic.

Portrait View

The little green book at the bottom is the menu button. There’s a progress bar at the bottom showing page number and percentage of the book being read. Also displays the time and the battery level at the bottom right hand corner. Sweet!

Screen Options 1

Screen Options 2

Text Options

Style Options

Control Options

Library Options

Download ZXReader for Symbian S60 5th Edition
Other versions download here. (Scroll to the bottom of the page)

Note: ZXReader also works well in landscape mode. Unfortunately my screen capture program doesn’t like me taking screenshots in landscape mode. I’ll upload a landscape screenshot if I can get it working.

If this post helped you in anyway don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.