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.

You’ve all heard of Moore’s law haven’t you? You haven’t?? Really???… Well I’m going to tell you anyway. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that could be squashed onto one single chipset doubles every two years or so. So that means our computers are getting twice as fast every two years. That is more or less truthful. After the Gigahertz race a couple of years ago everything capped out at around 3.6Ghz (A couple hundred megahertz more or less). Then started the multi-core race. Normal personal computers went from having single core processors to dual cores quad cores or even six cores in a very short time. Intel and AMD are in a neck to neck race to make the fastest processor. Maybe not neck to neck exactly. But AMD is keeping a close distance behind to give Intel enough competition to keep them on their feet. These days its hard to find someone with a single core machine.

Meanwhile RAM took its own course. While more and more memory was fitted into a single chip memory became more and more cheaper. Computers that used to hold 256MB or 512MB of memory suddenly had 1 GB, 2 GB or upwards of 4 GB of memory with the power of 64-bit processors and operating systems. Almost every operating system in the world today offer 64-bit versions. Most probably you would not see the next generation of operating systems in 32-bit versions.

Meanwhile internet speeds got a speed boost as well. While more and more computers are connected to the internet broadband internet connections have become commonplace. Wireless hotspots everywhere and wireless broadband or HSDPA technology is covering everywhere making sure you’re connected everywhere you go. And that’s at blisteringly fast speeds too. Every new mobile phone supports 3G speeds and touch screens which brings the world right to your fingertips wherever you go. Newer mobile phones are faster than early pentium class computers. Making them potentially as powerful as computers giving them abilities far beyond the original mobile phones ever dreamed of. (such as typing this blog post while going in the bus, say )

What does all this mean?

Computers are getting faster and cheaper right before our eyes. So that must mean we’re getting our work faster right? Right??

That’s where Wirth’s law comes in. I’ll get to that in a minute.

While all this was happening in the hardware field lets take a look at what’s happening in the software field. In the early days computers were ridiculously expensive. That made programmers write code that was optimized as to use all the juice a computer can provide as efficiently as possible. But now hardware is so cheap its a waste of the programmers time to spend optimizing code. If the code won’t run on the current system the solution is to throw faster hardware at it. Its easier for everyone. Because hardware is cheap and programmers are expensive.

Now we’ll get to Wirth’s law. He states that while hardware is getting faster, software is getting slower at even a higher rate. Modern software can bring even the most powerful computer to its knees. (case and point : Windows Vista). Gaming companies are throwing out games that require ridiculously high end hardware to play them on. Web sites went from being simple web sites to being complex web applications. Gone are the days web pages were designed with simple HTML. Now they’re loaded with Flash, Javascript. Ajax and god knows what else. Meaning they need more and more bandwidth.

So where does all this lead us? We’re paying for newer hardware every year or two and paying even more for extremely expensive software. In the end we have to ask ourselves what do we ultimately achieve from all this? Are you doing the same things you did on the old Pentium a few years back with your current Core 2 Duo PC with Windows Vista?

Technology is improving. No doubt about that. But are we, the general consumers, really moving forward?