Oh, Mobipocket! For those of you who don’t know, Mobipocket or Mobireader (as the application is called) is the reason I got involved with S60 in the first place, it is also one of my favorite applications on any of my devices. I use it to read casual ebooks, and I have also invested over 190$ in medical ebooks that are one of my main medical information gateways on S60. But unfortunately, this more-than-awesome freeware application has been lagging for ages: it hasn’t been updated for S60 since 2007, when I still had my Nokia 3250.
All About Symbian’s Steve Litchfield who shares my passion for this jewel of an application, has written a post this week highlighting the uncertainty of Mobipocket’s reader application. The application works well on S60 3rd edition devices, it is also usable on S60 5th edition devices if it wasn’t for one bug: you go fullscreen and you can’t go back, which means you can’t access the Options anymore nor go back to the Library to choose another ebook. You have to uninstall-reinstall the application in order to revert back to the default view.
Another feature that has been sorely missing from Mobireader is the “Find” feature, and I know a lot of users agree with me on this. You can’t search for a certain word or phrase inside your ebooks. That’s rather annoying but, since we’re real Gurus here on the site, we have your solution. I have been testing a beta version of Mobireader for ages now, since June 2007 to be exact, but this new version was NEVER released. It was meant to be released a few weeks after I got it, but it wasn’t. And since Mobipocket themselves don’t seem too excited to do it, it’s only fair for all Mobipocket fans that I out this version myself now.
So what does this beta version have? It has all the features from the last Mobireader release (v5.3 build 576), but it adds a “Find” feature inside Options, that allows you to write a word and then cycle through all its occurrences in the current ebook. It also has one added shortcut: pressing 6 quickly allows you to bookmark/unbookmark a certain page. These are the only two additions I could find in this beta release, but they are really major ones. Here are two screenshots from the find feature:
Options – Find when reading an ebook
Find in action: notice the first word on the page is “Acetaminophen”,
the one I’m looking for. Also notice “Next” to cycle through other
occurrences and “Cancel” to go back to reading the ebook normally.
On the downside, I have noticed that this beta version seems to have problems integrating with .prc extensions on your device: on some of my devices .prc extensions will be recognized and will open inside Mobireader, on others you will have to manually import ebooks to the Ebooks folder on your phone memory or memory card, then you can only access them by opening Mobireader and clicking them in the Library. One important thing to add is that this being a beta version, it is unsigned. You will need to get a certificate, using these directions that we posted earlier, then you have to sign the application yourself for your device. That’s not cool, I know, but it’s the price to pay to finally have a complete version of the most awesome ebook reader application.
Finally, here it is: Mobireader’s latest unsigned S60 beta version with the Find feature courtesy of your humble Symbian-Guru servant. I’ll now cross fingers hoping that this won’t be the last version of Mobireader that we’ll be able to install on our devices.
