Tomeraider review

Dave Oliver

We review ebook reader Tomeraider

Published on Jul 13, 2009

Amazon's Kimble may have been grabbing the headlines of late, but there are lots of ebook readers available – and Windows Mobile users don't have to buy any new hardware to get 'em.

TomeRaider uses the company's own TR3 format but it does give you access to over 4,000 books from the TomeRaider site, including a few notable exclusives such as Wikipedia (the full version – more than 1GB and counting) and IMDB's mammoth film encyclopaedia.

Other top titles include the Bible, the Koran and the World Fact Book, though quite what the demand is for the Belgian postcode directory is anyone's guess. There's also a smattering of classic novels and travel guides.

We tried the latest Tomeraider 3 (they're clearly not so bookish that they're unaware of the similarity of their name to a certain action game franchise) and used it on an Acer M900 touchscreen smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.1.

There are three user interfaces to choose from: native, full screen and skinned. The native or classic version has a menu bar with some rather dated looking graphics; the full screen version is just that, except for a small sliver of a control bar on the right-hand side with options to skip between pages, scroll up or down or go to the menu. The skinned version was our favourite though, with themed buttons and colour scheme throughout.

It allowed us to swap between portrait and landscape modes simply by turning the handset on its side, which came in handy with texts containing pictures. You can choose from a variety of fonts, text sizes and even colours, and there's the option to turn on Clear Type which can help with legibility.

The search feature is excellent, allowing you to scan for multiple word associations throughout the text, and you can add bookmarks which show up in a list so you can find them easily later to pick up where you left off. You can also add reference notes.

The scrolling wheel on our M900 came in particularly handy here, though it was no trouble to brush the screen up and down to find our way around the pages. It's a shame it doesn't allow you to skip through pages by brushing your finger across the screen, which would be a more intuitive way of doing it, rather than trying to pinpoint the rather small next page control buttons.

Tomeraider is a useful little reader with an interesting catalogue of titles (Wikipedia and IMDB could swing it for many people), but it means paying £15 for material that's available for free online.