Part 1 of the review | Reviews Home | Communicator Home

The Edit menu shows support for copying and pasting, as well as the find tool mentioned earlier. Unfortunately because the 9210 does not have a touchscreen selecting limited text is not possible, but the author may come up with a way round this.

The view menu allows you to toggle between the page view (looking at the document) and the bookmark view. You can also select whether to show the top title bar.

In settings you can choose various settings about the document. For example in render you can select whether to show text and line drawings. You can also opt to have images outlined, on or off. Turning any of these options off speeds up rendering of the document, especially for images.

The Zoom submenu allows you to select a specific zoom setting via a dialog or use the zoom in or out option to use zoom controls more quickly. You also have an option to use a width setting which allows the document to take up the maximum possible width of the screen. Below we can see the document has been zoomed to 50% of its size and this can be used to give an overview of the document.

The full screen option shown in operation below allows maximum space to be devoted to the document and thus less scrolling around is needed. The menu is still available to access many commands.

The Go menu contains many navigation controls for quickly getting around the document. These include first page, previous page, next page, last page, and the goto page dialog.

The tools menu allows access to the Preferences dialog and allows column mode to be switched on and off. Column mode is used when a PDF file has columns of text and allows each column to be view separately. The About screen and Help file will also be available from here in the final release.

Preferences is similar to settings although it contains all of the program configurable settings (allowing you to choose the default view for example). You can see here it is also possible to rotate the document (useful for those file printed at 90 degrees or if you want to the machine like a book). You can also choose whether to show links and whether to show everything as black text (easier on the eye in multi coloured documents!). You can also choose to display embedded fonts if applicable.

Pdf+ is a most remarkable application, mBrainSoftware have produced the definitive PDF reader for the EPOC platform. It great to see it make the jump to the 9210 so early and I know it will become and indenspensible tool for many people. It does it job very well rendering all the files I tried accurately and fast, what more can you ask for. With support for bookmarks and printing and many other features is is the best PDF reader for PDA's and as good as Acrobat Reader for Windows. It takes the 9210 one step closer to being the ultimate mobile office.

The greatest compliment that I can pay it should and is good enough to be included in the ROM of future machines, or at the very least on the CD that comes with machine. Pdf+ is expected to be between £15 and £20 although this does depend on location. While it is still going through the testing phase you can expect it to be released in its final version soon.

The support provided is excellent and I know from experience that the author is always quick to respond by e-mail, both in taking on board suggestions for future development and for helping with problems.

I also had a brief exchange with the author having written this review. It should be emphasized that there are changes planned and features to be added, particularly in relation to navigation shortcuts and selecting of text. The main issues for the author to consider when porting was the lack of a touchscreen. These have been solved successfully and re still be worked on (e.g. using Tab to follow links within a document). There is a possibility that there will be a reduced charge for upgraders from the ER5 version, but to be honest this is such a powerful program no one should think anything of paying the registration fee (around £15-20) again. I suspect that there won't be many people in this category in any case. I also commented on what to my mind were strange UI implementations (e.g. the lack of a close command), this is partly me being bought up on ER5's interface, but partly because the Nokia style guide is slightly different. In order to get maximum exposure it is necessary to follow these guidelines and after all it is what people using the software will come to expect.

Once again I would say that this a review / preview of a beta version of the program. There are likely to be considerable changes (improvements!) before the program is released.

Update:
Pdf+ has now been released, there is a trial version on the mBrainSoftware website. Although there have been some chnages these have only been improvements. I am now able to rate the program:

With a rating of 94% the program gets an All About ER6 Premier Program Award.