Read any document on your Pocket PC? No way - or perhaps there is, as Mike reports ...

I recently installed Pocket Informant on my PPC and put the reference pdf document on as a help guide, the in-built PPC pdf viewer wouldn't read the document so I installed Acrobat reader for PPC. Besides Adobe having a larger foot-print on the PPC, the reflow technology in it wouldn't work with the PI guide document - this made reading the document a nightmare, to get the text large enough to read, I had to scroll each line left to right, even in rotated mode. Not so in RepliGo - the document flowed sweetly down the screen in any one of the five font sizes I chose, the irony of it all!

The one thing I would like to see (literally!) in flow mode in the viewer would be images or even image markers. In both zoom mode and full screen mode the images are visible but not in flow mode. I can understand that the image positioning might not be perfect but just to know roughly where it would be (as a thumbnail perhaps) would be superb. The PI manual would have been even more readable in flow mode, without having to flick back to zoom mode to see the images.

If you're wondering why you would use the reader for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Web pages when these are all natively supported by the PPC, the answer is three-fold. Firstly, the RepliGo documents are generally much smaller than the originals thus saving valuable space on the PPC. Secondly, the PPC versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint have very reduced functionality. Complex documents become much simpler in content when converted from their PC counterparts which could result in the documents losing their meaning when put on the PPC, whereas the RepliGo verisons retain their full glory. Finally webpages, well they simply come across as one nice neat simple document, no messing round making sure all the images are in the cache and as easily viewed full screen and rotated as the rest.

The big question has to be whether RepliGo can challenge the Adobe monopoly. I know there are pdf printer drivers out there and, though I've used them occasionally from code, I couldn't really say how well they will handle all the tested formats; there are also other methods for producing pdf's without using Adobe software.

I liked RepliGo - it is quick and easy to use and makes the task of reading documents on the PPC very simple -it is also far less resource hungry, the RepliGo files being far smaller than the source, including the pdf's. I've tended to steer clear of Acrobat and readers in general in the past but I think I may be inclined to give them a second look now , but using RepliGo - after all, a little competition is healthy for the market!

Mike gives RepliGo for PPC 1.2 an 8/10

( You can win a copy of RepliGo in the Smartfone.net Wacky Picture Phone Contest! )