The Digital Reader

I came across another reader app for the iPhone. It was developed by a company called dBelement, and it’s their 10th app for the iPhone.

I don’t think it’s all that good as a reader app. The dBelement reader only supports PDF and TXT, and repeatedly choked on the PDFs I tried to read. The only features it supports are font size, dictionary lookup, auto-scrolling, and bookmarks.

But I will say that it has a couple rather neat details, even though one is limited to subscribers only. If you set up an account  with the developers website, you can upload files and access them from your iPhone. The first 2 are free, and if you want to upload more it will cost you $9 for a 6 month subscription. I really don’t see why anyone would bother; there are better reader apps out there.

The other interesting detail is how the app is installed. It’s not available through the App Store. In order to download it you have to navigate to the developer’s website and click on a link. dBelement has figured out some way to bypass the installation restrictions Apple has placed on the iPhone. Now that’s rather interesting; I haven’t seen it before.

Really, the only people who should get this app are those who want to duplicate the installation method.