I recently fell in love with Foxit’s free pdf reader. It sits on my desktop, takes up very little room and starts almost immediately. Added to the package is the brilliantly handy pdf-download Firefox extension, and I am a happy little vegemite. (For my non-Australian friends, that is very happy indeed.)

Now based on all of this, I had a great thought today. My life would be complete if only the Foxit people made a pdf reader for my Pocket PC! I would be able to ditch the bloated, over blown Acrobat and live happily ever after with a small, efficient mobile pdf reader. So I wandered over the the Foxit people, and checked out their site (just on the off chance that the Gods were smiling, of course). And guess what?

Foxit Reader for Windows Mobile.

Woohoo! Wait. Damn. Not quite as free as the Windows version. Double damn. No pricing on their website yet. But wait. Free evaluation…

Downloaded. Copied. Installed…? Yep. Simple transfer of the .exe file, double click and off we go. As far as I can see the only limitation to the evaluation is the great big red ‘For Evaluation Only’ and copyright text superimposed over your document. Now this isn’t a bad thing, per se, as I don’t do a lot of reading in pdf on my Pocket PC, and it is really only the very occasional document I need to view. But this could be something that irritates others. Oh, and when you go to open a document, it gives you a little evaluation message there. Having said that, I’d assume that these two things would disappear once you had paid for the proper licence.

Only other thing I can see about it is that I saved the program to my SD card, and it seems to only look on the SD card for documents. Not so good if you happen to store your documents in the ‘Built in Storage’ section for safekeeping. Again, this may be something that can be overcome with a more thorough exploration.

But on the whole, I like this. For the rare time when I want a pdf document open on my PPC, this will do the trick nicely. Probably not for the power user (in Evaluation mode, anyway) but small and fast. My only wish at this point would be the ability to customise the zoom on the document; I found it difficult to get a good window on the text without moving my scroll bars too much, while still being able to see the words easily. But on the whole, this is pretty minor for my usage.

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