Adobe's PDF Reader app comes to Android phones

From CNET News.com: Amid the flurry of Android news as part of Google's annual I/O Conference last week, a news item that slipped through the cracks was that Adobe released a native PDF reading app for Android phones.

The software, which went up in the Android Marketplace Friday, lets users quickly open up PDFs they download from a browser, or that they've received in e-mail attachments. It packs multitouch gestures for zooming, landscape orientation, and a tool that will resize the text on wide documents to fit your phone's narrow screen.

After a quick spin with the software on a Nexus One, I found it to work quite well, even on large files. A 12MB, picture-rich PDF file I had downloaded in Android's stock browser opened up in just four seconds and zipped around like butter on a hot pan. Part of the reason for that is that the software only renders around four pages of a long document at a time, and will load in the rest when you stop. It's kind of a bummer when you imagine trying to use this to pinpoint a specific part of a document by sight, but for most other reading tasks it's no biggie.

The real downer is the lag that occurs when zooming, as it takes the software a second or two to re-render the text and images. This may not seem like a big deal, but it can be annoying when trying to peruse a large document that requires a lot of zooming around; media-rich PDFs seemed to aggravate this.

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