QUICK LOOK

• Android application
• Read ebooks on your Android
• Syncs with Kindle devices

When I was a little girl, I remember telling my mom I was going to grow up and be Beauty from Beauty and the Beast. Not because of all that la-la princess stuff, but because she got to live in a castle with the biggest library I’d ever laid my young eyes on. Now that I think about it, this may explain my preference for large, hirsute men that unfortunately persists to this day.

Being a lifelong bookworm who’s also far too busy for her own good, my life is an eternal quest to find more time and situations for reading. Audiobooks have turned driving time into reading time and the Kindle has meant that I no longer drag a warehouse worth of books with me on holiday. Now that I have my new, super-shiny Android, the quest is on to find a great ebook reader for my phone too, so that I can take better advantage of those spare 5 minute gaps standing in queues, sitting on the loo or waiting for meetings.

The Kindle for Android app is free to download from the Android marketplace. As one of the most popular Android ebook readers, it seemed a good place to start. The app goes quite a way to replicating the Kindle experience on your phone: you can do all the basics like resize the text (essential on small screens), tap the edge of the screen or press volume buttons to turn pages and search the text for keywords. You can also add bookmarks and make annotations.

It even offers some of the more advanced Kindle features like the ability to get definitions for words by clicking on them, just in case you happen to be reading James Joyce.

Even if your phone has a slightly bigger screen than my teensy-tiny Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro, you’re probably never going to want to read an entire novel on your phone, since you’d be reading it in 30-50 word chunks (unless you have a tablet device, of course). The Kindle app has kept this in mind by honing down the user interface and making everything light and quick to navigate. It also gives the reader a fair degree of customisability by allowing one to choose portrait or landscape views, background colours and fonts.

You don’t need to own a Kindle to use the app, but it certainly helps: the app’s magic is really in how it’s able to sync your phone experience with what you’re reading on your other Kindle devices. The app syncs with your account to make your entire Amazon library available on your phone, without you having to import anything. Even better, a fantastic feature called Whispersync keeps track of your place in each book so that you can swop from device to device seamlessly and pick up on the last page you read.

You can enter the Kindle store at the click of the button to buy more books. You can also get the usual one chapter samples from the store (I suppose you could hypothetically read nothing but these first chapters – it would be a real-life If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller…). However, the app doesn’t give much thought to cheapskates like me who like to download our ebooks for free: it’s difficult to transfer non-Amazon ebooks into the app’s library. It’s not impossible – it can be done with something like Astro File Manager but it’s not simple. Overall, the app is brilliant if you own a Kindle and buy your ebooks off the Amazon store, but if you don’t, there are better options out there.

Turn ons

• Syncs between your Kindle devices
• Allows you to customise your reading experience
• Clean layout

Turn offs

• Not great for non-Amazon ebooks
• No one wants to read on their phone for very long

Price: Free