PDFViewer Application for the iPhone Reviewed

The iPhone has a nice big screen so it was quite a surprise to see that Apple provided no native PDF viewing application. However, there is an App called ‘PDFViewer’ in the Installer by thebigboss.org which allows you to view your PDFs on your iPhone. So we went to give it a try.

Downloading and installing the package is as simple as always through the installer and finished with a message telling you: ‘Please place all PDF files in /var/root/Media/PDF’. So that means you need to find a way to get the PDF files onto the iPhone.

PDF files can be easily transferred within a Windows PC using a free program called WinSCP. This program lets you drag and drop PDF files onto your iPhone using a standard Windows folder view interface. Once you have downloaded WinSCP you will need to logon to your iPhone through your PC.

So the first thing we need to know is the IP address for your iPhone. This can be found under Settings> Wi-Fi. Click the little blue arrow beside your active Wi-Fi network and you will go to a new screen giving you further information about your network including your IP Address.

Enter this IP Address into your WinSCP program alongside the username of root and password of alpine. Click login to logon to your iPhone and navigate to /var/root/Media/PDF. We found here that we needed to create the Media and PDF directories ourselves. This PDF folder is where you will need to drag and drop your PDF documents into.

To test out this PDF reader app for the iPhone, we dropped the 3.88Mb iPhone User Guide PDF by Apple onto the iPhone PDF directory to see how well this app worked. By choosing the new PDFViewer icon on the home screen we go to a screen listing the avilable PDF’s and the iPhone User Guide was one of them.

We were impressed by how quickly the 3.88MB PDF loaded up. The quality seems very good and you can zoom in to a level that suits you using the normal two finger swipe. You page back and page forward are handy too and it runs very quick although it is a shame none of the other buttons worked yet (zoom and thumbnail page view) although you have to keep in mind that this is still a beta release.

Having browsed the web quite often and finding ourselves tilting the iPhone to get landscape mode, the biggest dissapointment we found with this app was the inability to view the PDFs in landscape mode. There are no options othe than using this in portrait mode. Hopefuly we will see this capability added in at a later date. Overall, if you a after a PDF viewer and don’t mind viewing in portrait mode only then we think you’ll be happy with this great little app. We however are going to hold out for a viewer that allows landscape viewing.

Our Verdict: 3 out of 5