Dating Boot Camp is something new we’re trying: an entire book contained in an application! We partnered with Alpha Books, a subsidiary of Penguin USA, to bring the book Dating Boot Camp by Lisa Altalida to the Hiptop/Sidekick family of devices. All 270+ pages of the book are contained inside the downloadable application.

Dating Boot Camp’s intended audience is a woman who’s looking for a man. Of course, men certainly might enjoy reading what approaches women might be using….

After the splash screen:

The folder view of chapters lets us quickly navigate anywhere in the book:

Individual sections can be selected within each chapter:

Once inside the text of the book, page markers are indicated by the horizontal lines:

The page numbers inside the application correspond to the page numbers in the print version of the book.

The standard device navigation keys work, so menu-wheel, alt-up/down, send/end call, and @/space/. navigate like they do in many other applications. Scrolling down a bit to some book text:

The default font on Sidekick/Hiptop 2, 3, and iD devices is 9-point, but can be changed to 12-point for larger text:

LX & Slide devices have a wider selection of font sizes available–see below for more.

Some sections of the physical book have spaces to enter text with a pencil. These spaces are reproduced on the device with text fields where we can type:

Any text typed into these fields is saved. They can be cleared in bulk via the main menu of the application (Menu->Reset Book Progress).

We can also set bookmarks when we want to save something for later:

The bookmarks are available from any place within the book. A last-viewed bookmark is also available when we’re looking at the chapter folder view:

This location is saved, so we can jump back to our spot later on.

On Sidekick/Hiptop LX & Slide devices, the increased screen resolution really makes reading the book even nicer. The chapter list looks about the same:

The text of the book can be set to a range of font sizes:

So we can go from really small text:

to fairly large text:

This really makes the book readable–select your favorite text size, and away you go!

If you’ve got ideas/comments on books or genres that you’d like to see on your device, drop us a line!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 by ron and is filed under Dating Boot Camp, Sidekick/Hiptop Slide, Sidekick/Hiptop LX, Sidekick iD, Sidekick/Hiptop 3, SunCom (USA), Fido (Canada), Sidekick/Hiptop 2, T-Mobile USA. You can trackback from your own site.