This blog entry is part of a continuous writing on the topic of “optimizing smartphone usage for smarter life”.
If you haven’t done so, please start reading from the first article on this series.

 

Content consumption is one of the main intended use of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. Reading content in mobile screen has several benefits like its practicability of not having to carry lots of heavy books. An iPad, for example, has 128 GB storage variant. It has the capacity to store digital books in an amount more than what your local public library can handle. It is also considered to be more environmental friendly, as less paper will be used to print books on.

Other than just reading words and still pictures, digital screen also has the capability to introduce new methods of learning. There are tons of apps available, allowing us (adults and children) to learn new knowledge. From simple math to complicated chemical reaction; from animated biology textbook to an actual guide for medical experts.

This blog post is the fourth part of 8 posts I will write about optimizing smartphone for smarter life.
I will write this guide based on iPhone. Simply because iPhone is my primary smartphone for now. Most of my tips and guides should be applicable for Android, Windows Phone and other smartphone OS. But you might need to do a bit of more research to find out how to get similar function in that OS.

This guide will NOT teach you step-by-step how to setup or use the features. Rather, I am trying to inspire you with a feature’s functionality and how we can benefit from it to live smarter life. More productive, more time efficient, more organized.

 

 

iphone-smartlife-4-reading

Reading

The most obvious things we can read in our smartphones (and/or tablets) are digital books (also known as e-books). E-books are… well, books. just like the ones we can buy in conventional bookstores. Instead of using paper to print the content on, e-books are stored as digital data. The early concept of digital reading was introduced to the masses mainly by some dedicated reading devices like Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader and many more. Modern smartphones today generally can do the same functions as these dedicated reader.

There are two methods of obtaining e-books. One, we can just open whatever device we have (smartphone, tablet or dedicated e-book reader) and they usually have built-in digital book store. We can just browse whatever available in the digital store, and we can purchase books by few clicks (or taps). Using real money? Yes. Digital doesn’t mean it’s free (even though there are some books that are legally free). The price of e-books are generally cheaper than printed books, but not by a large difference. Most of best-selling novels are sold for $10-$20 in various digital stores, with occasional limited-time discounts.

The other way to obtain e-books are from sources other than the official digital bookstore. For example, a company might produce a digital guide book about how to use its products, and everyone can download those e-books for free. Even major company like Microsoft has published a huge collection of e-books, free download for everyone.

Now let’s talk about the e-book format. Before the era of mobile devices, PDF was pretty much the world standard of e-books. Well, I’ve seen some books are being published as Microsoft Word documenst, or even as plain text files, but they’re generally less common than PDF.
PDF format is very flexible, capable of displaying pretty much anything we can print on a paper. Thus PDF is the most convenient format for large screen devices such as desktop computers. How about mobile devices? Reading PDF in smartphones gives different experience, since the screen is small. The text and images will look significantly smaller. If the PDF contains specific formatting like two columns text or free-positioning texts, it will be even harder for us to read the PDF conveniently in smartphones or smaller-size tablets. Yes we can zoom in and zoom out. But keep zooming in and zooming out while reading is not an enjoyable experience, at least not for me.

Smartphone screen size is not just “smaller”. The bigger problem is, there are many different screen sizes and different screen resolutions. Resulting one fixed-formatting file like PDF will look different in every screen. A new format is needed to handle the screen size variations. Amazon introduced MOBI format. Every other companies basically embrace another format called EPUB. These new formats allow text in e-books to adjust to whatever screen size (and resolution) it is being displayed on. If there’s not enough space in a particular line, a word will automatically join the next line, and so on. Readers can even choose their own font-face and font-size, so they get the best reading experience based on their personal taste and eyesight condition.

I personally like EPUB format better than MOBI. My collection of e-books are mostly in EPUB format.

Some modern PDF reader offers a feature of “PDF text reflow”. It has the capability of transforming PDF text into something almost like EPUB. But so far, I still can find plenty of weaknesses in this feature, including the fact that some PDF files are not actually texts, but scanned images which contain text as part of the image. These kind of content will not be able to reflow.

Apple’s default reader for e-books is an app called iBooks. We can buy books from a default store from Apple called iBookstore. We can also add our own e-books by putting those books into our iTunes library. Then it will be synced to iPhone (or iPad) just like we sync our music. If we have our own dedicated e-book reader like Kindle, Nook, Kobo or Sony Bookstore, they also have native apps for iOS, so we can download the apps and read the e-books we already bought in their digital stores.

A third party app in iPhone/iPad worth mentioning is Bluefire Reader. Since this is a third party app, we can put books there with drag-and-drop operation (from Windows Explorer or Mac Finder to File Sharing area in iTunes), no need to add the books into our iTunes library. Even better, we can even add books using any computer (doesn’t have to be the one paired with our device). As long as a computer has iTunes installed, we can easily add or remove books from third party app library.

Where is the File Sharing area in iTunes. When we plugged our iPhone (or iPad) to a computer, open iTunes, then click the device in iTunes. If it’s not your paired computer, DON’T SYNC. The screen displaying your device in iTunes should have multiple “tabs” above, choose the one called “Apps”, then scroll down until you find a section called “File Sharing”. We should be able to find our third party e-book reader there (Bluefire or any other app of your choice). Click on the app (on the list below File Sharing, don’t confuse this with the list of app in above section) and the right panel will display the books already there. We can add or remove books to that panel.

Another method of reading is through RSS feeds. Some websites (usually blog or news site) offer RSS feed to allow reader to get notification and read their latest news in their own dedicated RSS reader. So all news from various site, all in one centralized screen. A cloud account will also allow us to have the same set of RSS feeds in multiple devices, and when we read an article in a device, it will also marked as read in other devices, so we don’t get duplication. Years ago, this service was dominated by Google Reader. After Google killed this service, Feedly becomes pretty much de-facto replacement for most RSS readers now. I personally use Feedly sync service with an app called Reeder to read my RSS. This is my primary source of getting the latest update about various topics, my morning reading material. At a glance by reading the titles only, I got the general picture of what’s happening. And then I can choose to read some articles which interest me.

Other services like Flipboard and Pulse are also interesting. They tried to make reading news more interesting my compiling them into their own style of presenting. Worth trying if the usual style of reading news doesn’t keep you interested long enough.

Services like Instapaper, Pocket, Readability and Read Later offer a different method to help us reading. Sometimes we see a website or other material with interesting content, but at that time we don’t have enough time to read. These services allow us to do a quick step to mark the content so we can read it later when we have time. They will grab our marked material and save it in their own server, usually reformatted for better readability.

Digital comic books are generally not a good idea for small smartphone screen. But they are excellent idea for tablets. I do like reading comics in my iPad mini, especially because I can carry a huge collection within one single device.

 

 

iphone-smartlife-4-learning

Learning

Reading is basically already a part of learning process. However, I’d like to bring up the discussion about learning to a deeper context.

Since all books can be converted to e-books, naturally it includes school books, textbooks, dictionaries and other books with knowledge materials. Reading them is doable in both smartphones and tablets. But smartphones (and tablets) still offer something more in the context of learning.

There are new ways to learn now. Digital screen allows more presentation and interaction method previously unavailable with ink and paper. The simplest form is animation. The even-better form is interactive animation, an animation we can control by our fingers, allowing better understanding of a visual knowledge.

For kids, there are countless of education apps in Apple App Store now, some are paid apps and some are free. Subjects from math, writing, chemistry, geography, life science and astronomy & earth science are widely available. Kids can now “play” with molecule structures, use interactive maps to learn geography, or even play real games to learn the concept of physics. Parents from previous generation might feel it was sufficient to send the kids to school. Parents of today’s generation need to know about teaching their kids to use technology as part of their learning process, not just a toy to play mindless games.

I personally like to learn foreign languages in my iPhone and iPad (I’m learning Japanese language now, very slow progress though).

For researchers and people working in academics, there is an app called Mendeley that will enable us to maintain our academic library using a cloud-based service. It has apps in Windows, Mac, and mobile devices, allowing us to access the same library from everywhere.

Last but not least is learning from the Internet. We have Wikipedia that pretty much has knowledge in wide area of topic. And if Wikipedia fails to answer our question, we can search it in Google (which arguably has indexed everything made public in the Internet). However, be very cautious that not everything we read from the Internet is true. In fact, lots of survey already indicated that about 70% of content we can find in the Internet contains false information. Even Wikipedia is not always a reliable source of information. Remember that everyone can edit Wikipedia, so it can contain any information, including the wrong ones.

Online Review

You are in a place you rarely visit and trying to decide where to have lunch. You see few restaurants nearby and would like to check which one is probably a good place to eat. This is another type of “online communication” with other people, through review sites. I usually use Urbanspoon app to check what people think about a restaurant. I’m sure you can find other apps offering similar service. Not just limited to restaurants. We basically can check people’s opinion on anything using our smartphone.

In buying gadget or household appliances or basically anything with significant price, it’s always a good idea to check what other people said about it. Yes we can also read “official” reviews from some review websites. However, I usually prefer to read review from actual users rather than professionals being paid to write a review. Bear in mind that these review from “ordinary people” are not always correct. Sometimes they don’t understand about something, or had false assumption about a product, yet they blame the product for not being exactly as they imagined. In the end, we still need to filter everything using our common sense. And also remember that some companies are actually paying people to write (and post) reviews as ordinary users.

 

 

 

Optimizing Smartphone for Smarter Life, list of topics in this series:
1. Calendar, Reminders, Notes
2. Maps and Trip Planning
3. Communication and Collaboration
4. Reading and Learning
5. Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation
6. Content Creation
7. Personal Database
8. Saving Money
*. Epilogue

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Apple and/or Google and do not receive any financial benefit from writing this article.