In an ideal world, to

be an indispensable business tool, Pocket PC would

do everything you used your desktop machine for -

a true Pocket PC! However, in the real world, this

isn’t really practical. Through its various incarnations

since version 1, Windows CE has got more and more

useful as time goes by as more and more big name developers

see it as a viable business platform and port their

wares to it. This in turn encourages more and more

businesses to see it as a viable enterprise platform

to build systems around. Everyone’s needs for their

Pocket PC differ but the bottom line is what does

a typical ‘Mobile Worker’ need to access on their

As a typical Mobile worker, I can tell you: Word,

Excel, PowerPoint, Database (SQL/OLAP), E-mail, Voicemail,

Faxes, Internet/Intranet, Project and PDF. Applications

are currently available that will provide me with

all of these but an important consideration any IT

Manager makes when evaluating software is ROI – What

will it cost? Well the new Acrobat Reader Beta from

Adobe is a winner already because it costs nothing.

Add to that the amount of time and effort you save

by not having to carry hard copy versions of all your

acrobat documents with you and your laughing. Now

I know this is interesting as a theory but it works

in practice too. I’ll explain this after I’ve walked

   This brand new beta version

was released on Monday 24th September and best of all,

   The Setup is a Self Unzipping

EXE file that runs a standard InstallShield Win32

App. Unless you have any hard drive space issues,

accept the default install location. Separate executables

are provided for ARM (iPAQ, Amigo), MIPS (Casio) and

SH3 (Jornada). The program is installed on your Pocket

Obviously, the next step is to open an Acrobat file

to view. As you can see, I already have some but even

if you don’t have any or choose not to download the

sample PDF’s from Adobe, the Reader includes a PDF

User Guide explaining how the reader works and the

I’ve chosen to open the User Guide. The default view

is the reflowed page width plus Table of Contents

Before I delve any further into the in’s and outs

of this app, I think I should explain a little of

the technology behind it.

Adobe have a

Network Publishing Vision which, to my mind, is

very similar to Microsoft’s

Vision – basically they want to provide the content

you want, when you want it on whichever device you

want it on. In its simplest form, this would be something

like early versions of BBView

which allowed you to look at PDF’s but not manipulate

or reform them in anyway. Adobe have gone much further

than this. In the latest full version of Acrobat (version

5), Adobe have included the functionality to tag text

areas in your PDF documents. For other people viewing

their PDF’s on the same platform on which you created

them, the experience is exactly the same. The Pocket

PC version, on the other hand, reflows the text on

these documents so that its easier to read on the

smaller display. Neat huh? You can still view tagged

PDF’s in the traditional way and zoom and scroll as

necessary (you may need to do this for maps and tables).

If you want to know more about the mechanics of PDF

and tagging, look at

Now that the techie bit’s out of the way, let’s carry

If you want to see more of the document, you can hide

the TOC by clicking on the double arrow bar underneath

OK. Now we have our document open, let’s change some

of the program settings by clicking on the little

menu arrow in the bottom right corner and selecting

In the preferences, you basically have 2 tabs (there

are 3 screenshots so as to show all of the toolbar

options). On the general menu, you can control how

your reader behaves when opening and reading PDF’s.

Functions here include action on screen tap, default

This is the toolbar tab of the preferences menu. This

basically controls what function buttons you have

on your toolbar when reading a PDF. This is largely

personal preference but choose the functions you use

most often as you are limited (by screen space) to

The find function from the PC version of Acrobat reader

remains intact in this version and is equally as effective

and full featured. I have included a picture of a

find on the same document in PC Acrobat so you can

The screen shot below shows the acrobat user guide

in reflow mode at maximum zoom.  Even at this

This is the user guide, still in reflow mode, this

time at minimum zoom. Clearly maximum zoom is not

much use for reading documents but would be useful

Again here is the user guide, still at minimum zoom,

but this time the document is in standard mode. You

can clearly see that the entire document looks different.

You can see distinct pages rather than areas of text

which goes some way to showing, in simple terms, the

effect of tagging your PDF’s – minimal white space.

Again reading text of this level would be virtually

Pictured here is the maximum zoom level for a document

in normal mode. You can see that the zoom level is

clearly higher with a document using normal mode and

would be useful for examining detail on pictures and

Pocket PC Acrobat Reader also has a useful feature

that allows you to change the orientation of your

document. Here you can see the acrobat user guide

in different orientations. If you have a tagged acrobat

file, then you do not need to change the position

of the document to be able to read the text properly.

I find this feature ideally suited for maps and such

To illustrate this point here is a map I used for

recent business meeting in sunny Nottingham. Even

when rotated and zoomed, the image remains clear and

should you wish to see document information you can

This is a public beta release. Adobe does not provide

any support for beta releases of software, but they

do have a 

user forum so you can share your thoughts and

issues with other beta testers. Alternatively you

can e-mail your comments direct to the beta team at

As specified previously, a version of acrobat is available

for all 3 Pocket PC CPU types. You will need at least

Pocket PC 2000 to run this, although it runs equally

as well on Pocket PC 2002 (Merlin) as you can

see from my screenshots. To run Acrobat Reader, you’ll

need a rather large 3.14 mb of storage memory and

and I haven’t come across any real issues. That said,

performance can be a little sluggish when handling

large acrobat files like my map pictured above. 

Additional memory optimization would be useful feature

for the next/release version but this is free after

all. As a PDF reader, the performance of this

application is equally as good as Primer – the other

Pocket PC Acrobat tool available from

This program is available free of charge from

Adobe’s website. They do require you to fill in

a registration form before downloading. The files

are between 8 mb and 8.5 mb dependent on which Pocket

also have sample documents available to download which

   As I said in my introduction,

as more vendors port their products to the Pocket

PC platform, then the closer it will become to rivaling

Palm as a recognised enterprise PDA platform. I also

said that I would give a practical example of how

this works in an enterprise environment so here goes.

My company is in the process of registering

for ISO17799, an international standard governing

best practices for information security. Part of this

requires that the business has some sort of business

recovery plan to aid the business to continue trading

in case of business disaster (e.g. destruction of

office premises, nearby fire or possibly even terrorism).

Basically this contains a plan of action for various

departments within the company to coordinate with

each other and steps to take to help the business

continue. Unfortunately, these events don’t happen

to a schedule – they normally happen when you least

expect them. Therefore, members of this business recovery

team must carry a copy of this plan with them at all

times. The original solution was to give them two

ring binders – one for home and one for work. This

is unworkable. My solution was to save the documents

as Acrobat files and give them all Pocket PC’s. They

already know how Acrobat works from their desktop

PC’s and a Jornada 548 is a lot easier to carry than

a great big folder! If you don’t need all the additional

functionality that Ansyr Primer provides and just

want to read PDF’s on the move then this program is

ideal. Got PDF’s? Get Acrobat Reader – it’s free after