Let me put it this way: the more material you
read, the more you need Speed Reader Plus. Do you get a lot of emails?
Get Speed Reader Plus. Do you read a lot of ebooks? Get Speed Reader Plus.
Why? Simple: Speed Reader Plus will make you money.

   WHAT?!

   Okay – so how does Speed Reader Plus make me
a faster reader? According to their website, Speed Reader Plus utilizes
a patented technology called “Rapid Serial Visualization Presentation”
or RSVP. Pretty official sounding, huh? Well, what it means is that instead
of a line of text, each word is displayed in rapid succession – as rapid
as I can take and still understand what I’m ‘watching’. This technique
was first introduced by the U.S. Military as they sought to increase the
reading speed of their personnel. They found that a lot of reading time
was wasted on eye movement. Speed Reader Plus reduces eye movement by
displaying your document one word at a time at the speed you desire. Makes
sense, huh?

   Reading is done on the main reading screen. Just press
the action button and the words are displayed in order at the speed you
choose. I found I could immediately read at between 350 and 400 words
per minute. I was immediately impressed, to say the least. If I wanted
the words to slow down a little, I could press left with the direction
pad a couple of times; conversely, when I wanted the words to speed up
a little, I could press to the right on the direction pad. If I wanted
to pause, I would press the action button again and the location of my
current text would be displayed in the grey text area (note: it does not
scroll while reading).

   In the screenshot above, you can see along the bottom,
from left to right, the file menu, the edit menu, the options menu, the
previous part button, the part information button, the next part button,
the help button, and the backlight override button. Let’s take a look
at these a little.

   ”About…” displays the About screen. “Open Library…”
will show you the books that you have installed for Speed Reader Plus
on your Pocket PC. “Document Information…” will show you the name of
the current book and how many parts there are. “Exit” will exit the program.

   Speed Reader Plus books are text files and are located
in “Program FilesSpeed Reader PlusSRP Library”. These books can be
downloaded from your desktop PC automatically while your Pocket PC is
synced, or they can be pasted into Speed Reader Plus on your Pocket PC.
Any text that you can copy to the clipboard can be loaded into Speed Reader
Plus, either on your desktop PC or on your Pocket PC.

   Here is the Library Utility that is installed to your
desktop PC. In order to maintain loading speed for your text books, Speed
Reader Plus breaks up the text files into “parts” that seem to be about
29kb in size. The transfer method is simple (as you can see above): sync
your Pocket PC, start the Library Utility, copy your text to the Windows
clipboard, and after the Library Utility pops up, give your book a name
that will show up in your library on your Pocket PC, and click “Send to
Pocket PC”. All in all, pretty simple.

   Believe me, it takes a lot more effort to explain the
process, or even to read about the process, than to actually “live the
process”.

   From the Edit Menu, you can copy text from the text
area of the screen. With “Paste”, you can paste text that you have selected
on your Pocket PC into the Speed Reader Plus library. VERY cool. This
means that you can quickly read through that long email that your boss
sent to you. AND – with Speed Reader Plus, you can paste in those class
notes or those meeting minutes you have been typing up, and REVIEW them
at high speeds… There are many useful applications for Speed Reader
Plus!

   With “Select All” you can select all the text in the
document. With “Find” and “Find Next” you can search through the document.
With “Go to Selected Word” you can have the reader pick up with the word
you have selected. This is handy if you would like to go back and re-read
from a portion of the text.

   With “Find”, you can search through the document – including
searching through parts. Pretty basic, but it gets the job down. And,
finally, with “Go to Part…” you can jump to whatever part you want -
that is, of course, if you even happen to know what part you’re looking
for! Speed Reader Plus breaks up your document into “parts” that correspond
to file size, not by examining the document for where the natural chapter
breaks are. Fortunately, though, Speed Reader Plus remembers where you
have left off reading each document and will ask you if that’s where you
would like to continue reading when you open the book.

   From the Options Menu, you can change Speed Reader’s
Settings. Under “Reader Settings” you can change some of the different
values for the speed settings of the reader. I found this setting extremely
useful because when I was pushing the limit of what I could understand,
as far as the words flashing on the screen, I found that if I adjusted
the “Punctuation Speed” a little then I was reading even faster.

   Also under “Reader Settings” are some miscellaneous
settings: ColorBar, Flash Word, Speed Booster, and Continuous. The Color
Bar is the dark-grey bar under the word “An” in the above screenshot.
When a sentence begins, the Color Bar is green. As the sentence gets close
to the end, the color bar goes to red. “Flash Word” provides a little
bit of a pause after every word during which no word is shown. “Speed
Booster” allows you to read at faster speeds. With “Continuous” reading
off, Speed Reader Plus will pause at the end of every part and ask you
if you want to continue. With “Continuous” reading on, Speed Reader Plus
will ‘play’ the entire document from start to finish – make sure you don’t
go to sleep or your Pocket PC will too once its battery runs out!

   With “Font Settings” you can change the display values
for the main reader screen. Speed Reader’s in-line help file was sufficient
to give a good understanding of Speed Reader’s basic functions. It also
included some useful tips, like using the d-pad and action buttons during
reading. Another very useful tip: if you want to go to the previous sentence
and re-read it, press up on the direction pad. If you want to go to the
next sentence, press down.

HELP SUPPORT

    According to Handango’s
Speed Reader product page, the only product requirement is 270kb
of free space on your Pocket PC. Of course, every book is going to take
up more space and the desktop Library Utility is going to require some
space.

    Apparently some users are having problems
running Speed Reader Plus with ActiveSync version 3.7.1. As a result,
Mobile Dynamo recommends that you downgrade your ActiveSync version
to 3.7.0. I am using 3.7.0 myself and cannot say that I have had no
problems when I wanted to transfer documents to my Pocket PC. But usually
if I disconnect my Pocket PC and re-connect then the problems go away.
Once I had to re-connect and re-start the library utility.

  Another thing I would like to see in Speed Reader Plus is
the ability to add my own bookmarks to documents. And, while I understand
the need to keep things as fast as possible, the ‘parts’ aspect of documents
seems really…contrived. Also, it would be nice to just be able to
‘open’ a text document from Speed Reader Plus, instead of having to
‘register’ it to the Library Utility. This could be done using the more
familiar File Explorer interface.

   I was really impressed with Speed Reader
Plus. The concept is so simple, and yet so effective. I really did immediately
see an improvement in my reading speed, and experienced less eye strain
because, well, my eyes weren’t moving so much! If you are in any way
in doubt about Speed Reader Plus, you must at least check out the demo
– its fully functional for 7 days. You don’t need 7 – after I had used
it for 2 days, I was reading so much faster that I was hooked!