Google’s Android release news totally stole the thunder of other product launches last week. An important one of these was the launch of an official Android PDF reader app from Adobe.

With the release of this app, Adobe has claimed back its hold on worldwide PDF documents on all operating systems once again.

This software originally went up on the Android marketplace on Friday and has remained unnoticed for a long time. I finally installed it on my HTC Legend today and here is my experience with this app.

The Good

This is the first version of an official reader from Adobe and it already has support for pinch zoom with multi-touch, tap zoom, resize to fit to screen and landscape reading. This gives the app some much needed document reader features and forms a base to build up from. But at the same time, it lacks some important features too.

The Bad

An important part of any PDF is the feature of bookmarks. This lets us organize a PDF and use it as a proper document. That is what makes a PDF different from a text file. Surprisingly, this official app from Adobe has no support for bookmarks which is a necessity in PDF documents. Something like this, coming from Adobe, which is an authority in PDF, is unexpected.

The Ugly

There are complains that this app lacks a search feature and also lags badly on the pinch zoom. It takes time to re-render while coming out of pinch zoom, totally spoiling the looks of the UI.

It is also said that the app loads the next four pages internally. When navigating through pages with jump, the app uses lots of resources. The app is not suitable to load large documents, especially ones with images. Apart from that, the app does not work on Android 2.0 or earlier.

All this comes for a size of 4.3 MB. This makes me believe that the app was a rushed up release and needs some heavy polishing.

Verdict

If there is one reason I would try this app, it is because of its UI. The UI looks great and feels greater. I hope that Adobe will make this a better app someday. Till then, I can live with the default PDF reader I have on my device.