Nokia Audiobooks turns your humble handset into a digital storytelling machine. Mobile phones should be ideal for audiobooks – they’ve got plenty of memory and decent sound – but most audio apps are optimised for the playback of music files.
This smart little app from Nokia’s Beta Labs, however, is dedicated to the spoken word.
Nokia Audiobooks is a free download available from Nokia Beta Labs and like many Beta Lab apps, installation can be something of a pain, this is still; because it's in Beta stage so hasn't been given the full polish down for universal consumption. You need to install the Audiobooks app on your phone, and an Audiobook Manager programme on your PC, together with a separate MP3 encoder.
This hung several times during our test, requiring re-installation. When you do get it working, the Manager then requires you to convert standard MP3 and WAV files into Nokia’s AWB format (taking at least a couple of minutes per chapter).
These highly compressed files use an advanced adaptive multi-rate wideband speech encoder – although all you need to know is that MP3 files shrink in size by about 90 per cent with virtually no loss in quality. A typical 40-min, 40MB MP3 audiobook chapter shrank to under 4MB in AWB. The manager also lets you add a title and cover image, then upload the book to your phone over USB.
The phone app is simplicity itself. After you select a book, the app will start reading at chapter one. As well the book’s title and cover, the screen shows the time and how long is remaining in both your current chapter and the whole book.
Your phone’s main pad controls volume (up/down), fast forward/rewind (right/left) and play/pause (select). The option buttons let you add and review bookmarks, move to specific chapters, set a sleep timer and lock the keypad.
Pause or exit the application and Nokia Audiobooks remembers exactly where it stopped reading, to start again in the same place next time. Audio quality really is as good as advertised, although there is the faintest amount of hiss audible in quieter passages.
This is not the audiobook reader for everyone. Installation can be painful and it doesn’t support podcasts, DRM audiobooks or even MP3s. If you don’t mind the hassle of converting from MP3, though, files are impressively tiny and sound quality impressively high, and the user interface is faultless. And they all lived happily ever after.
Details
Size: Nokia Audiobook Manager (PC) 1MB, Nokia Audiobooks 370KB
Price: Free
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