Mobile Ministry Magazine

I received my evaluation version of eBible almost two weeks ago and have been using it almost exclusively since then.

I use Bibles on my Palm OS devices mostly as a quick reference, or as a way to follow along when a pastor is preaching a sermon where he goes various places in the Bible. Also, I like to be able to compare versions from time to time during a church service or something like that.

There are many features in eBible for Palm OS that make it a very desirable electronic Bible for the way in which I use that kind of software, first of all the navigation from the upper left corner of the screen. Up there you have an icon, which will activate the pull down menus, you have the translation and the Scripture reference. You can tap on the translation to change translations very quickly and easily. Also the verse chooser, which lets you tap on the reference and get a list of books is in the upper left. Tap on your book and you’ll get a list of chapters, tap on the chapter and as expected, you’ll find the verses. This aids in navigation and is a very fast way to find a reference and makes it very handy if you are looking up a series of verses in fairly short order.

Additionally, there are forward and back arrows at the upper right corner of the screen that allow you to move in either direction of verses you’ve looked up using the verse chooser, which is especially nice. The find feature is also in the upper right corner of the screen, as well as the bookmarks, and a split screen toggle button that I actually found myself using more than I expected to. When you click on that, it will display or turn off a bottom pane in which you can display a second Bible, a commentary, personal notes or anything else that’s in your library. The ease with which this can be turned on and off is very nice.

One interesting feature that I hadn't seen before is the ability to tap on a singe word and get a pop up menu that provides access to study tools related to the word you've tapped on, such as topical searches, commentaries and lexicons.

The collection of books that’s included in the deluxe edition of eBible for Palm OS is very extensive. They’ve made a number of good references available including the Believers Bible Commentary, which is a personal favorite of mine. The reviewed version included three translations of the Bible including KJV, NKJV, and NCV or New Century Version.

Over all, I enjoyed this program very much, and found it both intuitive and easy to use. The only thing that I did not care for is the installation process. The program does not take up an abundance of memory on the device. However when I was trying to install, with only one Bible and a commentary, having 11 megabytes of memory free on my Tungsten E2, I continued to get out of memory messages. Never mind being able to install more than that on my device.

I contacted the good people at eBible and was advised that the way it was intended to be installed was with the program file itself on the device, and then a host of resources on a card. Their response was both timely and courteous, so I have no doubt that the product is very well supported.

I was also provided with an installation file for the program that would run on an SDIO card, and so most of the way I've used eBible has been with engine and data files on an SDIO card. The results were pleasantly surprising. There is the usual lag you'd expect from running programs on a card, but overall, performance was quite satisfactory.

Overall, I would recommend eBible to people I know, especially if they need to cross reference multiple versions and have numerous reference books available to them. With the wide variety of reference books, and a nice clean interface, eBible should be a benefit to anyone who needs a Palm OS based Bible. Topical studies are especially easy with the ability to tap on a single word and get a menu of things you can reference related to that, as mentioned above.