The Torah Bible Pentateuch – Review

Our rating:

By: The Torah Bible Pentateuch

Version #: 1.00

Date Released: 2008-12-03

Developer:

Price: 0.99

User Rating:

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It is good to see the proliferation of religious text on the iPhone. I mean, after all, isn’t the 15th century Gutenberg Bible thought to be the first book to printed by Gutenberg’s movable type system? It isn’t, but the printing of Bibles certainly helped further the advances of this 15th century technology! So why shouldn’t religious-based apps help drive greater adoption of THIS new technology?

Unfortunately, this app doesn’t advance anything. It is, in my opinion, poorly executed and, as a result, all but useless. Why?

The Hebrew font used is terrible. As in English, there are lots different Hebrew fonts that can be used. The one chosen here is difficult to read and tiny. Not good in an app that makes carrying the Hebrew text of the Torah with you possible.

The app has a search field on each page. A nice feature but unfortunately tapping it brings up an English keyboard. Problem is… the app currently only offers the text in Hebrew… making it useless.

The app has a "jump to page" field. Nice, but how would you ever know what page to jump to?

The app is portrait only. Note to developers- we now expect the ability to use our iPhones in either portrait or landscape. Take the extra time to make sure this is possible!

I’m not done yet…
The text not scalable.

The app offers no verse, chapter or book search. That means you have to scroll through the entire thing to get to the chapter and verse you want. This is not an issue if you are looking for something in Bereshit (Genesis). but is a huge issue if the text you want is in Devarim (Deuteronomy).

Listen the bar has been raised for iPhone apps in recent months. This kind of flawed app might have been acceptable in July but things are too polished and sophisticated now for this kind of limited app with such poor implementation. Perhaps the future update that promises an English translation will improve things. That will be great. For now however, this app is not worth getting.

Quick Take-
Would I Buy Again- NO