We have received quite a few questions about Hebrew support for BlackBerry devices so here is a new development. The developers at ZigZagWorld.com have provided a free solution for viewing Hebrew (and Yiddish) texts on your BlackBerry called Hebrew In Hand. This application includes support for fully pointed Hebrew, including vowels (nekudot) and cantillation marks (te’amim). No Hebrew fonts or other Hebrew support are needed on the BlackBerry. So far this seems to be more of a proof of concept. The integration with your BlackBerry device is minimal but it does work.
They seem to have ported this J2ME application to work on BlackBerry devices but as of now there is not much functionality available. Currently there are only 5 texts available for download and you cannot add texts yourself. You can check out the available texts here as they claim to update them soon. They have notified us that they have a full set of the Haftarot (Weekly readings from the Prophets in the Bible) is in the works. The way the application works is that you first download the reader and then you can download each of the texts by entering in the text code. Keep in mind that the application is pretty primitive as of now. You have no control over font size (which is quite small) and the keys for navigating the program are a bit weird. The menu button does not work when your reading a text and you have to click in on the trackball to get any sort of menu. I downloaded some of the sample texts and they ran quite slow on our test 8800 and 8300 devices. Scrolling through the texts is also a bit jumpy and could use some work. There were quite a few bugs in the program and I even had to reboot once to exit the program. All in all I think this application has some future and we will definitely be keeping an eye on its development. Hopefully in the future they will allow for user submitted texts. Though it may not be ready for prime time yet you can give it a whirl by downloading it OTA at this link.
Ronen Halevy ( View Profile) - Posts: