One of the hot items over the holidays this past Christmas was, among many other ereaders, the Kindle. Announced a few weeks back, there will soon be a Kindle application for the BlackBerry. One thing many people have been looking to do is find a sufficient application for their BlackBerry. Rather than shelling out the money for a new device, why not look for a reader substitute for the device they already have?

One of the best substitutes I have found for ebooks on the BlackBerry is Wattpad. It is a source of hundreds of thousands of free books available for reading. The beauty of this application is not only in the wide variety of free books or the availability of some great titles, but you can actually download each individual book as a separate entity. Each book can be installed as a separate application that operates independently from the Wattpad application itself. This is a great feature for someone that may not have great coverage all of the time but still may want to read at any time. This is only an option and you do not have to download every book to your phone.

In Wattpad, you have the ability to build a library. It comes with a few pieces already added to your library, but those can easily be removed. As for adding another book, you can browse through the most recently added pieces, the most read books, or featured works. All of these options are categorized, and you can refine your browsing to a certain genre and language. If you are looking for a specific book, you have the ability to search for that certain title.

Another neat thing about Wattpad is that the application is just an extension of the website, meaning that if you want to browse a little faster or if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, you can head on over to Wattpad’s website and more easily find what you’re looking for. Simply find the “wattcode” and enter it into the application if you want to use Wattpad itself and simply add it to your library, or go to the mobile site and enter it at the bottom of the page for offline reading.

Wattpad will automatically keep your place for any book in your library and tell you how far through each book you are by percentage. The controls are very easy to figure out and make reading much simpler than one would think on your small BlackBerry screen. You have the ability to slightly customize Wattpad for your phone by changing the background, font color, and font size.

My only three complaints about Wattpad is that the controls are very sensitive, there are advertisements, and the convenience keys are disabled. When scrolling up and down in the menu, if you scroll either left or right very slightly, it will either move you to the next or previous screen. The left and right trackpad/trackball functions should simply be removed. The advertisements are always something I can live with, but I need my convenience keys. Though you can still use the application switcher, I do not like having to completely back out of an application to view my messages, and the lack of a convenience key made taking screenshots a little tricky. I ended up having to use a program on my computer to get the screenshots.

Whether the Kindle app for BlackBerry is a paid application or not is not the issue at hand. I’m positive that the Kindle app will be a well developed application packed with features, but it may require the Kindle itself and you can use the two devices in correlation with each other. This is just my understanding of the Kindle app; it will simply extend the use of your Kindle when it is not around. Wattpad is a very suitable substitution for ebooks that can save you a good deal of money. The only problem with the application is, if you are a very avid reader, the selection of books may not suit your needs.

You can download Wattpad for your BlackBerry by clicking here from your mobile browser.