Qiqqa for Android (pronounced like “quick-a”) is a companion to the research and biblographic tool Qiqqa for Windows (I’ll have a full review on it soon).
Research and academic work today means finding, downloading, and reading a never-ending stream of PDFs and webpages.
Effectively managing and getting what you need from those documents can be a real pain, and wastes precious writing-up time.
Qiqqa puts you back in control, with all the tools you need to manage your documents and notes effectively, visualize your ideas, and find insights you would have missed otherwise. – Qiqqa.com
The current beta version is pretty basic, but it gives you easy access to your “libraries” of PDFs that you have synced from your desktop (or laptop) to the Qiqqa web service.
You can browse the metadata for all of your documents and download ones you want to read. It is a bit hard to see in photos but the downloaded PDFs have a brighter icon next to them (easily distinguishable on the screen).
Unfortunately Qiqqa Android can’t view or annotate PDFs yet, but that is supposed to be added in the next version. Once it can it will be a great addition to the Qiqqa system of tools for getting research done “qiqqa”.
Since you can’t use Qiqqa to read or annotate PDFs just yet, you will have to use another program for that. Below is RepliGo Reader in action. In this example the blue highlight was done on my iPad before loading PDF into Qiqqa and the yellow highlight was done in RepliGo.
Pros
- Easy to use
- Free
Cons
- Unable to view or annotate PDFs yet
- No iOS version yet
Once the new version comes out it should be a great tool, but for now it’s just an easy way to grab a PDF while on the go.
Grade: B
