Android App Review: CadreBible a nice Bible resource on the go

So, yesterday I received in the mail a Motorola/Verizon Droid, compliments of Google. Since then, I’ve been putting it through its paces, and I came across something that I thought I would share. On my other Android device (the Google Ion IO 2009 Developer phone) I had an app called CadreBible, which is a very capable offline Bible (i.e., it works with or without a data connection) with an extensive library of free resources. When I received the Droid, I immediately installed it. Why? Well, in addition to allowing me to carry a number of different versions of the Bible with lookup and search capabilities into places where I will have no network access, and in much less space and weight than it takes to carry one of those pocket Bibles, CadreBible also allows me to have at my fingertips a number of invaluable study tools as well.

If you hang out at DHWC at all, you may realize that one of my favorite commentators is Matthew Henry, despite the fact that he wrote a little more than 300 years ago (1706, to be exact) and uses a lot of thee’s and thou’s, etc. I don’t talk like that, and I generally use the NIV that doesn’t read like that, but Henry still offered some excellent practical insights into the Bible. The only problem is that he can sometimes be very wordy. And the way that his commentary is organized in print (i.e., in book-form), you generally have to look in three different sections to find all the relevant information about a given passage: the book commentary, the chapter commentary, and the actual verse commentary.

Enter CadreBible. This little app allows you to jump in Henry’s commentary right to the passage you’re looking for, and when you get there, it automatically collates the book commentary, chapter commentary, and actual verse commentary into a single place. So all you have to do is read through the stuff it pulls, right then and there.

Does it save a lot of hassle? I don’t suppose it’s a huge hassle to flip through a few pages of a book, but it’s nice.

Does it save a lot of time? In the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness,” Will Smith’s character lands an internship with a prestigious stock brokerage. Out of desperation and determination to make a better life for his son and him, he finds shortcuts to increase productivity and make himself more appealing for the grand prize at the end of the internship: a job with the brokerage. One of these shortcuts was simply not hanging up the phone after he made a call. Instead, he would simply touch the flash button on the base (it was one of those old dial phones) and start dialing the next number. He estimated it saved him just a couple of seconds per call, but over the course of the day, as he made tens and even hundreds of calls, those seconds added up.

So no, it doesn’t save a lot of time, either. At least, not if you use it only once or twice. But if you use these features, like I do, on an almost daily basis, both the time and hassle add up quickly.

So I would recommend CadreBible to anyone who has an Android phone and wants to carry a Bible around with them. In fact, the only downside that I’ve come up with is that it doesn’t offer the NIV. But it does offer KJV, ASV, and a whole host of other versions, including a Greek New Testament, the Septuagint (for Greek geeks like me), and Hebrew; not to mention concordances, devotionals, and more.

And in case you’re wondering, I just downloaded the OliveTree software (which my wife has on her iPod Touch), and I’ll be playing with that, too.