Audible is an audiobook browser and player. It’s easy to see the appeal of such a tool: Part of the reason why people want to own a smartphone is that it can give you information even when you’re on the go, a function that audiobooks also serve.
You can browse through Audible by recent releases, the title, the author, or the length of the audiobook. From the menu you can also browse through your library, get news related to Audible, view stats about your listening habits, run searches, and adjust a few settings. All in all, you won’t find a ton of features to mess with, but they make browsing easy.
While Audible is playing a file, it gives you options to pause, skip back 30 seconds, rewind or fast-forward, place a bookmark, skip ahead, or advance a chapter. You can also browse through chapters. The audio quality is clear and easy to hear, although sometimes I wish it was a little louder; I suspect the volume may be a phone hardware deficiency rather than a problem at Audible’s end. From the menu in the playback section of Audible, you can share, set the sleep-mode time, switch to button-free commands, browse through your library, rate titles, and quit the application.
I couldn’t get the share feature to function, but everything else worked fine. You can set sleep mode to operate for 15 minutes to an hour. The button-free controls allow you to navigate, play, and pause an audiobook just by using movements on the touchscreen. The screen controls work well and are quite responsive, but I found that the button setup is just as good.
Audible allows prospective users to test its service before creating an account. If you want to give it a go, you can download a few chapter excerpts from various audiobooks. Similar to a Kindle for audiobooks, this app is definitely worth downloading and checking out for yourself.