A Christmas Carol for iPad Review

Padworx Digital Media, creator of the interactive Dracula: The Official Bram Stoker Family Edition, is back in the e-book business with its release of A Christmas Carol, and just in time for the holidays! Given the popularity and success of Dracula, we were hopeful that A Christmas Carol would not only live up to but exceed our expectations. Did it? Almost…

A Christmas Carol capitalizes on the strengths of Dracula: The Official Bram Stoker Family Edition by containing some form of interactivity on almost every page. Whether it be the music, sound effects, or animations, there was always something to look forward to; some sort of reward for reading ahead.

Like its predecessor, A Christmas Carol contains an abridged version of the Dickens novel. Due to Dracula’s tremendous length, one can easily understand why the developer would choose to provide an abridged text. However, in this case, we found it a bit unfortunate, as A Christmas Carol is only a fraction of Dracula’s length, and its full-text e-book would only be somewhat longer than the abridged version provided in this app.

On the bright side, we appreciate the steampunk look and vivid animations throughout the novel. The visual effects create a captivating journey into the world of Ebenezer Scrooge. We feel that this will surely entertain both adults and children who are fans of the original Dickens tale for countless hours.

Additionally, we recognize that the developer took criticism and addressed the memory issues with the former e-book. While the Dracula e-book took up over half of a gigabyte of device memory, A Christmas Carol takes up less than 200 MB. While this size is also substantial, it is understandable given the visual wealth of the app.

Overall, we found the use of this app to be enjoyable and its release to be well-timed for the holiday season. Despite having abridged text and the fact that some of the supported gestures are not completely intuitive, we feel that if you spend a little time learning how to navigate the app, or are already an owner of the Dracula app, you’ll find hours of amusement and holiday delight. So, get out the eggnog, sit back and relax … with A Christmas Carol.