Wap Review

Six months ago I posted a piece entitled All I want is a good WAP RSS Reader comparing all the mobile web based rss aggregators that I could find at that time. Last week Google released a mobile version of their Reader. Here's my take on the latest entrant in mobile feed reading wars.

First of all, the main advantage that web based aggregators have is that they maintain the state of your feed reading experience across devices. If you read something on a web based reader on your PC it won't pop up as unread on the mobile edition of that reader. So what I really want is a reader that has a great mobile version and a great full web version as well. As I wrote here, I'm willing to put up with the glaring defects in Bloglines Mobile simply because the feeds in it are synchronized with the excellent desktop version. So if you don't like Google Reader on the desktop then there isn't much reason to use it on your mobile device. A lot of people like the "big" Google Reader but at least as many hate it.

I think there are several reasons that opinion on Google Reader is so polarized. The main one is that Google Reader uses the "River of News" paradigm - where you see the titles of the latest items from all your feeds mixed together in the order received. Personally, I'm not a fan of the "River...". Certain blogs I like to read first, Russell Beattie was like that until he quit posting. Now my favorites are Michael Mace, Martin Sauter and Carlo and Russell at MobHappy. If one of them has a new item I want to read it first, before the latest press releases on Engadget or some phone review.

Google Reader on the web has a glorious looking UI with lots of Ajax magic. I'm not so sure it's actually as usable an interface as the clunky Bloglines one. Google Reader is also a beta, even on the desktop, and there is missing functionality - no way to mark all the items in a feed or in all feeds as read, for example. I hear people complain about bugs too - one glaring one is that if you unsubscribe from a feed, it doesn't remove that feed's unread items upstream in the "River", you still have to visit them to make them go away.

Incidentally, Google Reader has two defaults that you will probably want to change. I had to change the sorting to "date" - the default sort of "auto" seems to sort items in totally random order. I think it's supposed to sort items with more "authority" higher but it just seems broken to me. You probably also want to set read items as hidden. Note that you can only change these defaults on the desktop - not on the mobile pages.

But enough about Google Reader on the desktop, lets look at the mobile version. The opening screen (top image) shows a list of the 9 most recent items from your feeds. The list is compact with just the item title and the name of the feed. Clicking the title or the numbered access key takes you to the item (2nd image). Unlike Bloglines mobile, Reader puts only one item body on a mobile page. Bloglines sends the full text of all unread items from a given feed to you as a single page. That can be 100's of KB's for a high volume, image-heavy feed - more than most mobile browsers can handle.

You can also read all the items in a particular feed by clicking on the feed name in the list of items. Of course, you might have to go through several screens of items before you find one from any particular feed - but that's the way River of News works. When you go into a feed this way, you again see a compact list (third image) of the first nine titles along with the first sixty characters of each entry.

Mobile usability is pretty good in Reader. Access keys are used extensively. The lists of items all have access keys so you can just hit a single numeric key to go to an item. At the bottom of each item are links to the next un-read item, to the full item and back to the list of all items (bottom image). These links have access keys too.

Images in feed items are displayed full size rather than compressed, which could be a problem with feeds that include big images. All links in feeds are retrieved using the Google transcoder - which does resize images. There is a link to the full item on the originating blog, which also uses the transcoder. Although transcoding is a touchy subject with many bloggers, transcoding the full item does provide a mobile-friendly way to read partial feeds.

I was not able to launch Reader Mobile in my favorite Palm OS browser, Xiino as the pages are sent with the mime-type of application/xhtml+xml which Xiino doesn't support. This is likely to be an issue with other PDA browsers, particularly old ones. Google really needs to do browser detection and only send xhtml to devices that can accept it. Most other browsers including Opera Mini work fine. You can launch Google Reader by going to http://www.google.com/reader/m/ or by just going to google.com on a mobile device and choosing personal home page and then Reader.

In summary, I think that Google Reader Mobile is the best mobile-web based rss reader yet when only the mobile piece is considered. Compared with Bloglines mobile it has a much better UI that won't overload your browser. It doesn't have as big an advantage over Feedlot UI-wise but it does support Atom feeds which Feedalot does not. If you are using Bloglines or Feedalot on the desktop, I don't recommend switching unless you can also live with Google Reader on the desktop.

Bloglines is a great web based aggregator on the desktop. It has a lot of potential as a mobile browser. Unfortunately, Bloglines Mobile has one critical flaw - it lacks an item index page. By index page, I mean the list of items for an individual feed. Index pages provide a drill-down capability that is essential to managing the volume of information in an RSS feed on a small screen. To me, a mainstream phone has a 128x160 pixel screen. Sure, smartphones have at least 176x208 and feature phones like the RAZR are starting to use that size as well. But most Nokias have 128x128 screens and the entry level Nokias are only 96x65. If you want your site to have mass appeal you have to aim at the mass market devices. The first image in the Winksite review shows an example of an index that works on small screens. Feedalot and Bloggo use the same design. Bloglines dispenses with an index page altogether and dumps you into the full text of all of a feed's current entries one after another as one giant page To get to the second entry you have to scroll through the full text of the first entry. That could easily be 15 screenfulls on a 128x160 phone. That's OK if you sequentially read though every post in every feed you subscribe to, but I read far too many feeds for that. I want to be able too scan the entry titles and read the ones that sound interesting and then maybe go back to the titles and read a couple more entries that sound interesting. Blogline's design might works on something like a Treo, Danger Hiptop/Sidekick or Nokia 9300 which has a large screen and dedicated page-down keys. If that's the target device, fine. But those aren't the mainstream phones that predominate today on the mobile web.

In spite of the above criticisms, I use Bloglines every day. Why? In a word - synchronization. I want my mobile reader to only show me items I haven't read already on the desktop and vice versa. Along with a million or two other folks, I use Bloglines on the desktop, it's simply the best aggregator around. As I said above, the problem with Bloglines Mobile is that it shows all the unread items for a feed on a single page. This doesn't work well with commercial feeds like Slashdot or Engadget which have dozens of new items daily. But Bloglines allows you to specify which of your feeds you want to see on your mobile (It's under Edit Subscription on each feed's index frame in desktop Bloglines). I set up Bloglines to just display sites on my mobile that only update every day or two (like most personal blogs). It turns out that these are the sites I tend to really read most of the articles instead of just scanning the titles to see if there's anything interesting. So when I'm on the train I read through all the items posted by a few of my favorite bloggers on my phone. When I'm back at my desktop, I skim through the busy commercial sites.

Note: if you are using the WAP1 version of Bloglines, you need to hit the Refresh link after logging before you can see your feeds. This is not a Bloglines bug, it's a limitation of the YesWAP html to wml transcoder.

There's a public beta of the next version of Bloglines Mobile up at m.beta.bloglines.com . If you are Bloglines user give it a try.

I'm really excited about this. I live in the Opera Mini browser running Bloglines Mobile. If there is a new version of either Opera or Bloglines I'm like a kid in a candy store.

While Opera Mini gets updated often, Bloglines hasn't had a significant upgrade in years. Although I use it more than any other mobile site, there are a couple of annoying "features" that I have high hopes of finally seeing changed in the new version.

In fact, the more serious of the two is already fixed in this first beta. More...

Berry Bloglines is another useful mobile web app from profilic developer of free Blackberry applications, Phil Bogle. Berry Bloglines is an alternate mobile web front end to the Bloglines RSS reader. Although designed for Blackberries, it should work on just about any web enabled mobile phone. External links are transcoded by Skweezer. Strangely, Berry Bloglines doesn't let you login with your Bloglines Blog ID, you have to use the email address associated with your Bloglines account which is a PITA for me as I signed up for Bloglines using an impossible to remember disposable email address!

Any interesting alternative to the mobile versions of Google Reader and Bloglines, mobileRSS.net is a simple web based mobile RSS and Atom feed reader. It supports OPML imports and exports shows all recent items from a feed in a single long page like Bloglines.  Look and feel can be altered by choosing from among a dozen predefined styles.  Shows which feeds have unread items but does not hide read ones.

I really like Winksite, I'm working on a full review of the site, and they do so many things so well that I feel bad about critizing their RSS reader. If you don't know Winksite, it's a true pioneer mobile institution. It's made it extremely easy to make a mobile edition of your blog. You can create a new blog on Winksite (editable via WEB or WAP!) or enter your feed url and let Winksite create a mobile blog site from it. Your "mobilized" blog will be accessible from WAP1, WAP2, i-Mode, PDA and even desktop browsers. Did I mention it's free too! The list of bloggers hosting their mobile blogs on Winksite reads like a who's-who of blogging's stars, Om Malik, MobHappy, Smart Mobs, Mobile Jones just to name a few. You can also build simple WAP sites combining static text pages, your own or other peoples feeds, a guest book, chat and surveys. All this without having to write any code.

Winksite's RSS aggregator is also nearly perfect. The UI features a clean index that lists the titles and nothing else. Numeric shortcuts to the items are provided on every device that supports them. Full item content is shown paginated and you can also get to a transcoded version of the original blog - something you'll need if you read partial feeds like MobileRead or the BBC. There is only one thing that could be improved. Winksite doesn't give any indication of which feeds have unread items. I read a number of feeds that aren't updated daily - when using Winksite I have to go into each one to see if it has anything new. This wastes a significant amount of time on a slow mobile connection. I'm suspect it would be a lot of work to retrofit an unread items indicator into Winksite's code but it sure would be nice. Even as it is, Winksite ties with Feedalot as the best Mobile RSS aggregator available today.