Six months ago I posted a piece entitled All I want is a good WAP RSS Reader<\/a> 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<\/a>. Here’s my take on the latest entrant in mobile feed reading wars.<\/p>\n
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<\/strong> a great full web version as well. As I wrote here<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>” 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<\/a> was like that until he quit posting. Now my favorites are Michael Mace<\/a>, Martin Sauter<\/a> and Carlo and Russell at MobHappy<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> with many bloggers, transcoding the full item does provide a mobile-friendly way to read partial feeds.<\/p>\n
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\/<\/a> or by just going to google.com on a mobile device and choosing personal home page and then Reader.<\/p>\n
Google Reader Mobile: xhtml-mp<\/a>
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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 … Continue reading