AvantGo and Rss Reader

www.bloglines.com/mobile through Opera browser is the best solution I've found.

A new RSS reader was recently announced called FreeNews This is an application (not WAP based) designed specifically for RSS to mobile phones. You subscribe to feeds on a web server from your computer, and the server tracks your feeds for you. When you connect from the phone, it compresses all downloads and only copies the new information. I have 60 feeds and my daily update takes less than 20 seconds. Everything stays on your phone, so you can read it while underground or without signal. It works in all languages and with any webpage with an RSS feed, and includes a text only browser for viewing the full content of the webpage.

I think Freenews is a subscription based service ($20 per year) whereas a similar service: www.litefeeds.com is free.

Their web interface, for setting up (& reading if you like) your feeds is very nice.

They've just released a new version of their free mobile client which has a lot of nice improvements. When you connect it compresses & downloads your favourite feeds & you can view the full articles within the application. It appears to offer everything that Freenews does except it hasn't got offline browsing yet.

So far it looks like it's growing into a very nice service.

FreeNews is subscription based ($20/year), and works quite a bit differently than LiteFeeds. With FreeNews, all your feeds are compressed and sent to your phone at once, not one feed at a time as requested. This makes it quite a bit more efficient for the user and for the phone bill. 😊

I would love to have people try both the products. There is a lot going on in the area right now and it would be interesting to hear what people think.

I wish the guys at Lonely Cat Games would make an aggregator based on the same framework as ProfiMail. Then you would be able to fit a lot more on the screen at once.

I've tried both Headline and FreeNews and am not especially pleased with either. Headline seems slow, doesn't support all my feeds and crashes regularly. FreeNews is Java so it always requires me to grant it permissions to connect to the network, and is subscription based.

I like that freenews will just fetch the updates to all the feeds at once, but I'm not sure its worth paying a subscription for.

Ideally I'd like a C++ app that downloads updates in the background when required.

EddWo wrote:
I like that freenews will just fetch the updates to all the feeds at once, but I'm not sure its worth paying a subscription for.

Ideally I'd like a C++ app that downloads updates in the background when required.

Hi EddWo - FWIW, I've had a number of user's tell me that the $20 for FreeNews saved them more than that in per packet data charges in just 2 months. If you're on a flat monthly rate, that's no consolation!

The background updates is an excellent idea and something we're working on.

Thanks, Jon M.

JonM wrote:Hi EddWo - FWIW, I've had a number of user's tell me that the $20 for FreeNews saved them more than that in per packet data charges in just 2 months. If you're on a flat monthly rate, that's no consolation!

The background updates is an excellent idea and something we're working on.

Thanks, Jon M.

Well I have paid the $20 for a subscription and I'm finding it fairly OK.

I like that it fetches all the updates at once, since I read the feeds on the train home from work which goes through several tunnels and the signal seemed to be lost just when I wanted to pull down some more data using Headline.

I don't like that I have to give it permission to make a connection and select the access point every time I run it, but I realist that is a limitation of it being written in Java and sandboxed.

Some operations seem terribly slow, returning to a feed after reading one of the items takes far to long. Its a couple of seconds before the red/white band appears, and then 3 or 4 more before it returns to the feed list.

If my 6600 was only capable of running Java apps I probably wouldn't mind so much, but Profimail etc have shown how much better a native symbian app can be and I am disappointed that a really great native feed reader does not seem to exist for the platform.

I am very impressed with FreeNews. I also like that you can view all your stories offline. I travel a lot by plane and I enjoy catching up on the news during that time. Before I was downloading story after story to my laptop to save for later. FreeNews is much easier to use on the go, and definately more comfortable to work with in the small confines of a plane.

Biggest drawback? Change the name so everyone stops complaining that it's not free past the 7 day trail!

If you look for a good (and free 😉 Rss software for your phone, try
SubliMobi Rss reader (http://www.sublimobi.com).