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RSS Feed Reader for the 9300

1 replies · 4,408 views · Started 04 January 2009

While following a thread on another Symbian board I ended up evaluating two RSS Feed readers for the 9300. One was bad, the other pretty good.

[edited...the other board "My-Symbian" seems to have not take my follow-up review on the better product, possibly because they are selling the product that got the negative review. I'm curious however since all three product reviews in their sales database were negative as well and these were not removed.]

Product #1: NewsGrabber - this purports to be a newsreader, but suffers greatly from any real forethought put into the application. The free download is a "demo" version which has to be registered to unlock some features and has frequent popups saying "Demo version", but looking at the menus and using it to view a couple of RSS feeds, I would advise you not to waste your time with this product. There are no help files or screens and the application only displays a very small portion of the feed abstract followed by an ellipsis ("..."😉 with no apparent way to link to the news site to be able to read the entire article. There also doesn't appear to be any way to save or flag an article for later reading. The program is compiled native to the 9300 and installs by an .SIS file.

Product #2: FreeRange- this is a Java (J2ME) application (so don't expect a fast initial load), but seems to have all of the features that you'd expect in an RSS feed reader. To start, you have to create an account (free accounts are limited to 10 feeds) by entering a username, password and email address. A negative...after entering this information you have to select MENU, Create Account in order to save the information. A little clumsy but after this most menus are intuitive and straight-forward. The program must be installed by browsing with your 9300 to http://mwap.at where the site determines that you have a 9300 and begins to download a .JAD file.

After creating an account, the default installation comes with 10 pre-loaded feeds which browse just fine. You can read headlines, then select the headline to read the abstract and then selecting the abstract brings up your web browser and takes you to the site for reading in full Web format. You can mark headlines for reading later. Pretty much everything that you'd expect in a RSS reader is in this application. I'm considering it a "keeper" application for my 9300.

Does anyone know of any other RSS News Readers for the 9300?

I don't know how I missed this before but OPERA MINI version 4.1 (for the 9300/9500) has an OUTSTANDING RSS Feed Reader in it.

It's kind of hidden in the top level selection and I had some difficulties installing a new feed at first, but it can't be any simpler...you surf to a page where there is a feed, cursor onto it and select it and voila it is added to your feed listing.

The browsing of the RSS headlines is much, much better than the two products above using the full screen (experiment with the directional arrows especially left and right to navigate) and it is almost an order of magnitude faster.

Best of all, it has its own browser function built-in so you don't have to wait for the Web applet to load.

Opera Mini is a must-have application for your 9300/9500 if you are a news reader junkie like me.