Going Mobile Series: Unified my RSS reading experience with Newsgator services...
I am an intensive reader of RSS content. spending hours a day reading about 100+ blog and tech news rss to get information from the world. I used Newsgator 2.0 integrated to Outlook to manage those rss posts offlined and using MSN desktop search indexing those posts for me for fast retrieval of those information when I need them.
At start of this October I just got myself a new Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone, the Dopod 900. It just got everything in a little box. support GSM 900/1800/1900 , 3G (WCDMA), 802.11b and Bluetooth. People in Taiwan just started to have 3G services to use mobile devices surfing internet wirelessly at high speed. With my powerful little mobile device, I got to change my life style and started to live mobile.
The "Going Mobile Series" will be posts related to life style changes on using mobile devices. I've also created a post category about this called "Mobile Life" to collect those posts.
Today I am going to talk about the search of RSS reading services to unified my reading experience across mobile devices, online website, as well as offline content preserving for seaching.
There is a discussion series talking about what is a good rss reader for mobile devices. after reading it, I picked up 2 major services to investigate, Bloglines and Newsgator.
Both Bloglines and Newsgator are online rss reader, both have good user interface for reading and navigating blogs and posts. With Bloglines, you can just go to the mobile page to have simple rendered content for your mobile devices, which got the UI pretty much like what you've got using a normal browser on a PC. the reading history is sync.ed between mobile web and normal web, but not able to read or preserve content offline.
With Newsgator, you need to upgrade to a paid service (Consumer / Business Gold or above) to have the mobile edition. and then you'll got an unique URL for your mobile device to get your OPML list and posts. reading history is still sync.ed between mobile and normal web, which is the same as Bloglines. but there is something that Bloglines not able to do: to get content be read and sync.ed offline. Newsgator got its Outlook edition!
By the way, you can try those Newsgator services 14 days before you decided to really purchase it. so just feel free to try them out. I subscribed Business Gold service to get the mobile edition and other services.
As I was familiar with the interface of Newsgator Outlook Edition, it's not a big problem for me to get it work. since I already used Newsgator 2.0 and got my OPML lists maintained by Newsgator, upgrade to this 2.5 version is easy and it automatically got my OPML list as well. the only question is that, could it really sync the reading history between mobile device / online web / and offline content?? I've did a test and found that it really worked!
Wherever you marked read of a post, it's sync.ed to the other 2 places, although with offline content you'll have to let it get the news again to get the sync.ed information updated to outlook folders. Also I love it's folder management abilities to let me organize blogs into categories, and the changes of folder locations, no matter changed at outlook, or via web UI, will also be sync.ed to the other place, pretty intuitive and user-friendly!
So, now I can extend my RSS reading availability to mobile devices by using 3G mobile band connecting to internet for reading my subscribed blogs when I am moving from a place to another places, and no matter I read a post from any device, I won't have to mark it read again at my other devices, just as it should be! It's really cool to be able to get the information I need anytime and anywhere!
I am planning to get Podcasting subscriptions ready on my Dopod 900 in the next... stay tuned....
Technorati Tags: microsoft , windows mobile , dopod , dopod900 , newsgator , bloglines