And My iPhone RSS Reader of Choice is…

Matt Petch — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:25:46 +0000

I have decided to change the way I present my group reviews. In fact they wont really be group reviews as such any more. I will still spend a good deal of time looking at all of the available apps within a chosen group, but rather than take up space talking about the ones I wasn’t so keen on I have decided to cut to the chase and just talk about my preferred app.

I have recently been looking for a good free RSS reader. Why do I feel a twinge of guilt when I say I’ve looking for a free one? Anyway it couldn’t just be any RSS reader. I had a list of criteria that it had to meet.

Google reader synchronization.
I want to be able to add to my RSS feeds whilst at my computer so it was important that the reader app would sync with whatever I added to my Google Reader account.

Manually organize subscriptions into folders.
I wanted to have the ability to group feeds into folders rather than have a single long list of feeds or some sort of automated sorting.

Built in Web Page viewer.
I didn’t want to have to leave the app to view a feeds web page in Safari.

Look good and be easy to use.
It is important to me that an app looks good and is easy to use.

This criteria allowed me to draw up a short list of half a dozen or so apps. I couldn’t find an app that satisfied all of the above criteria, but Of those I looked at, two really stood out. iNews O by gdiplus and MobileRSS (Free Version) by Nibiru Tech.

iNews O is a very feature rich and customisable RSS reader. Notable features are its option of displaying feeds in a tiled manner rather like magazine thimb nails, the ability to customize the navigation bars and the impressive range of export options which include Mail,Instapaper, Read It Later, Twitter and Facebook. Despite these features it still lacked one important thing for me; The ability to arrange and group feeds into folders of my creation.

The RSS reader I finally settled on is the free version of MobileRSS. MobileRSS Synchronizes with Google reader and whilst I can’t manually create a folder structure, it does maintain the folder structure I create in Google reader.It does have a built in browser and it can display feeds for the small screen. Export and integration functions are quite good allowing you to send to Twitter, Facebook, ReadItLater, Instapaper, Delicious and Email.

In all these are two very good apps but I think it is the simplicity and clarity of MobileRSS that wins me over.

Link to the Proporta website

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And My iPhone RSS Reader of Choice is…

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