Review - NewsGator Go - Very Promising, Very Flawed

Posted by: PatrickJ on Sep 21 2006 - 2,464 views

NewsGator Go is NewsGator’s new Windows Mobile RSS aggregator that ties into their very popular NewsGator Online platform. It’s a very promising program, but one that also has some major things missing or clumsily implemented in this current version.

I’ve been using it heavily for a couple of days, and liking enough things about it to keep the application, but also finding several things that are frustrating and awkward when working with it.

Read on for some first impressions on using NewsGator Go …

Installation

Installation is very simple and standard for a Windows Mobile device - I used the .cab file link and there’s nothing out of the ordinary to report on this subject - it works as you expect.

Performance

NewsGator Go does very well on performance. It refreshes feeds fairly quickly, syncs with your NewsGator Online (to update which posts are read and not read etc) in a reasonable time, and shows you how’s it going with a pretty good status bar during these activities:

When you first kickoff a sync operation, there is a noticeable hit on overall system resources, i.e you cannot switch to another program very quickly, and responsiveness on the device is sluggish.  This settles down quickly though as the sync continues, so it’s acceptable.

It is very quick and nice to work with on loading article pages - there is virtually no delay in opening an article - it loads all the text first so you can dig in and start reading, and any photos / graphics on the page catch up as you go along, so you’re reading is not interrupted. The pages are very nicely optimized for mobile devices.

Sync with NewsGator Online - Very Nice

This is what is most interesting and appealing about NewsGator Go to my mind. Your feeds and status of articles read can be synced. So fi you’ve read it on your mobile, the Online version updates to reflect that and vice-versa. This is a very cool feature.

If you’re a heavy RSS reader on both the PC and a mobile device, this is a potential big timesaver. 

NewsGator also lets you choose which feeds are synced to your mobile device. That’s also very handy if you’ve got a huge collection of feeds but don’t need or want all of them pulled down to your device.

I had not used NewsGator Online before - but I like it and like the stay in sync capability enough that I’ll continue using it now.

Use-Ability - Poor

Navigation is Clumsy

Navigation within NewsGator Go leaves a lot to be desired. Navigating forward - as in, from your main listing of feeds to an individual feed, and from within one feed’s listing to an individual article - is fine and works well. Also, when you’re viewing a single article, it’s easy to move to the next or previous post.

But … if I want to go from a single post *back* to the listing of all articles for this feed, I have to tap the OK button at the top of the program screen. This is very awkward and pretty much requires use of the stylus, or fat-fingered efforts at tapping ok with a fingertip. The same goes for navigating from the listing of articles for one feed back to the main listings page containing all your feeds.

NewsGator lets you organize your feeds into folders. Nice. But, when you want to expand or collapse a folder in the mobile application, there’s no D-pad support - so you have to be able to tap on the tiny little + symbol left of the folder name - so you’re forced to use stylus or fingertips again.

This makes one-handed use of the program much more difficult.  It’s just not very clever.

Menus & Options Are Limited

Also - the menus and options for the program are very limited and missing some really essential items. For instance, when I read RSS items on my 8125, one of the things I do most often is email a link to myself or others when a piece is interesting. In NewsBreak this is extremely simple to do right from the SoftKey menus. In very few presses of the D-pad you choose to send a mail, choose your recipient, and send - as shown below:

In NewsGator Go, emailing yourself an article is clumsy and difficult to do. There is no menu item for this at all, so you have to follow the article’s link and open in your browser, and then choose to mail it from there - so you immediately lose a lot of time waiting on browser page loading and so on. This absolutely should have been a menu item within the application itself.

There does not appear to be any way to add a new feed within NewsGator Go - you just have your feed list as chosen on the Online version. That’s another very basic failing - you should be able to add and remove feeds from within the mobile client.

There’s no Today screen plugin as yet for NewsGator Go. That’s not a big deal to me, but is probably a feature that many mobile users would like to see. I also do not see any support for podcasts or enclosures within the application. The range of options and settings is just very sparse - there’s not a lot you can select or set preferences on - this should be improved.

Overall

NewsGator Go has a definite Version 1.0 feel to it, not surprisingly. It also feels to me as if it was designed and developed without ever looking at what other Windows Mobile RSS apps are doing, and doing well. 

The awkward navigation and lack of an easy way to email yourself a post, for instance, seem like pretty basic omissions. I believe that there are a number of excellent RSS programs for Windows Mobile - my favorite is NewsBreak, but there are several other very worthy contenders, like FeederReader, Egress, PocketRSS and so on. It seems to me that the NewsGator Go team should have been looking at these programs, and doing their best to match their features and abilities - perhaps trying to achieve FeederReader’s slick handling of enclosures, NewsBreak’s gorgeous look and feel, as well as rock solid performance, and so on.

Despite several pretty major flaws, I like NewsGator Go - and will keep it. This will be largely because of the sync capability with NewsGator Online. I hope and expect that the NewsGator team will improve the mobile application a lot, and get its features and ease of use much more up to the level of some outstanding Windows Mobile apps that it will compete with.

For more information, and to grab a trial download (you have to register with NewsGator for free first) visit:

NewsGator Go for Windows Mobile 

[tags]NewsGator Go, Windows Mobile RSS reader[/tags] 

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