Android App Review – FeedR

Overview: If you aren’t familiar with RSS yet, you should be if you enjoy reading blogs and news. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or originally: Rich Site Summary), and is a great way to pull information from websites to quickly get information. If you are reading this article, you’ll probably see the logo (pictured above) somewhere on your browser, just click that to bring up some options on how to subscribe to our RSS “feed”, using this, you can subscribe to websites and get their data automatically. Almost all websites use RSS feeds these days, and they are a great way of keeping you informed. So today, I’m looking at the FeedR application for the Android G1, a great way to keep up with your favorite sites on the go.

Functionality: Simply, FeedR is an RSS Reader (much like google reader if you have used that), you put in the feeds you want to use, and it pulls the recent posts from the entered sites. It comes preloaded with a variety of feeds, most of which you’ll probably delete like I did the second I started it up, but unlike some other feed readers, finding new feeds is a snap. Typically, you have to enter a long URL (typically different from the sites normal address) to get a feed; but FeedR uses the google feed search engine to easily find the feeds you’re looking for. Once you’ve search for the feed you want, you can add it or get a preview of it to make sure it’s exactly what you want.

That’s all well and good, and it makes for an excellent RSS reader, but the special features are really where FeedR shines, most noticeably: notifications. You can set the reader to check your feeds automatically (at an interval of your choosing), and then notify you when you have new posts, saving you a lot of time by manually checking for updates yourself. The other features are nice as well, including auto-hide read articles, auto-rotation, memory options, shortcuts, and more.

Look and Feel: Look wise, it has the same (unfortunate) general look of most Android applications these days: text on a black background, fortunately the author made the wise choice and made it white and not an unreadable red. The interface is pretty simple, you have a list of news sources and you click on one to bring up the article, or long press to bring up the options for each feed. Then additionally, you can press the menu button on either the main screen or inside the individual fees for various options. It’s quite intuitive, and you probably won’t need to use the actual commands much after initial setup, which I think is a good thing.

Conclusion: This is the best news/RSS reader I’ve yet to use on the Android platform, and it’s modestly priced at only $0.99. If you enjoy getting all your information consolidated and don’t mind paying a smidgen, pick this one up.