[timconstan]

Hello,

Thanks for the information, but hopefully I can clear up some of your issues with NewsMob. I'm making some assumptions, so please let me know where my assumptions are wrong.

I then tried Newsmob. In theory, I thought that I could use http://mobile.newsmob.com using Blazer, when near my home WiFi network; and http://sync.newsmob.com when I was disconnected.

Yes!

Following the instructions to "Sync your channels to your Palm ...", I installed Plucker Viewer and Plucker Desktop. Sure enough, the channels synched on Plucker Desktop. ONLY, however, the top level pages synched! There was no other content that could be sent down to the Palm, making the experience pretty limiting.

When you follow the instructions, NewsMob is displayed in 2 levels, the first level is your list of favorite news sources, and the 2nd level is the headlines & stories. There is no other level available from the news sources. I'm assuming you're comparing NewsMob's service with AvantGo and other services where there's an artificial 3rd level like this: List of Channels, List of Headlines, News Story. Separating the headlines from the stories provides a much more difficult to read/use service. In AvantGo for example if you wanted to read 5 stories you would tap on the headline, scroll to read the story, go back, tap on the next headline, scroll, go back ... well you get the idea ... in NewsMob, you just have to scroll! And, just to be clear AvantGo is not displaying more information, they are just displaying it in a difficult to use format.

If you mean that NewsMob didn't follow the links in the headlines and stories and grab content from the originating web site, then this works as designed and is perhaps part of the problem you were having with Sunrise where you said:

I guess that Sunrise worked TOO well for me, for now I was discovering that I was getting TOO MUCH content.

The links back to the originating web site will pull back too much information because those sites aren't sync friendly. If you have come across the rare site that is sync friendly then you can do that with NewsMob! Just change your preferences in NewsMob to Follow Off-Site Links. Checking this box allows you to sync the full story from the originating web site. If some of your favorite channels provide sync friendly links and some don't, then create 2 NewsMob accounts and set your preferences for each account accordingly.

(If you surf over to the forums, you'll see that there's only been about 4 postings -- total! -- in 2004 and 2005, which indicates that offline reading really isn't something that Newsmob is targeting).

Granted, NewsMob doesn't have the name recognition that AvantGo does, but that doesn't mean we're not serious about offline reading! We live it and love it! We aim to be the best off-line reading experience available. Please try NewsMob again with these points in mind and if you don't agree, please be more specific about what's missing, and we'll fix it!