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Welcome to MobileRead Nathon and thanks for the comments. We are always happy to hear thoughtful and polite opposing views.
As a matter of fact, you are definitely not alone. I'm glad it's a good solution for you. I guess I'd have to say I'm a bit envious of those that have figured out the RSS feed thing so it works well for them on their handheld. Many people do seem to be very happy reading their RSS feeds with programs like Quicknews. One of these days I might even be one of them. But for me personally so far, it just hasn't been a very pleasant experience.
I agree also that the teaser feeds are certainly a problem due to content provider choices. But the trouble is that it is a mainstream technique and mobile device users face the biggest impact because the click-through to the original site is slower and more painful (depending on the site, the browser capabilities and the connection speeds). Even worse if you are not connected at all.
That whole issue of who controls how content is handled, and how much it can be controlled has a lot to do with the usability and cost of content in the future. I have concerns that with future web technologies (maybe not even in Web2.0, but especially Web 3.0 and beyond), it won't be possible to find printer friendly versions of sites for mobile clipping. We may find in the future that you can't navigate directly to a printer friendly page, or even directly navigate to a particular page within a site at all. Web sites will have the technology eventually to control completely the navigation through their content and what's seen on the page.
For mobile users, when this happens it may be compensated for by more content tailored specifically for mobile viewing because mobile devices will become commonplace. But additional control on viewing may also bring more subscription-only mobile content as content providers are better able to control the way their content is viewed. And it may not even be at prices that most people would consider fair.
Many sites, like newspapers, will collect revenue for subscriptions to content once they have better control of how you can get to the content for free. Maybe the give a subset of articles for free or teaser paragraphs. Sort of like the ESPN insider subscription model. Sites will continue to try to figure out how to best provide newspaper or magazine content in mobile form as a subscription (probably in addition to any subscription to read at the desktop if possible), but right now there don't seem to be any nice standards for delivery, and many times they even require special software for a particular site. (Washington Times has been an example of that.) Plus, it's a case of buyer beware, so it's just not even worth pursuing for most people. In some cases, you don't find out limitations or what's required or what the costs are until you are well into the purchase process. But eventually, it will evolve into common standards for mobile usage, and you can be sure that will include mechanisms for controlling payment for access.
Will customers and readers push back hard enough to prevent all this content provider "iron hand" control from taking over content on the web, and especially for mobile devices? I don't know. Without the pushback, it could be bleak, but even sites like Google which you mentioned, are helping with the pushback by providing alternate sources of the information repackaged. But even that is being threatened by legal challenges, so who knows where this will all end up!
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