Avantgo, Newsmob, Plucker, Sunrise/Plucker, RSS Bandit 2 Plucker, MobileRSS

[divirtual]

Since I got my Palm TX at the beginning of November, I've tried multiple ways of doing offline RSS readers. To save others the days and days of experimentation, I'm posting my findings.

For beginners, Avantgo does a good job. It's free up to 8 Mb, which initially seemed like a lot, until I started subscribing to blogs, and got a 1 GB SD card. One advantage of Avantgo is that it's got a pretty good interface to figure out if feeds (RSS, Atom, XML) are available.

Incidentally, I hadn't used My Yahoo in a while, and was impressed with their ability to pick up RSS. However, the Yahoo feed in Avantgo doesn't pick up the feeds from My Yahoo, so neither one was satisfactory.

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. 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. (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).

The conventional wisdom on the web is to use Sunrise with Plucker Viewer. This worked well. (I had the Java "Out of Memory" message, and figured out how to increase that).

I guess that Sunrise worked TOO well for me, for now I was discovering that I was getting TOO MUCH content. (I've posted a question on how to better filter on a separate thread).

In hopes of reducing threads from RSS feeds, I was searching around and discovered RSS Bandit 2 Plucker. RSS Bandit is a Windows-based RSS reader, and RSS Bandit 2 Plucker transfers all of the "unread" entries to Plucker. Although there is a video of the installation on the web, there is no documentation or forum. (I've e-mailed the author). I had some problems getting the connection from "RSS Bandit 2 Plucker" to a new channel in Plucker. (I don't always install under the "Program Files" directory, so it took a few deletions and reinstallations to figure out that non-standard directories may be an issue).

RSS Bandit 2 Plucker appears to do as advertised. One thing that I hadn't considered, though, is the that content gets downloaded from Bandit to Plucker pretty well as a flat file, i.e. there aren't any links at the top of the page (or in the middle) to jump down the document. (In Sunrise, there's a "create index for newsfeeds" checkbox that is quite helpful). This output is somehow harder to read, so this alternative is still behind the Sunrise/Plucker combination. (Other people may like to try it out, to see how they like it).

After reading a few more reviews, I went over to http://mobilerss.com . This website would probably be my choice if I was surfing live on the Internet on my Palm. One nice feature is that the pages are generated on the fly, and visible on a PC browser, so you can get a good idea of what the content would look like on a Palm before having to do all of the work installing.

I tried a combination of MobileRSS as a channel directly into Plucker Desktop. MobileRSS/Plucker Desktop works almost as well as Sunrise/Plucker. The index "tree" in Plucker Viewer makes navigation easy. In practice, however, MobileRSS appeared to be pickier about pages that it wouldn't accept as "well-formed RSS". As an example, http://www.chowhound.com/canada/boar...o/toronto.html really isn't RSS. It's HTML pages. Somehow, they're viewable in Sunrise/Plucker -- I don't "create index for newsfeeds" -- but MobileRSS won't handle them. (I suppose it might be possible to send such pages directly to Plucker, if Sunrise doesn't turn out well in the future).

So, after going around in a circle, I think that the leading solution is Sunrise with Plucker viewer. If this didn't exist, I would probably revert to MobileRSS with Plucker Desktop and Plucker Viewer. If that didn't exist, I would probably go to RSS Bandit 2 Plucker. In all, I wasn't all that dissatisfied with Avantgo, but since I've started downloading blogs over 1Mb or 2Mb in size, I would be in a paying situation a lot sooner.

For the record, the above trials were on a Thinkpad T41 with Windows XP SP1 and fixes, syncing to a Palm TX .

[MrSaint]

Thanks for this helpful review. I never heard about RSS Bandit 2 Plucker before, although, I haven't used RSS Bandit either yet. You may want to keep an eye on Sunrise development, because from what I understood Laurens is working on a new viewer (PPC-only though I think) : https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...?threadid=5551

[Laurens]

The link is actually http://www.mobilerss.net/

It's a good solution, but you do give them details about your RSS usage. That goes for every other web service, though.. (Skweezer, Bloglines, etc.)

[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!