I know, I know…it’s a two year old dinosaur, but my Pocket PC Phone Edition still meets my needs and T-Mobile has yet to come out with their next Windows Mobile device.
I am still overall very pleased with the functionality of my handheld. Things I like:
The only complaint is that since its Internet access is built on GPRS technology, it can be a bit slow. Hence, the purpose of this post.
I’ve gotten into RSS and have been reading a collection of RSS feeds for about a year now. I did some research and tried out a number of RSS reader apps built for the Pocket PC platform. Many of them required heavy use of a network connection, some required a subscription fee and others just plain stunk. And then I found Bloglines. Aside from their main site, Bloglines has a fantastic site tailored for a handheld sized web browser. Not only is the web interface easy to use, it is lightening fast! Their PDA site is, by far, the quickest loading site I’ve used over my GPRS connection which makes navigating my feeds quite nice.
I’ve been using RSS Popper to ready my RSS feeds in Outlook, which advertises synchronization with a Bloglines account. I tried it out and the synchronization is weak. In fact I didn’t really find it useful at all. RSS Popper is not to blame though since the Bloglines web services API is not very rich. So I use RSS Popper as my primary feed reader and then when I’m done reading all my feeds I use a .NET command-line process that I wrote that tells Bloglines (via HTTP GET) to mark all feeds as read (can’t seem to find the code around, so I’ll try to post that later). At any rate, the system is definitely not perfect but it works fairly well and allows me to read my feeds wherever I am (or at least wherever T-Mobile has coverage).