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:
- Great synchronization with the Windows platform
- Expandable memory with SD/MMC cards
- Great for listening to podcasts (using Windows Media Player)
- The phone works well
- I always know what traffic is like
- I always have access to my RSS feeds
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).