When I first started getting into RSS, I used NewsGator. Probably the coolest thing about using NewsGator as my aggregator was that it allowed me to synchronize my feed folders in Outlook to my Pocket PC, meaning that I could read my feeds offline. Even cooler was that anything that I read while away from my computer would be marked as read when I synchronized my Pocket PC.

This worked well for me for awhile, but over time a few things became apparent:

  1. Outlook is just damn slow. 2003 especially. (Chris Pirillo’s right on this one)
  2. The Pocket PC Inbox application only supports plain text, with no image support. Formatting is stripped.
  3. ActiveSync, while much better than it used to be, gets flaky and downright unstable when synchronizing a large number of folders. I’m not talking Scoble-like 1000′s of feeds/folders, but more like anything over 100. At that point it gets really flaky.

This is really a shame, because I’ve yet to come across any other way to synchronize the same set of RSS feeds in XP as well as on my Pocket PC. But I eventually became so frustrated with fighting with Outlook and ActiveSync that I decided there must be something better. I decided to divide my RSS subscriptions into “desktop” and “Pocket PC” feeds; I tend to scan more on my desktop, but read in depth on my Pocket PC, so I sorted accordingly.

I’ve been through a bunch of different readers on my Pocket PC since then, most recently Ilium Software’s NewsBreak reader for Pocket PC. I was using the 1.0 trial version, which, while a nice reader, has a number of shortcomings. To be fair, they have apparently released a 1.0.1 version, so many of the problems I’m about to list may have already been sorted out. Anyhow, here were my problems with NewsBreak:

  • Navigation between feeds required stylus taps; it can’t be done with navigation buttons
  • The application if left running would fairly regularly hang my Pocket PC in a running state, killing my battery dead and requiring me to restore from a backup (if I had a recent one) or reinstall all software (this has happened to me twice)
  • Because of the above bug, I could not set it to automatically synchronize, so had to remember to manually do so each time I docked my Pocket PC

This eventually became tedious, so I decided to see if there were any better readers available for Pocket PC. The one I heard mentioned again and again is called Egress.

So far it looks great; navigation can be accomplished solely with navigation buttons, and it apparently will download and cache inline images (I haven’t seen another Pocket PC aggregator that would do that). So I’m giving it a go. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Please note: I've moved my active blogging over to a new site, called Jason Clarke - Infinite Bass Line. I will leave this site up indefinitely, but if you're interested in my latest posts please consider visiting the new site.