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Welcome back to Feed Reader Fridays here at BBGeeks.com. If you missed our previous review of the FreeNews reader, take a minute to check it out.

As RSS becomes more and more popular, it is being adopted by the mobile generation. This mobile adoption has lead to innovations in how we handle RSS feeds and in particular, how we handle the synchronization of these feeds across multiple platforms.

This Fridays feed reader review features the NewsGator Go RSS reader. One of the key selling points for this reader is the ease of synchronization between traditional online reading and on the go viewing of selected news feeds. For BlackBerry users who track a large number of feeds on a regular basis, the NewsGator Go feed reader just might be the feed reader for you.

System Requirements

NewsGator Go for BlackBerry is designed for BlackBerry OS 4.0 or later. This includes BlackBerry models in the following series: 7100, 7200, 7500, 8100 (Pearl), 8700, 8800, among others.

Please note: A NewsGator Online account is required to purchase or evaluate mobile products.

Pricing
NewsGator Go costs $29.95 alone or $14.95 with any of NewsGator’s other products (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Inbox).

A free trial of the NewsGator Go software is offered here.

Installation
The first step in the process is to sign up for a free NewsGator Online account. This is easy enough. Simply head on over to the NewsGator account set up page and enter in a user name and password. You will also need to tell NewsGator what type of content you wish to receive.

Once you are all signed up, you will see your NewsGator Online dashboard which features all of your feeds chosen up to this point and some helpful videos and widgets to get you started.

Your next step will be to download the NewsGator Go trial software. Clicking this link will take you to a standard TOS agreement page. Accept the terms and conditions and click the submit button.

An email with download instructions will be sent to the address you chose when signing up for the NewsGator Online account. The email will include the following URL http://ngmw.mwap.at/. Simply point your BlackBerry mobile browser at the URL and you are ready to go.

You will notice that when prompted to download the software from the mobile link, you are presented with two options. The first is a standard instal and the second is specifically for BlackBerry owners who are running a BES. We have downloaded the BES version for the purposes of this review.

Getting Started

After the download is complete, exit from your mobile browser. You will now see the NewsGator Go icon nestled amongst the other application icons on your BlackBerry desktop.

Click this icon to launch the NewsGator Go feed reader.

Upon launch, you will be prompted to enter the username and password that you had chosen while signing up for the NewsGator Online account. You will also be asked to indicate which time zone you are living in.

You may also be prompted by your BlackBerry to authorize the “HTTP Connection”. Choose “Don’t ask again for:HTTP connections to mobile.newsgator.com”. Then click the button labeled “”Allow this connection”.

During “Trial Mode” you may receive multiple error messages that state “No Licensed Account” or something to that effect. Don’t worry, this is just a default error message displayed for all trial access.

Getting around:

The first thing you will see after signing into your NewsGator account from your BlackBerry is the list of feed categories you had selected during the account setup. These are arranged in alphabetically orderd folders below a “catch all” folder named “My Feeds”. You will note that to the right of each heading there is a number in brackets. This number indicates the amount of unread news articles available for each.

Clicking on any of the main level folders will expand said folder and allow you to see which individual feeds are available. Again, the numbers to the right indicate specifically how many articles are available for reading.

Once you drill down into a specific feed within NewsGator Go, you will see a number of things. The first is the title of the feed in the upper left corner of the browser. The second is the post count in the top right. Last but not least you will see the headline for each available article in the chosen feed. Articles in each feed are displayed in chronological order and broken down by the day they were published.

Click on the desired headline to drill down into the actual article itself. Once you are done reading the chosen article, simply click the back button on your BlackBerry. You will now notice that the article you were just reading has been marked with a small green checkmark in the top left corner. This checkmark provides an visible indication that the article has already been read.

Note:Clicking at any point within the mobile optimized news article will prompt the NewsGator Go application to download the entire article from its source. The complete article includes any links, comments and additional content deemed nonessential for the mobile experience.

Menus and navigation

Getting around in NewsGator Go is effortless. The process of drilling down through folders, feeds and subsequently articles and contained links works exactly as it should, just scroll, highlight, and click.

Moving back up the news chain is equally as easy. Just click the back button on your BlackBerry keypad to jump backwards through each step of the chain.

NewsGator lets you organize your feeds into folders. Expanding and collapsing each folder is as simple as highlighting its header and clicking once to either expand a collapsed folder, or vice versa. This makes one-handed use of the program easy to manage to say the least.

Features and Settings:

Customization
There are a large number of settings available which you can play with in order to customize your RSS reading experience. These include a ton of display settings and font size adjustment. In order to access the settings menu, press the application key while inside NewsGator Go and scroll down until the word “settings” is highlighted. Click once to access the entire list of customizable options. For each of these options, simply drill down and indicate any changes you desire. Press the back button on your BlackBerry keypad to jump back one level in the navigation.IMAGE 6

Adding and removing news feeds
There does not appear to be a way to add new feeds to your account via NewsGator Go. This is slightly surprising as it is a common functionality of many other RSS readers on the market. Instead you will have to add any new feeds via the NewsGator Online dashboard. Not a hard process at all, but entirely inconvenient.

Send an article to a friend
Emailing an article to yourself for future use, or sending the info to a friend is an easy task with NewsGator Go. All you need to do is drill down into the desired article and hit the BlackBerry application key. In the menu that appears on the left, choose “Send”. You will be presented with a screen asking you who to send this article to. You have the option of choosing a contact from your contact list, sending it to your own BlackBerry email, or to an email address you define.

Offline content
The NewsGator Go application caches downloaded feeds onto your BlackBerry. This makes it possible to access all of your favorite feeds even during times when internet access is not readily available. Quite handy for the businessman on the go, riding subways or airplanes on a regular basis.

Article Clipping
Think of this as bookmarking the article for later use. To clip an article, simply click the BlackBerry application button while reading a particular news item. In the menu that appears on the left hand side, chose “Clip Article”.

After an article has been clipped, it is accessable from a new folder which appears above the “My Feeds” folder on the NewsGator Go main screen. These clipped articles are likewise, accessible from all of the various NewsGator software packages when syncronized.

Online/Offline Synchronization

The NewsGator feed reader syncs flawlessley with the NewsGator online platform. All feeds which have been read on your BlackBerry will be marked read on your online account. This makes it fairly easy to remain as productive as possible, reducing the amount of time it takes to sort out which news you have already been through.

Additionally, you are given the option to choose exactly which feeds from your NewsGator online account you would like pushed to NewsGator Go for the BlackBerry. For me personally, this is an incredible bonus. I have a number of feeds which I keep an eye on that are suited for on the go access, while at the same time have a handfull of feeds which I prefer to read from the comfort of my home office. Being able to seperate the two allows for a streamlined workflow and increased productivity.

NOTE: The software is not only able to synchronise RSS subscriptions and content between NewsGator Go and NewsGator Online. The entire suite of products is supported, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator Inbox.

Performance

NewsGator Go performed adequately in all of our tests. It refreshes feeds in an efficient manner and syncs with your NewsGator Online account quickly. There is also a handy status bar which indicates your progress during syncing and feed loading.

During the syncronization process, you will notice a significant impact on your system resources. You will find that access to other applications during the sync will be slow to unresponsive. This issue resolves itself once the sync has completed.

The NewsGator Go software does a great job loading article pages. During tests there was little to no delay. By loading the full text of the article first, the reader allows you to begin reading right away, while you wait for any embeded images to filter in. The NewsGator Go feed reader displays traditional online content in an efficient manner thanks to the implementation of “Skweeze” technology.

Skweeze — the ability to “skweeze” the full article output from feeds which tease a story only but does not display images,etc.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the NewsGator Go RSS reader functions extremely well in all the things that it does. Allowing quick and easy access to a large amount of news with only a few clicks of your BlackBerry keypad, delivering the same content offline, and synchronizing all of this content with your computer at home or work. The big misstep here is the lack of functionality when it comes to adding news feeds while on the go. I look forward to having the ability to add new feeds through the NewsGator Go in future releases of this product.

So if you are not scared of the $24.95 price tag and can see the value in having access to the NewsGator Online account, I suggest downloading NewsGator Go. There is a free trial available so why not give it a shot.

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