Resco Neeews on your Palm Treo

Posted on October 21st, 2007 by Diana M. McDonough

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Adding to their impressive line of applications, Resco has come out with an application that allows you to quickly and easily centralize all your RSS Feeds, Blogs and PODCasts. Resco Neeews organizes those together in what it calls Newspapers. Neeews comes with several Newspapers already set up.

The interface is intuitive and easy to use. The existing newspapers can be modified to your own liking, and you can add custom newspapers quickly. You can include feeds from many different sources and of different content types to a single newspaper. The number of un-read articles appears in parenthesis next to the newspaper.

In spite of the fact that I was totally inexperienced in the arena of RSS Feeds, I was able to quickly set up two newspapers: one for my city (a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio), and one for Cincinnati itself. I even set them up so that they had their own icons directly in the Palm Launcher, meaning I didn’t have to go into Resco Neeews to pull them up, but could go straight to them. Extensive help and explanation of terms are also built into the application.

You can schedule updates of your individual newspapers to happen automatically. You can also quickly disable the scheduling globally through the general options, should you need to turn the updates off quickly without editing each newspaper’s settings. Resco Neeews can be installed to your SD card, but if it is, these scheduled updates will not happen. Most of the data is saved to the SD card, and you can change the cache settings to further increase the amount of information saved to the card rather than the device.

Resco Neeews also supports several sources of dynamic feeds. These act very much like search-engines, and will find feeds that match the key-words entered.

The amount of information in any given article varies, depending on the feeds. They range in size from full articles to teasers. Some were so short that they left me scratching my head and wondering why they were included at all. Most articles seem to be 2-3 sentences. For some of these articles, I wish there had been a link to take me to the full article. Also, I found that I got some articles multiple times because the same articles were carried by several feeds in the same newspaper.

You can send specific articles to other people via e-mail, SMS, beaming or BlueTooth, or you can export the article(s) to memos.

Resco Neeews keeps a history of the articles you have looked at, but I found it to be of little use, as it listed the date/time stamp of the article rather than the title.