At first glance mRSS (AKA mNews) seems to be candy for the news junkie. In fact it is. But it’s also a great way to stay up to date with whatever interests you as more and more Internet sites are making use of RSS feeds.

For those of you unfamiliar with RSS, it stands for Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary. It’s a way to bypass all the other junk on CNN when all you really want to know about is the most current information on Brad and Angelina. Or it can be set-up to give you whatever news strikes your fancy.

I ran through several of the RSS links that came with mRSS and found entirely too many that I liked. I could spend all day just reading article after article. The default channels had a selection of topics that should please just about anyone.

mRSS allows you to choose one of three options for viewing:

• By Title - only gives the title and of course loads very quickly, just click on the hyperlink for the article (works great)
  
• Quick View - gives a preview of the article without graphics, but with a hyperlink to view the full article (I had some trouble linking from Quick View to the article on my 700p, but on the 650 the center button will go to the link. The developer has informed me that a fix is in the works for a future release.)
• With Browser – no extra clicking needed, the whole article, including graphics is viewed (I had the same issue as Quick View.)

Using the By Title option, once you find a title of interest, you can click on it and you’ll see a preview of the article. By clicking on the blue link at the top, you’ll open the complete article.

Something unfortunate happens here. It’s Blazer, but not with any control over it. All pages are viewed in Wide mode and if a page is written in white with a black or other dark background, you will not see the article. Backgrounds are ignored and white font is invisible. Nothing can be highlighted, so it can’t be seen at all.

The good news is most of the bigger sites use black or dark letters on white or light backgrounds so the white screen doesn’t come up a whole lot. However much of what’s out there in RSS-land is not optimized for smartphones…yet.

One feature I particularly enjoyed was keywords. By downloading all the channels I wanted and then searching through them with keywords, I was able to find those Brad and Angelina articles immediately, without having to wade through any other useless news.

There are more sites than just what’s included in the default channels provided with mRSS and there are instructions in the user’s guide on how to grab other RSS feeds. As I began paying attention to which of my favorite sites use the RSS format, I discovered there was much more to it than just news. There are feeds supplying coupons through their RSS! Locally, there’s a feed that tells me what books my library has recently acquired. More and more sites are starting to see what can be done with RSS subscriptions. Even MTDN has RSS feeds for Reviews.

The Archive feature in mRSS allows you to keep links to articles that you want to view later (or those you find amusing and wish to view again) They can be stored on an SD card.

There’s an icon on the main mRSS screen that will take you directly to your Archived News.

Overall mRSS delivers as promised. It’s an RSS reader with useful keyword searches and archiving features. I’d like to see improvement in the Quick View and With Browser viewing and some control over Blazer while using it for viewing. But it’s functional as it is and RSS is a whole new world of information gathering that should keep me nicely informed on the latest with Brad and Angelina.

Related Links

Download mRSS

Buy mRSS

An RSS file format definition and history

Filed under: Software reviews