Productivity Portfolio

At first, I thought that any RSS reader for the Pocket PC would offer few features or need too many taps. My other fear was it would be difficult to add RSS channels. NewsBreak decisively squelched these fears on day one.

I was particularly impressed with the New Channel Wizard. The company thoughtfully provides a predefined list of 35 or so channels where you can check ones of interest. Or, if you're looking for new channels, the program links to Syndic8.com which is a popular RSS directory. And for RSS addicts, you can import OPML files. About the only missing options are auto-discovery and detecting a RSS feed based on a URL such as the site's home page.

Although the product got off to a good start with the Channel Wizard, I was equally impressed with NewsBreak's ease of use and visual clues. These icons help you focus on important or timely items. As you can see in the screen snap below, NewsBreak shows:

By looking at the main page, I can tell if there are stories about my keywords. A similar icon system is used when you drill down to a channel's headline list such as Gmail.

The program allows you to set any number of keywords and assign one of nine icons. For example, you might assign the star icon to a keyword for your company and the flag icon for your competitor. When you view the story summary, you can see the keyword identified at the bottom of the page.

The program also provides several viewing options from the main page and from the channel headline page that make reading easier. For example, you can assign a channel to a category such as PDA. If you wish to view only the PDA category, you can click the Categories Button at the top of the main page and select the desired category.

A similar filtering can occur using the View option at the bottom of the main page and the headline listing. Here you can elect to see only new headlines. And since we're in that bracket that no longer has 20/20 vision, we appreciated being able to use ClearType and adjust the text size.

There were some glitches we hit, but nothing that would keep us away from using the product. Ironically, one of the glitches included our feed which didn't properly update on one occasion. But, the flip side is this glitch introduced us to Ilium Software's support personnel whom I will assign equally high marks. They responded to the issue in a timely and professional manner.

As with our feed issue, sometimes the problem isn't caused by NewsBreak but the vendor or RSS feed. For example, we were disappointed to learn that Gmail only provides about 80 characters for each email message. All the same, we preferred pulling our Gmail using NewsBreak rather than using the Messaging program on the Pocket PC.

After using the program for a week, we're very impressed and think this program is well worth the cost. There are no complicated settings or panels that sometimes overwhelm users. The bottom line is NewsBreak provides much of the functionality of desktop RSS readers without the bulk and complexity.