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Here's a comparison of ways you can read your feeds from google reader on your non-touch s60 phone. The focus of this comparison isn't to highlight the features of each, rather its to compare one thing: how it displays the complete feed. The complete feed is simply how it's displayed on the desktop with the exclusion of videos of course. The more complete the feed is, the more a desktop experience you get on your mobile. Well, just the feed at least.

First off, here's the actual feed from the desktop version

Now to the mobile solutions:

http://m.google.com/reader

From left to right:

Opera Mobile (set to mobile view mode)
Opera Mini (set to mobile view mode)
UCWeb (set to adaptive mode)

The mobile gReader site is as good as it gets. It gives you as complete a feed as you can get really. The article is there, images, embedded links, html styling & formating, etc. Though each browser has its issues. Opera Mobile has image quality issues & image stretching issues (not quite apparant in the screenshot, but its there). Opera Mini has image quality issues, limits with images displayed and can't resize the image to page width even in mobile view. UCWeb doesn't align text, doesn't space between paragraphs & gets confuse a bit with html styling on occasions.

http://www.google.com/reader/i

This is the iphone's version of gReader on Opera Mobile. It displays almost identical to the mobile gReader site. Again there are minor issues. Images are resized but not fitted to page width. As a result, they look a bit smaller. On occasions, especially with the s60 browser, text and images tend to offset to the right of the page requiring horizontal scrolling. Not a big fan of that.

MojosMobile gReader

This is how a feed looks like on Mojosmobile's gReader application. Not so great isn't it. You get small size images, plain text, paragraph breaks with no spacing and that's about it really. The article is completely stripped down from it's original html formating. What's worst is the app doesn't use the entire page width to display the article because of those oddball icons on the right. I am not impressed, especially considering its a paid app.

Gravity gReader

This is how a feed looks like in the beta gReader in Gravity. Again not much as in MojosMobile own app. Plain text only and paragrah spacing. Still no images yet. Granted, Gravity's implementation is very beta so you can't criticize it too much. It just hasn't been developed in full yet.

The point is this, if you're creating a gReader application or solution for mobile & you're turning it into a paid application, you better make sure you develop one that meets or exceeds the free alternatives. Priority number one should be the feeds themselves and displaying them correctly. That should be the the core of the app. Build everything else around that. Mojosmobile app, to me, wasn't designed that way. The opposite in fact. Lots of features, but feeds look horrible.

Note that this post is strictly about how the feeds are displayed and nothing else. Extra features, usability, naviagation, etc are not mentioned.

What do I use as my gReader solution on mobile? I perfer the mobile gReader site on UCWeb browser. Why exactly? Maybe in a future post? I'm tired. This was a long post.

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Here's a list of issues I've encountered so far after 24 hours with the Nokia N86. Note that I'm still on the initial firmware until v20 gets release for the US variant:

1. slider is not secure. top piece shifts and wobbles. most noticeable when multimedia keys opened
   • wobble of slider becomes more apparent when holding phone to take photo
2. slight difficulty in sliding phone to use multimedia keys
3. camera key stiff. need to press real hard down on button to take photo after autofocus
4. realplayer playback issues with youtube mobile videos. corrupted video playback, buffering issues, stuttering audio
   1. scratch that comment. tried it again and youtube mobile videos playing just fine for the most part. some videos still have minor playback issues, but most seem to play fine now. i don't know whether one of the restart i had with the phone resolved the issue or the youtube mobile site was just acting up a bit when i was using it
5. nokia email client does not work correctly with my yahoo mail account. crashes each time it attempts to connect with the account
6. poor outdoor visibility. almost impossible to read in direct sunlight. expected due to oled screen
7. copy/paste not working in certain text fields on websites in native s60 browser. website includes dabr.co.uk
8. setting default access point to "none" for java apps or ucweb does not default access point selection to destination priorities like on my nokia n78. instead, the nokia n86 ask for access point selection when a connection is attempted
9. magickey app not working properly. key reassignments not working when phone slider is closed or multimedia keys opened
   • volume key reassignments work with keypad out
   • could be due to keypad being disabled when slider is closed. as a result, volume/multimedia keys reconfigured to numbered keys won't work
   • phone crashes & restarts if exit with phone slider closed
   • phone crashes & restarts if daemon is killed
10. launching settings app crashes when briefly open sometimes when opening through jbak app listing (hold menu key with settings at top of listing)
    • next time launch, settings app is slow to navigate around
    • requires another launch of app for it to work as usual
11. messaging app defaults messaging files storage location back to phone memory rather than mass memory where it was assigned to. happened once.
    • says could not find saved to drive so defaults back to phone memory
    • could be due to phone restart
    • similar issue to nokia n97
12. popping sound from speaker when volume set too high? need to revisit

The wobbly slider is getting pretty annoying. I may return it back to Amazon on Monday and try to exchange it.

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