QUICK LOOK

• Get your RSS feeds on your phone, with images and full text
• Great social sharing
• Syncs with your Google Reader profile

I’ve written before about why I still believe RSS readers are still important in a Twitterised world. It may be a matter of personal taste and reading behaviours, but I for one still need a quiet space where I can follow topics that are unrelated to geek news (and where I can retain articles no-one else has read so that I can pretend to be interesting at dinner parties).

Google Reader – for a multitude of reasons – has been my RSS reader of choice for many years, and it’s the obvious choice for an Android phone. RSS feeds are the perfect “brain snacks” for when you need little snippets to read in those 5 minute gaps throughout the day. I’ve been using the official Google Reader Android app for a couple of weeks now, and I’m pretty happy with it overall.

You appreciate the Google Reader app best when you’ve previously tried to use the mobile site, which required you to try to aim for tiny dropdowns and text links using the fingernail of your pinkie (a feat as difficult as trying to get stuffed animals out of those claw machines). The app is much simpler to use, featuring big chunky buttons (mmm… buttons) and stripped-down text menus.

When you load up the app and sync it to your account (which is more of a mission than it should be, on a Google-owned Android device), you see the first menu showing you your starred items, friends’ items, the ability to explore to discover new feeds and your unread items. Sadly, you do see your unread items counter on this screen, so you may have to suffer the twinge of guilt that you’ve let it get to 1000+ yet again (do other people feel guilty about this, or do I have some strange emotional need to please Google?).

From within your unread items menu, you can access your feeds within their groupings, if you have created subfolders. If you click on an individual item, you can read the entire piece (including images – hallelujah). You are able to use the two big up and down arrow buttons (mmm… buttons) to go to the next piece, or you can set it up so that your phone’s volume keys do that for you. This is handy, because it means you don’t have to constantly return to the home menu to access the next item. Unfortunately, though, whenever feeds don’t pull the articles through in their entirety you have to launch the mobile browser to read them. This does get a bit clunky.

By opening the contextual menu, you have additional options to star, like or share the piece using Google Reader’s traditional functions. But even better, you are also able to use non-Google ways to share the piece using the phone’s share functions (e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Bluetooth, SMS, Evernote, Dropbox or any other sharing apps you have installed). This is probably the best feature of the app and it makes it much easier to send out articles to friends who aren’t (yet) Google Reader converts.

My single bugbear about the app is its inability to read articles offline. It would be great if the app pre-downloaded all of your articles when you were – say – connected to Wi-fi, so that you could read them all later without chomping through your 3G data. This is a particularly sensitive issue for me right now, since I may need to sell an organ or two to pay last month’s phone bill as it is. *Sigh.

There are other RSS reader apps out there, but if you’re already accustomed to the Google Reader interface I would recommend this one. Mainly because of the satisfyingly large buttons.

Turn ons

• Big buttons (mmm… buttons)
• Intuitive user interface
• Great social sharing tools

Turn offs

• Too much bouncing between the app and the mobile browser
• No offline reading

Price: Free