SOFTWARE REVIEW

Spb Insight

RATINGS Quality Geekness

With the wider and wider spread of network-enabled PDAs and smartphones, those of us who are addicted to RSS feeds and blogs have found a large number of tools available to help feed our information jones. Spb Software House enters the growing field with Spb Insight, a full featured RSS reader for Windows Mobile devices. Spb Insight offers a variety of features that make the adding, reading, and updating of feeds a simple process, and handles the one-handed form factor of Windows Mobile devices very well.

Spb Insight installs as every other WM5 application does, either through ActiveSync or directly on the device via .CAB file. It can be installed either to the main memory of the device or a memory card. After install, users can then choose what content they want to download to the device.

Pressing the left softkey brings up the New Channels window, which allows the user to choose a channel source from the following options:

The Online catalog option downloads a listing of over 1,300 popular channels that is divided by subject. Drilling down through the folder structure and clicking on the channel you want adds it to your local listing. If you already know the URL for the feed you want to read on your device, simply select the RSS/Atom feed option and enter it yourself.

If you are already using a desktop reader (and honestly, if you don't have one, you are starting in the wrong place ... get to FeedDemon or some such), you can export your feed listing to the ever popular OPML file, place it in your device's My Documents folder, and browse through it on the device to pick the feeds you want to use. This does not offer any type of synchronization with your desktop reader, however.

Searching for a feed also works through your data connection, though your results may vary.

The final, very powerful option is adding a Local Template. This capability is best utilized with a bit of knowledge of XML, but can allow a user to get data from any webpage and properly format it for the small screen. Proceed with caution, however, if you are not a programmer, and check out the Spb message boards for more information.

Each time you add a feed Spb Insight will attempt to download the appropriate content via whatever data connection is available. Thankfully, there are options that can control the method and amount of data you will download. If you are blessed with unlimited data plans on a high speed network like Verizon or Sprint's EV-DO implementations or Wi-Fi, you can likely download to your heart's content. If you are paying more for a data connection or it is slower, you can opt to turn off the downloading of images for a feed, saving you data costs and space. You can even set "no downloading of images" as the default behavior, and then later choose which channels you want to download images individually. This is a very thoughtful option that considers the varying types of data connections WM5 users may have.

Updating can also occur when the device is cradled, pulling updates through the established ActiveSync connection. This also will help keep data costs down, though if your corporate network is behind a firewall you will need further configuration work for it to succeed. You can even set Spb Insight to only use "free" Internet connections (Wi-Fi or ActiveSync) to do its updates.

Once your chosen feeds have downloaded to the device, navigating among the feeds is a a simple task. Pressing the center action button opens a feed and will also open an article. Scrolling up and down is handled by your navigation pad. While reading an article you can press left or right on the navigation pad to go to the next or previous article. Scrolling to the end of an article also moves to the next one in line. When viewing the listing of articles in a channel, scrolling right or left moves among the channels on the device. The softkeys change the function in support of one-handed navigation, allowing the user to move back and forth between the channel and article views. Again, kudos to Spb for making this one-handed navigation possible.

Because the RSS data pulled down by the device can be sizable, it is strongly recommended that content be stored on a storage card, a simple configuration selection in the Options menu.

I have been using Spb Insight for a few weeks and can find very few negatives in the product. On my wishlist for a future version is the ability to put feeds into folders for organizational purposes. I have run into a few lockups with Spb Insight running, but nothing catastrophic has occurred. On the Spb forums I have seen some complaints about corrupted SD cards while using Spb Insight, and those are likely related to a write process being interrupted.

RSS junkies, rejoice! Your WM5 enabler is here. If synchronization with your desktop is a must, NewsGator is beta testing a WM5 reader that will stay in sync with its FeedDemon desktop software, but at a price. Spb Insight should do just about everything you need at a good price.

Ratings Defense
For Quality I give Spb Insight 4 Geekheads out of 5. A very clean interface, easy methods of adding and updating feeds, and simple customization make the product easy and enjoyable to use.

For Geekness I give Spb Insight 3 Geekheads. Its overall Geekness is not that huge (we all use RSS readers, right?), though the Local Template option will give the truly ambitious a lot to play with.

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