Our take on the Mobispine RSS reader

If ever there was a Web application that seemed tailor-made for mobile, it is the RSS feed. The constant roll of short text blurbs coming from blogs and news feeds is perfect for the limited capabilities of all but the most bare-bones phones. But like so many other Web apps, RSS has had trouble adjusting to the demands and restrictions of the mobile Web.

Most mobile browsers have an RSS or Atom reader inside, which will track feeds, throw up a paragraph or two onto the reader's screen and then provide a link to the full story. The problem is the full story is often a feature-rich Web page intended to be viewed on a PC browser, not the scaled down mini-browsers on most handsets. If the browser can render the site at all, it often is too big and too ungainly to be navigable or chock full of unsupported elements, often draining hundreds of kilobytes from a customer's data subscription.

Mobispine's RSS reader (downloadable at www.mobispine.com) is designed to address a lot of these issues, though it certainly doesn't do them perfectly. Mobispine has designed a Java application that helps users track down RSS feeds, organizes them and displays entries in a graphically rich, easy-to-use manner, with ads sprinkled between every few entries. Mobispine even tackles the issue of linking to the full story, but here's where Mobispine's neat and tidy rendering engine begins to break down.

Most RSS feeds push only a few paragraphs of each story to an RSS reader, assuming that if you want to read more, you simply will follow the link to the full Web site. When displaying a full story, the Mobispine app accesses that site and scrapes the full story into its reader, often with messy results. Buried in HTML code, the remnants of text ads and the occasional reader comment, you often can find the item you're trying to read, but it's not always easy to spot, and it certainly isn't pretty.

This isn't a fault in Mobispine's design. In fact, it's doing the best it can with the tools content providers make available. In cases where it works directly with a partner such as Yahoo! News, the results are much better formatted. Unconfigured blog feeds, however, often get mangled. News and blog publishers have designed their RSS feeds for the wired Web, and their intention is to drive users back to their Web sites, where they get full exposure to advertising. Until these publications realize that there is a potential mobile user base for RSS and start formatting their feeds accordingly, the experience isn't likely to change, no matter how much companies such as Mobispine tinker.

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