REVIEW: Mobispine’s mobile RSS reader calls up deficient results

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Yay or Nay, a feature for RCR Wireless News’ weekly e-mail service, Mobile Content and Culture. Every week we’ll review a new wireless application or service from the user’s point of view, with the goal of highlighting what works and what doesn’t in the mobile content industry. If you wish to submit your application or service for review, please contact us at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
Application: Mobispine’s mobile RSS reader
Running on: Samsung M510 from Sprint Nextel Corp.
Yay: Mobispine updates content frequently, and its user interface is so simple your parents could figure it out.
Nay: With only 11 channels, pickings are slim on the content front. Also, accessing recent headlines is easy enough, but digging deeper into some stories requires closing down the app and firing up the WAP browser, then launching Mobispine again to access the next story. Which gets old pretty quickly.
We say: Only in Beta, Mobispine does a serviceable job of delivering timely headlines to Java-enabled phones. But a few glitches and an overall lack of content make the application nothing more than a novel, promising offering — not a must-have.
Review: We hate using our phones to brush up on the news. On-deck offerings are usually limited to just a few sources that seem to update their pages maybe three times a day, and off-deck news sites are often ill-suited for mobile, making for a miserable experience.
Mobispine, a startup out of Sweden, hopes to bridge the gap between online news and mobile with its flagship offering, a downloadable RSS reader. The application, which is available for download here, offers a refreshingly simple user interface: a three-category carousel across the top of the screen dictating sub-menus of options.
The three main categories couldn’t be more simple: a bookmarks offering allows users to choose which sources they’d like to receive feeds from, a “my news” option that delivers news from those sources, and “explore,” which presents a list of news stories and blog entries by category.
Sadly, our initial excitement about browsing potential bookmarks was short-lived: the news category offered only a handful of channels, many of which seemed relatively obscure. In addition to content from MSNBC and the New York Times’ business offerings, we were presented with The Mobispine Blog, BBC Sport and a blog called memeorandum. Options under the technology category comprised only the Unofficial Apple Weblog and Boing Boing, and sports content was limited to ABC News and the BBC.
One random sampling offered an underwhelming 11 channels of content, many of which were from less than high-profile sources. And we couldn’t find a way to customize the application with our favorite news sources – a key element of some of the best RSS readers.
Most channels were updated fairly consistently — rotating stories anywhere from every several minutes to every few hours — the content seemed to have a distinctly European tilt. (Which may not be surprising, considering Mobispine is hoping to gain a foothold in Europe before it comes to North America in earnest.)
And drilling down through headlines to get more substantial information often proved problematic. Mobispine did a fantastic job of retrieving information from direct sources such as the New York Times, formatting it for the phone and delivering it through the application, allowing a single-screen read of fairly lengthy news pieces. But for news aggregators and clipping services such as memeorandum — a substantial contributor of Mobispine content in the United States, apparently — the process was painful. Clicking on a “go to URL” link to retrieve more information automatically shuts down the app, launching a WAP browser that delivers the source. Those Web pages are often not formatted for mobile phones, offering a painful user experience. One memeorandum piece we clicked on delivered us to a Washington Post page that was basically mobile-hostile, requiring more than 150 scroll-through clicks just to access the story. Really.
Other offerings made it clear that Mobispine is targeted at European users, not U.S. consumers. As it shuts down, the application helpfully lets users know exactly how much data they’ve accessed during the session, underscoring the problems facing the pay-per-byte market across the pond. And the “explore” option includes a category on adult content — something you’re highly unlikely to see in any U.S.-focused application.
It seems clear that many of the glitches we experienced with Mobispine are due to the fact that North America is, for now, a secondary market for the Beta product. And we fully support Mobispine’s mission: to deliver timely, targeted information to on-the-go consumers. But until the developer works out some of the kinks — and adds a lot more channels to the menu — we’ll admit defeat and head back to the deck to get our mobile news.