Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Yay or Nay. 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. If you wish to submit your application or service for review, please contact us at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
Application: Piconews
Running on: BlackBerry 8130 on Verizon Wireless’s EV-DO network
Yay: A ridiculous amount of content from news feeds around the world delivered to your phone. Free.
Nay: See above, except for the “free” part. Also, navigating the app can be a chore, and wading through dozens of stories takes time.
We say: If you’re just interested in dipping in for the headlines or a score from the ballgame, Piconews isn’t for you. If you need hard-to-find content from obscure or foreign sources, though, this little app might be perfect.
Review: Too much of anything is a bad thing in mobile. Fast-action, console-type games squeezed down to the cellphone give us headaches, and watching football on a handset only raises our blood pressure.
Which is why we were at first skeptical of Piconews, a BlackBerry offering from BlackTouch, a developer out of France. Downloading the offering was a piece of cake – like many apps, you can point your phone’s browser to a download site or have a link sent to your phone via e-mail or SMS – but we were overwhelmed by the number of news items we received initially.
A welcome screen thanked us for using Piconews and then required us to enter our name and e-mail address “for authentication purposes.” We signed up for a push connection but when that option failed we settled for “periodic poll,” which presumably sends news feeds at regular intervals.
The screen was readable if not perfectly rendered (a header at the top was partially obscured), but the headlines were delivered quickly and cleanly – and in quantity. The initial “dump” included 24 items from Yahoo News, 17 from The Economist, 50 from the New York Times and dozens more. Picospace isn’t exactly a designing wonder – headlines are stacked atop one another with just the content provider’s name serving as a break – and it took us 24 scrolls of the trackball to reach the bottom of the screen. And that was before we signed up for any specific feeds.
But the first offerings were a fraction of what Piconews has to offer. Users can go online and register to receive feeds from a lengthy, categorized menu that offered news, media, society, sports and more. And the content providers ranged from the obvious (USA Today) to the niche (Washington Nationals) to the flat-out silly (returns for “pythons” in Austin, Texas).
We passed up the chance to shop for used reptiles in Texas, though, and subscribed to a few lesser-known feeds from the blogosphere. Then we went back to our handset, found “synchronize subscriptions” and began to receive the feeds (although we never could get the push feature to work).
Tweaking Piconews to your personal tastes seems like a time-consuming task: not only are there more than 1,500 feeds to wade through, we would have preferred not to have so many news stories from the New York Times’ business section, for instance.
But Piconews seems like the perfect way to stay up with The University of South Carolina’s sports teams, or the surf break for northern Orange County. We’re guessing users who simply download the app and don’t customize news feeds probably won’t use Piconews much. Those willing to spend a little time with the offering, though, will find an astounding amount of personalizable – and useful – information.
