Newsstand for iPhone

In this day and age, the easiest way to keep up with news from anywhere in the world, straight from the source, is by RSS feeds. There are RSS feed readers for the desktop, or web services that allow you to keep track of all your newsfeeds. What about some RSS readers for the iPhone? Well, there are several slick RSS apps, but the one that stands out the most is Newsstand.

The interface is clean and simple, with no gimmicky looking UI but rather, what iPhone apps should look like. View all unread items with the button at the top, or even flag articles and view them later with the flagged option. The app comes preloaded with several popular feeds, but you can easily get rid of them and add your own, with the simple Edit button at the top. For easier ways to delete feeds, swipe across an item and a delete button will appear, much like in Mail.app.

While Newsstand can be a standalone reader, you can also use it to import your feeds from other services as well (Google Reader, Bloglines, or OPML files). With an import, you will get all of your feeds as well as the folders that you organized them in, that is, if you organize them at all. There is even an export option, which will create a new email that you can send to yourself or another Newsstand user. This allows one to restore subscriptions later or even transfer them to another device, which is pretty useful if you know you’re going to need it. Not necessary, but nice to have anyways, just in case.

Please keep in mind though, that the ‘Import’ feature is not a SYNC. It merely imports the feeds to the app itself, but WILL NOT sync with your Google Reader or Bloglines. Also, there won’t be options such as Starring, Sharing, or Commenting [for Google Reader] because it doesn’t sync. So if you were looking for an app that will perfectly sync with Google Reader, this may not be what you were looking for.

The lists and articles are flexible with viewing, allowing both portrait and landscape modes. So if you prefer the wider screen with landscape then you can have it. Don’t like landscape? That’s cool too; stick with portrait mode. One neat little thing with Newsstand that you won’t find with any other RSS iPhone app is an actual ‘newsstand’ when viewing your list of feeds and folders in landscape mode. Blogs become digital magazines and newspapers that you can scroll through, and open up like a real magazine or newspaper.

However, even though the shelf view is pretty cool to showoff to friends and just flick through for fun, it isn’t exactly practical to actually do all the reading with that mode. The small digital booklet will be split in two; left side will be the list of all available articles for that feed, and the right will be the article itself. If there are pictures in the article, you will have to scroll around to view all of it due to small and limited screen space. The text is pretty small and hard to read, although I suppose some people wouldn’t mind. Overall, a nifty little mode that’s nice to showoff, but not great for practical use.

In normal viewing of an article, you have options at the bottom: Flag, Themes/Font Size, Share, and View [the webpage]. Flagging will result in the item getting a flag, and thus viewable when you click the Flagged Items option at the main screen. Themes will bring up several different themes to choose from to view articles, and you can also change the font size to your personal liking. Share allows you to send the piece via email, Delicious, and even Twitter. The Twitter integration is pretty awesome; not many other RSS apps include this (from what I’ve noticed). The view webpage seems to be a standard among many iPhone apps (not just RSS readers) so it’s not really anything that special.

Also, when viewing the list of pieces, there will be an option at the top that will allow you to share the entire list of articles by email, which will include links to the original website and the beginning of each article. Useful if you want to share a new blog with someone that isn’t aware of it.

If you’re overrun with feeds and can’t go through them all, the check at the bottom means ‘Mark All Read,’ which will allow an easy escape from the hundreds or thousands of items that you would otherwise have to waddle through.

When fetching new items, Newsstand will allow simultaneous downloading from multiple feeds. You can increase the number of simultaneous downloads from Settings.app, however, be aware that the more you set the likelier the app will freeze or take longer to be responsive again during downloads. The default setting is for two simultaneous downloads, which I personally think is enough. Refreshing items is quick and painless with the tap of the circular icon, which will then go through all feeds to check for anything new since you’ve launched the app.

Overall, this is a very nice RSS reader for the iPhone. Only complaints I have is the no sync and tedious reading with the digital booklet version. Other than that, this app is great for reading RSS on the go!