Mobispine
Mobispine is a specialised news browser for your java enabled phone that organises and downloads news feeds to your mobile. You can search for news feeds or review the highest ranked feeds and then subscribe to those that interest you. You will find links to the news feeds you have subscribed to in the bookmarks area.
Clicking on a bookmark brings up a list of headlines for each item in that feed. Selecting the headline opens up the article text and any images in that article.
We tested the beta version.
WHO WOULD USE IT?
Mobispine is for anyone who wants to keep in touch with any sort of news. It is like having a newspaper on your phone. There are news feeds on just about any topic you can imagine, including all the subjects that would make up the sections in a newspaper.
WALK THROUGH
After you clicked through to download Mobispine from 3neXt, the site picks up your phone type and if it's supported, automatically downloads the correct version. You will have to accept the licence agreement to complete the installation. To set up the software, select a region and a country. Mobispine will provide you with a set of links customised to your region. Since I told it I was in Australia, it gave me the news feeds from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for news and entertainment.
When Mobispine opens up, you see three tabs: News, Explore and Bookmarks. The News section is a combined list of all the headlines from the feeds you have subscribed to. You can subscribe to any feed you find through the search (via options) or from Explore. They will then appear as options in the Bookmarks section.
There is also a menu with options for Tools, Mashups, New Blog Post and Tell A Friend. In Tools you can change your account, check your data usage, review the settings for the client software and check for software updates.
When you exit Mobispine, it pops up a message telling you how much data you used in the session.
When you open a bookmark, you get a list of headlines from that news feed.
Clicking on a headline brings up the text and any pictures.
Features
Read news anywhere on your phone.
Create a blog directly from your phone.
Upload photos or video to your blog.
Recommendations
Spend some time exploring what is available and then stick to the best five or six feeds. Any more than six and you will spend all day reading news on your mobile.
Publisher's site
http://www.mobispine.com/
Pros
Mobispine is very easy to use and the RSS feed technology is hidden from the user.
It seems more stable than some other RSS readers we have tested.
Cons
It freezes from time to time but that may be due to new feeds coming through rather than Mobispine itself.
It may take some time to get going on start-up because it checks the status of your bookmarked news feeds so that they are ready for you to read
Verdict
This is a useful tool for keeping up-to-date in spare moments, such as when you are sitting in the back of a cab or in a waiting room.