Need a RSS Reader for your Windows Phone? There's plenty to choose from and today we turn our sights on Feed Me from Forty3Degrees.
Supporting off-line browsing, Feed Me is a simple, straight forward reader that takes advantage of Windows Phone 7's Metro design. With support for your Google Reader feeds as well as ties to Twitter, Instapaper and Read It Later, Feed Me has a certain amount of appeal.
Follow the break to read more on Feed Me.
Lay of the Land
Feed Me lays things out nicely, making use of the horizontal spread of Windows Phone 7. The main pages display your reader or source groups and any new stories from individual feeds.
You can create unique groups to place similar feeds in. For example, you can create a Windows Phone group to place feeds such as WPCentral (hint, hint), wpsauce, and windows phone blog in.
Feeds can be manually entered, pulled from your Google Reader account or search for by keyword via Bing Google.
Settings are layed out across a six page hub and covers everything from how the back button acts to Live Tile settings. You can change the font size, clear you cache, backup your feeds, and establish manage your account information for Twitter, Google, Instapaper and Read It Later.
The Live Tile can be set to display the number of new stories for designated feeds. You can also determine the update interval of the Live Tile. This will give you the ability to check to see if new stories are availble at a glance from your Windows Phone Home Page.
Groups
As mentioned, groups are a collection of similar feeds. When you tap on a group listing from Feed Me's main page, you are sent to the groups hub pages. From here you will see pages listing all the groups stories, any unread stories, and then pages for each individual feed/source.
From the Group three-dot menu you can mark all stories as read, delete the group or filter stories by keyword.
In pulling up individual stories, you will get the text of the story and any graphics/pictures. At the bottom of the screen you have the option to view the full article online via an internal browser. From the three-dot menu, options include sharing the article through email, twitter and SMS messaging. You can open the article by way of Windows Phone Explorer as well as adding it to you Instapaper or Read It Later account.
Overall Impression
Feed Me was a pleasant application to test. It was well laid out with regards to navigation, setting up groups and feeds, as well as viewing articles.
The Live Tile allows you to see if new articles are available at a glance and the ability to download content helps viewing articles when you find those dead zones in life. Feeds can be automatically updated at start up (just check the settings to turn this feature on) and downloaded feeds are updated once a data connection is re-established.
Did I mention that Feed Me supports podcasts as well? Nonetheless, if you are looking for a clean looking, straight forward, news readers Feed Me is worth considering.
There is a trial version available the is fully functional but restricted to four groups with a maximum number of four feeds per group. The trial version also has some restrictions concerning the live tile and does not support podcasts.
The full version of Feed Me will run you $1.29 and both versions can be found here (opens Zune) at the Marketplace.
