[A big hello to Gideon, our third new reviewer. Matt]
How do you review an RSS reader? In theory a good reader should not really be noticeable as it is merely a conduit to the information you want to read, and therefore – using my line of reasoning – anything that detracts from you getting to your information can be classed as a negative. You may not agree with my logic, but hopefully, as I give you good and bad points to Readello, you will understand my line of thought.
The Good
Acceletron have succeeded with Readello in many areas. The first I’ll focus on is the aesthetics. Again people may disagree with me, but my attitude is that Apple have put in place certain UI conventions and in most cases there really is no point trying to re-invent the wheel. Obviously some developers pull it off and you get great software out of it, but more often than not you’ll end up with some garish unusable mess. Fortunately Acceletron have resisted the temptation to play and have kept things simple, which in the case of an RSS reader is a good thing. Ideally you don’t want a cluttered screen distracting you from reading your feed.
Readello is the first RSS reader I have tried on the iPhone which integrates with Google Reader, and again hats off to Acceletron, they have done a good job in mirroring the features you find on the web interface, including having your tags and folders preserved. Things aren’t quite perfect, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
If you find an article you want to keep, just click “Add Star” and now even when you purge your feeds of read articles and it seems to vanish, this article will have been transferred across to the Starred section
The final area where Acceletron have done well is giving people choice: do you want to browse posts by topic, feed or purely a list of unread feeds in the order in which they were posted?
The Bad
Unfortunately everything is not perfect with Readello. As good as the integration of features is with Google Reader, the process of syncing is noticeably slower than other RSS readers I have used.
A common flaw with iPhone RSS readers that sync with a web based service is the inability to add feeds from your device, and unfortunately this trend is also present in Readello. I know it’s not a deal breaker, but it would be nice to have. Something that some may not regard as a deal breaker, but unfortunately I do, is having to open links in Safari. Many other RSS readers [such as Byline – Matt] have their own built in browsing feature. Again, it is just a little thing, but the flicking from Safari to the menu then back to Readello when you want to continue reading just gets annoying and interrupts your flow when reading feeds.
The final area where Readello loses points is that it can get really slow at times. Start flicking through posts and after the first few (which I would guess it caches), everything starts to slow down and posts don’t load instantly. Since the data has already been downloaded during the sync process this delay can’t be blamed on net connection issues – it must be an issue with the app.
Also, when I first synced it had been a few days since I’d read my regular feeds and ended up downloading 800+ posts, this too seemed to have a negative effect on the speed of the app.
Conclusion
All in all I’d say that Readello is quite good. Is it worth £2.39 when you can download better RSS apps for free? Well that’s up to you to decide. If you’re after an RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader and Acceletron can fix the few niggley flaws in an update then I would says yes it could be worth the money. If though you’re like me and you aren’t attached to Google Reader and you would like something that works rather than having to wait for an update, then I’d say give Readello a miss, for now at least.
Readello
Company: Accelotron
Version: 1.0
Category: News
Current Price: £1.79
UK iTunes Store link