Back in March of this year Research in Motion acquired Viigo, the company behind the popular RSS aggregator for BlackBerry that has been known to make a top ten BlackBerry applications list or two. Other than the announcement that Viigo for Windows was being EOLed (End of Life), we really haven’t heard much about RIM’s plans for RSS aggregation on the BlackBerry platform… At least this was the case until yesterday when RIM announced BlackBerry News Feeds Beta for BlackBerry.
BlackBerry News Feeds is currently available in BlackBerry App World under the test center category, but, those of you familiar with Viigo will find a stripped down version of what they once new as arguably one of the best third party applications for the BlackBerry. You can import your Viigo feeds in to BlackBerry News Feeds, but, you can no longer get sports scores, flight arrival times, or the weather updates. Jay Steele, Viigo’s founder and now senior director of content distribution platforms at RIM said “Viigo was actually duplicating a lot of the things RIM and a lot of other third parties were doing. So a lot of the full-featuredness is definitely going away.”
Another thing that you won’t find BlackBerry News Feeds is two-way Google Reader synchronization. The Viigo, err, RIM team is working on adding this feature, but, it’s absence makes installing BlackBerry News Feeds almost pointless if you rely on Google Reader unless you just want to see what the new app looks like. I am sure that BlackBerry News Feeds will get better over time, however, I recommend that any BlackBerry user serious about viewing RSS feeds on their BlackBerry take a look at BerryReader.
Download BlackBerry News Feeds Beta from BlackBerry App World if you want to give it the once over…
[Via PCmag]