We told you that the BlackBerry News Feeds Beta would launch today and Netposer let us know that it is now available at this link below in App World. The app is annoyingly limited to the US and Canada in App World but hopefully that will change soon. It is also much lighter than Viigo at aprox. 500kb.
BlackBerry News Feeds in App World Test Center
We are just starting to dig into the app but I noticed a few things right off the bat. First of all it has the feel of Viigo but it no longer uses your Viigo account.
- You will need to login with your @BlackBerry login if you have one from App World. It is a shame that you lose all of your old subscriptions but I can see the new BlackBerry universal login strategy coming together.
- The interface is much bigger than Viigo and does not let you see as much on one screen as you used to be able to in Viigo.
- You will need to add BerryReview to your feed list by searching for it. Not sure why there are two entries but hopefully we can fix that.
- There does not seem to be any Google Reader integration but it does provide the ability to send an article using the built in Facebook and Twitter apps which is nice.
- You can tell it is built on Viigo because it uses the same default feeds as Viigo used to show…
Let us know what you think of BlackBerry News Feeds in the comments!
tfrankson ( View Profile) - Posts: 209
Posted: December 13, 2010 at 12:10 PM EST
Thanks, I’m def going to check this out. Been needing one since Viigo is gone.
tuftsmo Not Registered
Posted: December 13, 2010 at 12:32 PM EST from my BlackBerry 9300 | OS 6.0.0.380
There is also a feature to import feeds using viigo credentials! What a bonus!
Pusherman Not Registered
Posted: December 13, 2010 at 12:54 PM EST from my BlackBerry 9000
RIM, is still disrespecting none US and Canadian citizens.
Daniel Perez Not Registered
Posted: December 13, 2010 at 5:23 PM EST
Like this app. If this is truly is the replacement for viigo, this should include the links to podcasts.
PDM ( View Profile) - Posts: 22
Posted: December 13, 2010 at 6:31 PM EST
For those of us living outside the designated “test” countries…. Is there a *cough* OTA or hosted file anywhere? Just for Torch or also other OS6 devices? *cough* 9700/OS6 would be great…
9650 Owner Not Registered
Posted: December 13, 2010 at 7:26 PM EST from my BlackBerry 9650 | OS 6.0.0.225
Anyone have try the software care enough to provide an OTA for us who don’t live in US or Canada ?
PDM ( View Profile) - Posts: 22
Posted: December 13, 2010 at 7:45 PM EST
I found it over at mybbota
9650 Owner Not Registered
Posted: December 13, 2010 at 11:31 PM EST from my BlackBerry 9650 | OS 6.0.0.225
Strangely I haven’t been able to sign-in using my BlackberryID
Corey Davis ( View Profile) - Posts: 1293
Posted: December 14, 2010 at 8:57 AM EST
One thing I find odd is keyed shortcuts. Like hitting the D key for delete. It’s tedious to delete articles on this application.
Arthur Dent Not Registered
Posted: December 14, 2010 at 10:57 AM EST
But WHY does these RSS apps take sooo long to show any article text?
(BB 9700 and OS6 .380)
In SocialFeeds I can goto options and back and text pops up,… in this app I cant and just have to wait anything from 8 to 20 seconds after clicking on an aricle heading before text shows…
Is there Anything that can fix this?
Ronen Halevy ( View Profile) - Posts: 3325
Posted: December 14, 2010 at 11:24 AM EST
Yeah I don’t know what takes the app so long to render an article. I am thinking it has to process it or something?
DavidB ( View Profile) - Posts: 1791
Posted: December 15, 2010 at 8:02 AM EST from my BlackBerry 9530
Yeah this is definately Viigo reborn.
Three huge issues for me so far have me disabling it and won’t use:
1. No “swipe” to go to next/previous article on touch screen only device.
2. The interface is WAY too “big”. Once in a feed, each entry is WAY too much screen real estate.
3. Feeds can’t be renamed.
It almost looks like they threw out everything that was “Project Tango” and took Viigo back to it’s RSS reader roots. Hooray for that, but the dropped some important stuff in the process.
Hopefully they jettisoned all the legacy garbage in the code that was so plaguing Viigo. And found and squashed the awful memory leaks.
But no way I can hit the menu and choose Next every time I want to go to another article. For Storm/Storm2, this iteration is pretty much unusable.
Name: (required) Not Registered
Posted: December 29, 2010 at 11:49 AM EST
Can’t download the app!!!! Why!! Is it not for OS6?