One of the things that has really annoyed me since I upgraded to BlackBerry OS 6 was the lack of Viigo as a news reader. Viigo has been a mainstay on every one of my BlackBerrys for YEARS even since I paid for their original NewsClip app around 2005. Viigo may not have had all the features I wished it had and it had quite a few memory leaks but they were moving strong and adding features on a regular basis until they were acquired by RIM in May of this year.
Then Viigo fell silent. The app that earned a 5 star CNET Editors Choice Rating hasn’t been updated in ages. It has been months since BlackBerry 6 was released and still we have no support for Viigo. Viigo used to be (and probably still is) one of the most popular BlackBerry apps available. When RIM purchased it I was hoping RIM would fix any of the issues the product had and add loads of new features. Instead we got nothing. If anything users are worse off than they were before since there has not been a Viigo update since RIM purchased them.
I thought at first that the Social Feeds application bundled in BlackBerry 6 would be a viable replacement but sadly it is not. The RSS reader built into it feels like RIM baked it in as an afterthought. It has practically no options and is really only useful to the most casual of RSS users.
Currently I am happy using BerryReader with its Google Reader integration but I really find it sad that RIM seems to have killed off Viigo. I heard rumors that RIM is working on creating a new app using the expertise Viigo has brought to the table. The question is why would they not simply update the current Viigo release for their own latest platform at the same time. It is such a shame to see Viigo die when it had such potential.
It is really odd on RIM’s part to keep Viigo around yet not update the application for BlackBerry 6. Hopefully RIM has something in store for us and won’t let Viigo totally die from stagnation.
What do you think?
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