I know a few people that read the Fozzolog own Palm-based smartphones like the Treo-line from Palm. I own a Treo 700p and had a 650p prior to that. I've been keeping an eye on the Centro because it just looks sweet and addresses most of the complaints my wife has brought up about the Treo when I tell her it's so much nicer in one regard or another than her Blackberry Pearl.

This is going to be a review about a piece of software I recently installed on my Treo and have become quite enamored with. But, before I get to that, let me just say I'm worried about my future as a PalmOS user. If Google does things right with the Android mobile phone platform, I will ditch Palm in milliseconds. For a couple years now, Palm has been saying a future version of PalmOS would be running on top of Linux and would provide backward compatibility with legacy PalmOS applications. The advantage would be a new, modern platform for smart phones based on one of the most actively developed operating systems in history. The result: HUGE VOLUMES of software choices for users and that is really what drives a successful hardware device. But, Palm announced earlier this year that plans to release a new PalmOS on top of Linux have been... uhm... substantially delayed... so quit asking about it.

So, if Google does things right with Android, they'll achieve the same thing for their hardware partners and I'll be one of the first in line for a highly-functional mobile device that will let me do as much or more than I can currently do with my Treo.

Quick News

So, that brings me to something new I've been doing with my Treo: Reading RSS feeds with Quick News.

Now, I don't like paying for software. I generally look for open source software for my Treo before I even bother looking for commercial options. In this case, I paid for a couple applications from Hobbyist Software, including Butler -- an application that, among other things, nags you when you don't immediately answer an alert or alarm. One of the other Hobbyist applications I installed is called Initiate and it's a replacement for the default application launcher. Initiate supports plugins and one of those plugins is for Quick News.

I previously downloaded a free trial of Quick News and played with it. I liked it more than any other RSS feed aggregator for Palm that I had played with, but didn't really spend the time to explore it completely. When I disovered the Initiate plugin, I spent more time and ended up throwing $14.95 at Standalone Software so I could own it for good.

So, what is cool about Quick News? It's an awesome RSS feed reader. It comes with a boatload of RSS feeds already, many of which I disabled right off the bat because, for example, I'm not a Mac user and I don't really care to read what CBS thinks is newsworthy. But, they still had a few good geek news feeds.

Adding a feed is easy if you know the URL to the XML syndication resource (e.g. the RSS file). This is pretty straightforward when you're adding one site at a time, but can be annoying when you want to populate your Quick News feed list with a lot of sites. It would be easier if there was some way to set up Quick News as a helper application for Blazer so that any time you selected a link for an RSS feed, you could have the option of adding it to your Quick News feed list.

The best feature of Quick News is the auto-update options. I set my feeds up to automatically update every six hours, over the air. You can also update at HotSync, but that requires a conduit -- presumably a Windows application -- on the desktop computer you sync with.

Another excellent feature of Quick News is that it offers the option of downloading images from feeds as well, thereby providing a rich viewing experience. All the downloaded feeds can be stored on your removable SD card so you don't have to worry about filling up your onboard memory with feed content. The amount of feed content cached on the SD card is configurable as well.

Below are some pictures of Quick News in action. These were taken with my digital camera and my screen protector makes them look a little hazy. Sorry.

This first image is the "collapsed" view of all the articles in a feed. In this case, the Utah Open Source Planet.

Next is one of the articles from the feed expanded for reading.

Thirdly, a view of the list of all the feeds currently set up. You can quickly configure which feeds will update over the air, at HotSync, etc.