Speeed Reader | Google Reader for your Windows Phone

Although Windows Phones have been around for many years, the apps built around the platform often feel dated.  Additionally, they are often much more expensive than their counterparts on other platforms such as the iPhone.  There are notable exceptions to this, however, and the new Windows Marketplace for Mobile offers some exciting new apps.

This past week I came across a new exciting app on the Windows Marketplace thanks to their Twitter feed – a native Google Reader app!  Google Reader is great for keeping up with news from your favorite sites and blogs, and many popular feed readers, such as the excellent FeedDemon, automatically sync your read feeds with it.  This makes it very easy to keep up with what you’ve read whether you’re at your own computer or an internet-connected computer anywhere in the world.

Speeed Reader (yes, with 3 e’s … that’s not a typo!) now brings this power to Windows Phones in style.  Although you can access Google Reader through your mobile browser, Speed Reader gives you a much nicer interface in which to read your feeds.  Once you install this app, simply sign in with your Google Reader account and your feeds will automatically synchronize.  All of your feeds will be easily viewable, and can additionally be cached for offline viewing.  This is my favorite feature, as I can sync my feeds when I’m in a WiFi hotspot and then read them anytime later.  When you sync again, Speeed Reader will refresh your read feeds on Google Reader so your feeds will be in sync everywhere.

Speeed Reader gives you everything in your feed, including all text, links, and images.  You can view these directly in the reader, and since the data is cached it loads much quicker than most mobile websites.  My favorite feature is the reading list view, which shows only the unread feeds in a folder.  Speeed Reader also offers a search tool to let you find just the feed you want in your list.

By default, Speeed Reader uses a modern black interface, but you can customize it with two other themes.  You can also choose where to store your cached feeds (locally or on your storage card), how many posts to cache, and can even add your Twitter credentials to easily share items on the go.  In fact, Speeed Reader gives you the option to share articles via Email, SMS, Twitter, or directly through Google Reader.

Speeed Reader works on all Windows Mobile devices running Windows Mobile 6.0 and newer.  It works on both touchscreen (WM Professional) and non-touchscreen (WM Standard) smartphones.  It ran great on my T-Mobile Dash running WM 6.1 Standard (The screenshot of the app running is from the publisher’s website and appears to be running in WM Professional).  The only oddity I noticed is that the selection in the options pane seemed to jump around; instead of selecting options from top to bottom, the selection would skip options and then return to them.  Hopefully this will be fixed in a future update. Update: The 1.13 update fixed this bug, so now selecting options works just as you would expect … which means it works great!

The latest version of Speeed Reader is available from Handango or the Windows Marketplace for Mobile for $1.99.  You can also view more information about it or download a 10 day trial from the publisher’s website at http://emuneee.com/eeenno-mobile/speeed-reader-v-1/.  Or, if you’d perfer to pay even less (read free), you may download the older 1.0 version for free at http://emuneee.com/eeenno-mobile/speeed-reader/.  With either choice, your feeds are sure to shine on your mobile device!