With my current cellphone plan about to run out, I decide to splurge a little and opt for the special data plan that my cellular provider offered me. I ended up with one of those spiffy PalmOne Treo 650 smartphones (part PDA, part phone). I did this despite the tragic end of my last PDA, a $700 (Cdn, incl. taxes) Palm V, which an expensive hardshell case did not save from damage. And as if on cue, when the young salesman handed me my new Treo, it nearly fell from my hands. Butterfingers.

Foremost in my mind was the thought that I could find a nice free mobile RSS reader and start subscribing to a bunch of feeds. I could then read these when I was otherwise offline. No such luck. Every reader I encountered (at the time of writing) falls into one of these categories:

1. Requires the IBM Websphere MicroEdition Java environment or some such, but after installation of said environment, the feed reader wouldn't load.
2. Doesn't support the PalmOS.
3. Simply doesn't exist, despite the web page touting its features. Feedburner, for example, is in the middle of developing version 2 of their mobile reader, but is no longer allowing downloads of version 1. Other URLs that showed up high in the results pages of Google and Yahoo didn't exist.
4. Requires a "my" account on a site like Yahoo or Google, or in general has to be reached via a web browser. I'm not against this per se, but I want a standalone reader.
5. Supposedly will install right onto your device by having you go to the right URL on your PDA, but for some reason produces an XML error message, or something of that nature.
6. Installs fine but reboots my Treo when the app is run.
7. Costs money. Again, I'm not against this, but with all the free RSS readers out there, I figure someone has a free mobile version for PalmOS somewhere out there.
8. Insert reason here.

After a frustrating two hours of trying out different sites, while simultaneously writing this post, I haven't yet found a mobile RSS reader, so that's another project for my to-do list. Who knows, maybe I'll luck out after I've posted this weblog entry. Keep in mind, though, that even though I didn't find one for PalmOS devices, there are readers for other PDAs. A good place to start is Wikipedia's list of aggregators.

Wow, I'm not asking for much, am I :) Speaking of asking, do you use a PDA to access the Internet? If so, do you use an RSS reader? Which one? It'd be interesting to know waht people interested in RSS use.

>> Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

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