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I was asked by the developers of SmartRSS 2 to play around with it before its release on the iTunes App Store. The software, released by Visuamobile, is one of the best RSS readers I’ve used period, let alone for an iPhone. It’s very quick and although it lags up at times, this is expected when you’re grabbing hundreds of RSS feeds at once.
Adding a new feed is easy. Just use the menu (seen above) and search for your favorite website or blog. If it’s not listed, you can manually enter the feed URL. You can also import an OPML file via your Google Reader account, which sets up in seconds. All of the other standard features you’d expect in an RSS reader are here and the formatting is perfect for the iPhone 3G.
Speaking of Apple, you can enter a weird “3-D Touch Interface” that looks a lot like Mac OS X’s built-in RSS screensaver. You can touch through multiple stories and while it’s cool for a few minutes, the novelty wears off fast as no serious browsing or reading can be done in this mode. Still, for eye candy, it’s decent.
You can score SmartRSS 2 off the App Store for a mere $1.99 – the perfect balance of utility and price in an iPhone/iPod Touch application. Whether you’re a casual reader or an RSS hound, you won’t regret buying it.
SmartRSS 2 (iTunes)
