I’ve been a long-time user of NetNewsWire, an excellent RSS reader for the Mac. Since their acquisition by NewsGator I was looking forward to synchronization with NewsGator’s online service. As I was playing around with the latest beta’s sync ability I stumbled on a reference to “NewsGator Mobile.”

Always a sucker for making my mobile phone (Blackberry 7100t) do things it wasn’t desgined to do well, I tried it out. Well, tried to try it out but I couldn’t find how to get it working.

NewsGator’s site has this page which gives me the impression their web site will recognize my browser device and send me pages formatted for the BlackBerry. Not so.

Taking a quick visit to Google (search: newsgator mobile html) all I found were press releases about separate products for Windows Mobile and J2ME devices. The former available with the latter not ready until Q2 of 2006. So where’s the HTML support?

Maybe I should go browinsg to http://mobile.newsgator.com/, but no, nothing. More Googling with disappointing results. It seems every blogger felt the need to regurgitate the announcement of NewsGator Mobile (why oh why restate the same news?) but none of them felt compelled to elaborate if they had used it and none commented on how well it worked.

To the NewGator KnowledgeBase I went searching for “mobile” or “blackberry” and got 0 results. Judging from the copyright notice at the bottom of the page, 2003, I wasn’t surprised to find the KB devoid of anything related to their mobile offering.

Surely NewsGator Mobile for HTML must exist but where is the damned link? One last look at my Edit Locations page and I notice the “Configure” link next to the NewsGator Mobile section. Ah-ha, found at last! Maybe I’m too impatient (or getting old) but this is far too subtle of a link.

So how does it look on my 7100? Excellent. The HTML rendering is fast, uncluttered, and even includes the story’s photo. Navigating to full stories and getting back to the list of feeds is tedious but nothing the J2ME version won’t solve.

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