Revamped Google Reader for iPhone Offers Full Features

07.01.08 | No Comments | by: Dave Jeyes

Today Google announced a brand new mobile interface for Google Reader that has been optimized for the iPhone. The new Google Reader for iPhone is full featured and offers an excellent example of the capability of the mobile web far beyond the simple interfaces that we often see today.

If you have a Google Reader account, all you have to do is go to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ to start using it. The main difference is that the reader starts out in a list view that tells you the title of the post, which feed it’s from and the first few words of the article. You can also click on the star to favorite a post from the title view without reloading the page.

From there you can quickly scroll through to find articles that are interesting and click to expand them. The posts are presented in full text and include pictures, which makes reading feeds much more worthwhile. Even once you’ve expanded the post, Google Reader for iPhone keeps the list of titles above and below that article so you can just keep scrolling until you find the next story to read. When you expand a story, you can Share, Email or Write a Note about it. Opening stories does require a page load, but it was amazingly fast.

This is a really impressive full featured tool for the iPhone. There are also a lot of lessons that mobile web designers can take away from the reader. The first one is that it’s possible to implement full-featured mobile web applications. Often it seems like companies over-simplify their mobile web tools because they’re so worried about the size of the screen. What we’re finding more and more is that while you need to design your site for the mobile web and take the screen size into consideration, it’s very possible to create rich mobile web experiences.

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