iReadG Review

It's increasingly handy to have all the links you could possibly need in one central place. RSS is fantastic for this making it easy to keep track of your favourite sites. As someone who jumps from PC to iOS device to completely different PC, using Google Reader is ideal for me. So when an app designed around Google Reader - iReadG - came along, it seemed like an ideal app for me to give a try.

I was rather disappointed to note that immediately it's rather slow to sync. I've got a lot of feeds saved to my reader but there are no doubt many heavy users like me. Once iReadG did sync up, all was fine. The wealth of options are handy.

You can view your links en masse or individually, divided by site. You can also view all the images in a seperate album of sorts which was rather convenient when it came to just wanting to check out the photos. You can also add your own notes, send links to Instapaper for later, or tweet or Facebook about them.

Most usefully, you can view your links offline via a caching system. This is brilliant if you know you're soon going to be stuck somewhere with no internet connection and you want to catch up on some reading.

iReadG offers pretty much everything you could want from a Google Reader app. The problems lie primarily with the speed of the app and the fact that some of the navigational controls are a little confusing. It doesn't take that long to figure out but it also doesn't feel as intuitive as I'd like. The app is fast enough once the links have all been synced but it's an annoying wait at first when you've not checked in a few hours, especially compared to the (admittedly online only) Google Reader mobile site.

After a while, when you know you've got an internet connection, you will find yourself retreating to the comfort of the website rather than this app. If you're stuck without a connection though, the offline browsing makes this app extremely useful.