Testing Phonly
Although Nextgen Reader has saved the lives of all of us who use Feedly, there is still a lack of an application that is much more faithful to the RSS service. Faithful in the sense of design and features of it. And luckily, the folks at GeekIndustries are working on an app that has this: Phonly.
Phonly is an application that allows you to read news with your Feedly account. It has a design that will remind us a lot of the web service, with a green color for the titles and a sepia background that improves the reading of the text. Once the application is open, we will have 4 columns:
- Featured Articles: It will show us the most important articles from sites that we have added to our account.
- All: Shows us all the articles to read ordered by date.
- Categories: Here we can see all the sites that we have added in Feedly, at the end of each site we will have a number with the amount of unread articles.
- Saved for later: In this section, as the name says, are the articles that we have marked to be able to read at another time.
When you enter a particular site, instead of showing the news as if it were a list of titles, the same will give us the image used in the article and the title of the sameThis takes up almost the entire screen so it looks pretty good. In the lower right part of the news, we will have the buttons to "Mark as Read", "Share" and "Save for Later".
When we select an article, we can read it and at the bottom we will have 4 buttons: Mark as Read, Share, Open with Internet Explore and Save for Later. One disadvantage that the client has is that articles that are clipped in text must be opened with the Windows Phone browser. It would be good if they implement something like the Readability that Nextgen Reader has, to avoid opening another application to read a piece of news.
On the other hand, Phonly also has the possibility of adding sites to our account, since it integrates the –very useful– search engine Feedly. An interesting feature.
Now, Is Phonly better than Nextgen Reader? There are two points where each beats the other: Phonly has a much more interesting and attractive design, not as dull as the Nextgen Reader, while the latter has many more features and tools than Phonly, and that is quite noticeable.
However, Phonly is in beta version and they still have some time to integrate more things into it. If they get it right, it's an app that will be worth paying a few bucks for all of the above. The application has a release date, according to the developers, for within 1 or 2 weeks and it will be free to download, but it will have in the articles unless we pay for the Pro version.
