While we're on the subject of mobile RSS readers... Bloglines announced yesterday that its Bloglines Mobile service now features integrated Skweezer technology.

What's Skweezer, you ask? Well, on its own, it's a free, platform-independent web service that optimizes page content for mobile devices. The benefit of Skweezer technology being added to Bloglines is that you won't have to specifically go to the Skweezer portal when you want to force a particular site to be friendly to your mobile device. When you visit a page via Bloglines Mobile, Skweezer compresses and reformats the content on the fly. Bonus: Skweezer can also translate content into more than a dozen languages.

I have tried a ton of Pocket PC RSS readers, and the one that I keep coming back to is called Egress, by Garish Kernels. I don't know, but get the impression that Garish Kernels is a one man show, given the very slow updates to the software, and the somewhat lackluster response times to support requests. I'm also somewhat annoyed that a persistent bug still exists in it (at least when using it on my Dell Axim X50v) where if I leave the program running, it will prevent my Pocket PC from going into sleep mode, and eventually run my battery out.

With all of that negativity, how can I possibly recommend Egress? Simple. It's by far the best thought-out user interface for reading RSS feeds on the go that I've seen so far. It renders quickly and well on both high-resolution and regular-resolution Pocket PCs, which not all Pocket PC RSS readers can claim, and it also caches images contained in posts so that reading offline delivers the same experience as online - very few Pocket PC RSS readers boast this feature. It also contains rudimentary synchronization with both Bloglines and NewsGator, although in practice I've found it not worth the trouble to bother with this feature. Also, there are quite a few display settings under options to allow you to make Egress pleasing to the eye; don't judge it based on this screenshot.

By far the biggest advantage I've found using Egress over other RSS readers is that Egress is optimized to allow you to go from story to story, and feed to feed using only the direction pad. This means you can put the stylus away and read continuously without any tapping. It's truly amazing how almost none of the other RSS readers I've tried have this feature.

NewsGator recently debuted their new Pocket PC reader, called NewsGator Mobile (BETA). Although I had high hopes for a Pocket PC reader that would fully synchronize with an online or desktop RSS experience, I was very disappointed with this release. It renders slowly, looks terrible on a full-VGA Pocket PC, requires screen taps for navigation, and does not cache images. In fact, Egress is the Pocket PC RSS reader that NewsGator should have purchased to build their branded version on. It's a shame that they didn't.

Currently Egress offers a 30 day trial, and a license with lifetime upgrades costs $12.