Blur News Widgets

[Eeyore]

There are a lot of questionable choices in Motorola's Blur layer for Android, but one thing I really like is the widget that's associated with the "News" app. By default on the Backflip, there were a few of these installed. One was subscribed to Yahoo News, I think, and another to a "tips and tricks" feed from Motorola. I deleted those pretty quickly, but created one for news and one for blogs. Each widget can display messages from multiple RSS feeds, so I have one subscribed to Google News and the local newspaper, and another subscribed to all my friends' blogs.

The 2x2 widget displays the short description and enclosure from the most recent post. Tap the widget to expand that information to full screen and page through all unread post summaries. Tap the headline of a post summary to view the full post in a browser. It's pretty slick.

I've only found two bugs worth noting. One is that you can only add new RSS feeds to the widget while you are viewing information full screen. If there are no unread posts, you can't add new feeds. The other bug is that sometimes posts won't register as read even though you've definitely checked them. This is sometimes a bug in the RSS feed itself, though.

Are there any 3rd party news apps with widgets like Blur's that I can recommend to my non-Blurred friends?

[ATTDroids]

[Con5150]

I don't know about any third party news apps , I guess from using what's on the phone I have not needed to use third party ones. I really like the news widgets , I have two each on three screens, Happenings , Ireland & UK News , US & World News , Sports News , Photography News and a Tech News feed. I definitely think they got this right.

[Zarathustra]

I don't use the Blur news widget for one main reason: when you expand to full screen to read through the posts, the headlines are always cut off. Drives me crazy.

[Eeyore]

It's true that the cut-off headlines are annoying, but it is just supposed to be a preview, so that doesn't bother me too much.

Do you use something else instead, or just do without news widgets?

[tbutterw]

I use Feedr and it's great! The widget keeps to a darker theme and I like that. The widget doesn't automatically update when there are new post though but you get to the set the widgets intervals for showing new articles.
The lastest version of Feedr only works on devices with Android 2.0 or higher so I can't update mine, but it still works amazingly well and is a great replacement for Blur-less phones.

[Zarathustra]

No news widgets for me. I get most of the news I need from my rss reader and from twitter.