Google Reader + iPhone – The Right & The Wrong

As part of the iPhone 2.0 / 3G release, Google has updated the Reader interface for iPhone. The hub of my iPhone browsing centered around Google Reader, so it was critical that Google get it right. To my chagrin, the update leans towards the negative.

Pros

- Feels like the desktop version with AJAX pop-open stories, which saves needless navigation as the last version required you to pop to another “tab” in Safari to read an article
- The ability to switch between new / all items within a given view, and even mark all as read when browsing by category

Cons

- The biggest one by far, at least for me, is how difficult it is to browse by tag. I have many feeds and they are grouped by tag. The browsing difference is as follows:

Old UI:
  1. Navigate to my bookmark that shows me all my tags
  2. Browse by tag
  3. When finished, go back to tags
  4. Repeat

New UI:
  1. Land on All Items page (you cannot easily bookmark the tags page)
  2. Tap Feeds to see your tags
  3. Tap the tag you are interested in
  4. Tap the “tag folder” to see the relevant articles
  5. When finished, go back to tags
  6. Repeat

- Unless I’m crazy, the iPhone view seems to be sync’ed with your desktop reader such that if you filter by New Items versus All Items, they seem to be remembered across platforms (which may not make sense)

- It seems that you no longer are directed to a Google-stripped down page to read an article; rather, you are taken to the source site directly, adding up on bandwidth (and in Canada, that can be a bit expensive).

Anyone else bothered by this? Anything else I’ve overlooked?

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