iAnywhere, a subsidiary of Sybase announced the beta release of new RSS (Really Simple Syndication) features for its popular AvantGo mobile Internet service. The new features give users greater ease-of-use for viewing mobile RSS subscriptions online or offline, and expands the content available through AvantGo by including the millions of RSS feeds offered by bloggers and major media. AvantGo users can now add any RSS feed to their account, without installing additional software, and then synchronize using a wireless or desktop Internet connection to receive the feed items in a format optimized for their device.

“AvantGo has a trendsetting audience and RSS support has been one of our top user requests,” said Jon Asmussen, product manager, AvantGo at iAnywhere. “Today we're responding by delivering a simple, free service for reading RSS feeds on a smartphone or PDA.”

New features of AvantGo for RSS include the following:
Easily view new RSS items/articles:  AvantGo RSS channels include all active items in a feed. Any new items since a user’s last synchronization are noted next to the channel name on the AvantGo homepage and appear in bold text within the RSS channel.

Save RSS items: To save an item, the user simply selects the disk icon next to the item title, with the ability to save up to five items per RSS channel.

Easily share photos:  If an RSS feed channel includes photos, a “Slideshow” link will appear at the top of the channel homepage.  Users can select the Slideshow link to easily flip through the photos in the feed.  Since photos are already delivered to the device during AvantGo syncs, users can share pictures from their mobile device without waiting for each image to be retrieved over the wireless network. Users of photo sharing sites that offer photo feeds can make AvantGo their mobile photo album.

Channel personalization: Users can adjust channel settings to optimize feed subscriptions, setting the maximum allowable size for the channel and whether or not to include images.  Users can also modify the link depth setting, which tells AvantGo how many page levels it should crawl when synchronizing the channel.

Easily subscribe to RSS channels with AvantGo’s AutoChannelä for RSS: Users can take advantage of the AvantGo AutoChannel for RSS bookmarklet which enables easy on-the-fly subscriptions to a site’s RSS channel.  When a user is on a page that includes an RSS feed, a browser bookmark can quickly add that page into AvantGo for RSS.

Publishers can create a button that enables users to quickly add their site to AvantGo: Content publishers such as bloggers, online media and magazines can use an AvantGo button creation tool to generate code for a button to place on their Website, making it easy for readers to take the site’s feed mobile

Availability
The beta version of iAnywhere’s new AvantGo for RSS service is immediately available for AvantGo 5.7 users.  To learn more or to subscribe to an RSS channel with AvantGo, go to: www.avantgo.com/rss.  AvantGo for RSS supports RSS versions 0.91, 1.0 and 2.0 and Atom syndication formats.  Supported devices include Palm OS 5, Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Symbian OS UIQ and Symbian OS v6.1 Series 60.  To sign up for the free AvantGo mobile Internet service, go to: www.avantgo.com.