I'm starting to feel in love with DopplerMobile, my new favourite RSS Reader for my Windows Mobile Smartphone. 
After testing the Beta 2 version, I've found and signalled to the staff (Erwin is a great and kind person!) the bugs I've discovered and today (only 2 days after) I'm happy to see that a new version (Beta 3) is out.
This new Beta 3 version solves one of the bugs I've signalled, the problem on reading posts (the screen was blinking on Beta 2). This was a problem caused by the WebBrowser component and on the previous version can be solved by opening your Pocket IE and telling him not to display images (Menu, 7. View, 5. Show Pictures).
Now you can turn on the image display function on your IE and Doppler works good.
The other bug I've signalled is still present, and it's a problem that you can find only on particular sites (such as weblogs.asp.net or our blogs.ugidotnet.org). As Erwin explains me on these feedbacks, for downloading the feed icon DopplerMobile uses a particular algorithm:
- it checks if the 'link' tag was specified in the RSS feed you're adding
- it then 'strips' the URL to only remain the host part (for example http://weblogs.asp.net), and then it checks if at that level the favicon.ico file is available. In this example it tries to open http://weblogs.asp.net/favicon.ico, that is a not existing url.
- .Text engine, instead of returning a "404 Not Found" error, returns an error page that says: BlogDoesNotExistException
A blog matching the location you requested was not found. Host = [weblogs.asp.net], Application = [favicon.ico] with a "200 OK" return code. - Now DopplerMobile thinks to receiving an icon file, then opens the stream it gets from the webserver and saves it as an icon. In reality it's downloading a text page with the .Text error message above, ans so it's the reason for why DopplerMobile creates the empty icon 've signalled, that cause the application to crash.
You can avoid this problem by manually going to the DopplerMobile data folder (in my case \Storage Card\Application Data\Doppler) and deleting the empty icon file. Your DopplerMobile will work good now!
However I think that this particular problem could be easily avoided, for example by checking the size of the icon file from the generated file that comes from the stream and, if it's empty, by placing a standard icon. I'm sure that Erwin will solve it soon...
I've not tested the synchronization with Newsgator because i'm not a Newsgator user, but it's improved on this new beta.
Finally, two new little feature but so nice:
- You can now sort the list of your subscribed feeds by the number of unreaded posts
- All your feeds that don't have a personal icon now have a nice standard RSS Red icon
DopplerMobile is on a beta stage but it's really a good application and it's really promising for the future, mainly because it has a kind man like Erwin that is working a lot on the product and is listening a lot to all the feedbacks that arrives from the community. This is a sign that the product will grow a lot.
A personal note now: tomorrow I'll start for a 3 days travel for my new year's holidays and this evening I've just prepared my Smartphone by downloading all my favourite feeds with DopplerMobile. Now I have all the feeds saved locally on my device and I think that in these days I'll have something to read... 