It’s been a few months since I wrote an article titled “Viigo app to become a thing of the past?” and at that time it was more of a question than a complaint. At that point, we had not seen the RSS capabilities of OS6, but I was pretty sure that RIM would deliver, considering they acquired Viigo and all. Boy was I wrong. Now that I’ve had some time with OS6, I can definitely say that the RSS experience is painful.

I really don’t know what RIM’s plans are with Viigo or RSS, but right now it looks like they spent a bunch of money to completely ruin the RSS experience for OS6. The feeds are all jumbled together by default, there’s no way to decipher read from unread feeds, and the viewing experience is sub-par. Theres also the the absence of many features that Viigo has, but I’m just speaking on the problems with the present aspects of RIM’s native RSS. If RIM wants to direct the Viigo crew to refresh and improve experiment with the BlackBerry RSS experience, then they should also update the Viigo app to work with OS6/WebKit. Mike Lazaridis can stand up on a million stages and speak about making magic with the BlackBerry OS, but when RIM makes moves like this it just seems like they’re stepping backwards. I’m sure they will gradually improve the RSS experience, but what about the meantime? Let’s be real.. Improvements in software updates seem like they take forever. Is Lazaridis going to say, ”Viigo is a part of BlackBerry now. If you can’t deal with your BlackBerry, you should shut it off.”?

Now you may be thinking, “why don’t you just use another RSS reader?” Viigo was the first BlackBerry application I can remember installing. I’ve been using Viigo religiously for a few years now and it has served me well. I’ve tried using several other RSS readers and I always ended up back with Viigo. I still have my 9700 on OS5 and am using Viigo daily, but that will eventually come to an end. I hope RIM gets their priorities straight. I really hope I’m reading my RSS feeds one day soon and I see a little red star next to “:: What’s new in Viigo”