News at the hip? Thumbs down.

CliffNotes have traditionally been a guide to help students understand complex works while others, especially teachers and professors, often think they allow students to avoid reading assigned materials, this is similar to the way I feel about receiving and interpreting the news on my mobile device.

I have been a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) aka Blackberry user for nearly a year now and I love it. Receiving and writing emails from my phone has been beneficial when I don't have access to a computer and the ability to scour the internet has settled many disagreements between my friends and I. All and all I have been thankful to have such a device in my pocket because I truly think it makes my life a little easier, and for that I am thankful.

When I was asked by my instructor to go and get the news on my mobile phone I was pretty excited because I figured it would be easier than scouring my RSS for updates and happenings around the world.

Boy, was I wrong.

I first tried to go to news sites (Google and Yahoo) and set up a text or email notification system that would keep me informed without having to turn on my computer. I encountered two major problems after I set up this "service".

1. My inbox was flooded with news stories. So many stories that I couldn't focus on one, let alone one issue that I selected when setting up the news alerts. This was annoying because I was spending more time sifting through which news stories I thought were relevant than the time I would spend reading stories that I already knew were relevant on my RSS, which was also easier to set up.

2. Reading the stories on my phone is chore. Since I have the Blackberry the page that I see on my screen is quite small and only shows about a paragraph of reporting. Scrolling back and forth is not only distracting, but for someone that sometimes needs to read things twice to fully understand what is being said, frustrating, to say the least.

I will continue to use my PDA for checking my email and texting with friends, but I found that trying to read, and better yet understanding the full context of the news stories quite difficult. I think that trying to stay properly informed using only only a PDA or mobile phone would be like reading the Cliffnotes version of the news, you might get the idea, but you're never going to fully understand the context of the story. I would advise anyone to set up an RSS over receiving mobile updates.