Snaptu Review: Create Mobile Apps with no sweat

in Mobile Opinions by Yohay Elam — May 3, 2010 at 10:19 am | 2 comments

Following out report about  Sequoia’s decision to invest in Snaptu, we decided to check it out on a Nokia E71. The idea is great, and the design is awesome, yet there are some shortcomings.

Snaptu is an Israeli start up that creates free and fast applications for mobile phones – smart phones and others. CEO Ran Makavy’s application was downloaded over 4 million times. I gave a try as well.

The application sure is fast in comparison to other applications that I have on my Nokia E71. Some applications are always slow, while others don’t like to multi-task with other applications. Snaptu’s always worked fast. Also the design is quite neat – the buttons are big and everything is simple – simplicity sure is an advantage.

I focused on the RSS reader. I find it hard to keep track of my RSS feed – something I don’t have on my phone. Snaptu offers quick and easy import from Google Reader – once I supplied my credentials, I could select the feeds I wanted to import and the ones to leave behind.

Now, I took my time with checking out the feeds one by one. The display of the text is straightforward – I found myself reading long pieces on the mobile phone, something that seemed impractical. Reading blog posts / news on the mobile phone is very useful before going to sleep – while a book needs light and a laptop creates light, reading using the cellular phone doesn’t spread much light, and enables your spouse to sleep tight.

But here’s the first shortcoming – when clicking on the Back button, Snaptu goes back to the top of the feed list, rather than the feed I just dived into. Scrolling down again wastes time and isn’t friendly.

After this long catching up with content, I clicked the “All Channels” button and to see the latest updates. Reading headlines and selecting which ones to read was very quick. The feature that allows reading comments inside Snaptu is also great in terms of speed. An option to add my own comment to the site would add a lot to the experience.

With keeping up to date, I also found an unfriendly feature – the list is limited. Old items are bumped down, and cannot be accessed through the “All Channels”. Pressing the Down arrow didn’t bring them up. The only way was to checking the starred individual feeds and trying to remember which feed was already via the general feed, and which wasn’t. Keeping a Read / Unread status would sure help.

Some sites don’t offer a full feed. I’m not going to enter the debate about full or partial feeds, but mention that in this case, Snaptu offers the reader to open the phone’s browser. Here there’s a small issue – the application doesn’t offer an option not to ask again, and it also doesn’t close the dialog screen. A tiny shortcoming, but users are often lazy, and every click that can be saved should be saved.

Other applications

The weather application is great – simplicity here is perfect – the user receives the current conditions and a 7 day forecast, as well as a satellite image and several indices. Everything is well-designed. You can’t ask for more. It seems that the Twitter and Facebook applications received a lot of attention, but these fields are already quite crowded.

All in all, Snaptu has a great potential, but it still needs some tuning.

Website: http://www.snaptu.com/
Abstract: Snaptu turns favorite websites into ultra fast mobile apps that work on most available phones. snaptu supports facebook, twitter,RSS and many other applications and websites hosted under the snaptu...  
Read more about snaptu in The Wadi Index.

Tags: featured mobile app Ran Makavy snaptu

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Author: YohayElam

Yohay Elam is a problogger, with Forex Crunch being his primary site. Yohay belongs to the founding generation of Israeli political group blog Black Labor, a writer in the The Networking Blog and maintains his personal bi-lingual blog. Before becoming a problogger, Yohay worked as a programmer in various Israeli startups such as Metacafe.