If you follow a lot of gossip and entertainment blogs on a daily basis, you will like Amebo. Amebo is an RSS reader that aggregates latest posts from some of the most popular news and gossip blogs in Nigeria, and presents them in a neat and easy to digest format. Amebo has been specifically designed to load fast while saving data, especially on low-end feature phones.
The app is touted to load consistently in 10 seconds, over a decent internet connection. I experience an average load time of 8 seconds, and it doesn’t have to refresh until another 20 or so read articles. The interface is very simple and free of unnecessary clutter. Images fast and render beautifully. You can listen to audio files and watch videos within the app and there’s also social sharing functionality integrated – so you never have to leave the app.
While I praise Amebo for its simplicity, I feel like it’s a little too simple for me. I wish there was an option to auto-hide articles after I have read them, so I don’t have to scroll through the same articles every time I reload. I also don’t like that you can’t add your own custom feeds, only feeds that Amebo curates for you. I understand the aim is probably to keep things as simple as possible, but there’s always room for improvement.
Amebo is currently available, and runs smoothly, on all major mobile platforms including Android (also available on the Nokia X Store), Blackberry and Nokia Asha. Windows Phone to come soon. I have personally tried it out on Android, Nokia X and Asha and the experience is practically uniform. Amebo was developed by TeXSoft, the guys behind the J2ME Framework once featured on TechCabal.
