If you haven’t been living under a rock, you have probably heard recently that Google Reader is shutting down. And if you’re anything like our blogger, you’re a heavy user of Google Reader, and in search of alternatives.

You’re in luck though. Every single website on the Internet is telling you about the top alternatives. Every. Single. One.

They generally look like this one by Lifehacker, who have probably published another dozen articles almost exactly like this since Google’s announcement, and will probably publish a dozen more before Google shuts down Reader on July 1st.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we aren’t going to make a list. But we do need to find ourselves a new RSS reader. It has to sync between machines. And it has to have an app that handles offline reading.

That’s it. Nothing too fancy.

So we’re combing through all these recommendations, and actually trying them out. After a few days, each one will get its own post here on the Big Bad Blog, and we’ll see how it compares against the frontrunner. Once we have a potential replacement.

First up …

Feedly

Feedly seems to appear on every list that’s out there. And no wonder – it’s pretty sweet.

• It syncs a single account across all your devices.
• It’s pretty.
• You can import your Google Reader feeds with a single click.
• It’s pretty.
• They have a no-effort solution for handling the closure of Google Reader.
• Have we mentioned that it’s pretty?

The Android app is also quite nice — one of the best RSS reader apps I’ve used. It’s not just gorgeous, but intuitive, and looks like it has plenty of additional options to help organise your feeds.

But.

Before I got to configuring these, I got on the tube to come home this afternoon, and this popped up:

Seriously, feedly? No offline support?

I checked the available settings. Nothing.

No offline support is simply a dealbreaker. The internet is not available on the London Underground. Nor is it available on airplanes. And while it’s available in foreign countries, it’s really damn expensive through a phone.

Offline support, Feedly. Offline support.

What’s next?

The Old Reader was going to be next, as I had seen various recommendations, but not only does their mobile app not include offline support – it does not even exist.

So tomorrow will be Newsblur.

Newsblur charge a subscription fee, so will have to knock the socks off the competition, but all these services are certain to be experiencing scaling issues from the influx of people seeking an alternative to Google — a combination of deterrent (ie, cost) and cash influx from new users is certain to help that.

So I have high hopes, Newsblur. Don’t disappoint. I need a frontrunner.

The first half of this week was tough. Things broke. As they are purported to, they broke in threes.

last.fm

As many denizens of the Internet might know, last.fm broke early in the week.

Once upon a time, this would be something I might not have even noticed, but since last year’s Android Music Adventure experiment, I have become quite the last.fm enthusiast. I now use the service to track all the music I listen to, to discover new music (which is mostly music that has somehow gone missing from my library in the move from tape to CD to MP3), to listen to music at work, and to keep track of statistics on what I listen to.

Yes, I like statistics.

At the end of the day, I can listen to music using my phone or the library on my home computer (which is what I mostly do anyways). But it broke. Which sucked.

giffgaff

Of course, having last.fm broken doesn’t necessarily matter if you can’t connect to it. And when I was mobile, I couldn’t connect to it.

Why? Giffgaff went down.

That isn’t exactly fair, of course — giffgaff is a “virtual” mobile network, meaning it runs on another company’s hardware. And that company, O2, had a major network crash, which lasted for approximately 25 hours.

The phone

Of course, having your mobile network broken doesn’t mean much if your phone is not working. And mine has developed a fault.

The down volume button doesn’t work.

If this sounds like a small problem, it’s because it should be. But for some reason, this triggers my phone to go into Safe Mode in Android Ice Cream Sandwich. There seems to be no way around it. I’ve tried a stock ROM, and all sorts of other ROMs. None of them work.

What does work is going back to Gingerbread. But after half a year of using Ice Cream Sandwich, it feels like being back in the stone age — I have grown accustomed to many of the Ice Cream Sandwich features.

The plan today is to stick with Gingerbread until Jelly Bean is available for my phone — hopefully later this month. Then hope that Jelly Bean will play nice with slightly broken hardware.

If it doesn’t, then I will have a dilemma: I want my next phone to be compatible with a 4G network in the UK, but those don’t exist yet. Do I limp along with Gingerbread until then? Or upgrade my phone early?

And if I upgrade, to what?

My first thought was the Motorola Atrix HD. I’ve like Motorola phones in the past.

But for some reason, Motorola — who are owned by Google — lock down their Android phones and don’t ship with the latest version of the Operating System. On the other hand, Google branded phones by Samsung (who I no longer trust to build robust hardware) are easy to root.

Colour me confused.

In any case, I apologize for missing your call this week.

Some fourteen months ago, I bought myself a shiny new Nexus S.

In the year that followed, I grew to seriously love this phone. It has been rooted, tweaked, screwed up, nearly bricked, and updated ad nauseum. Whenever I feel I want a “new” phone, all it takes is some research and some time to set it up with a new ROM and/or launcher and/or launcher theme, and it’s ready to go.

And then on Friday, it gave me some very, very bad words:

Safe Mode.

I do not know why, or how, but my dear Nexus S booted up in Safe Mode on Friday morning, and it would not leave.

There are various instructions on the web for leaving Safe Mode. All were tried. I rebooted. I removed the battery. I booted with the up volume pressed. The down volume pressed.

Eventually I completely wiped the phone and installed a stock ICS ROM. Problem “solved”.

And it’s a good thing, too – I very much do not want to buy a new phone right now; anybody who willingly upgrades their phone right now is a bit of a fool.

The reason? 4G.

Waiting on the Fourth Generation

My wife bought the latest version of the iPad. She bought the “4G” model – or what was being called the 4G model at the time. Now Apple markets it as WiFi + Cellular in the UK.

Why? Because we’re backwards here. While the rest of the developed world uses LTE (or other competing) technology to have a so-called 4G network (these standards actually fail to meet the 4G standard, as a general rule), the UK is lagging behind in having these faster networks. In fact while the latest news indicates that progress is “speeding up”, you will still see a conspicuous lack of a schedule for the introduction of a 4G standard to Britain.

And until the technology is rolled out, nobody knows the version of the standard that will be used. So any device that might be designed to handle a 4G (or 4G precursor) technology would not necessarily work on a British solution.

So I’m glad that I did not have to buy a new phone this past weekend – I’m hoping to hold on to my little Nexus for a little while longer. I’d suggest you do the same.

The news appears broke on Tuesday: Instagram has arrived for Android!

The blogs are crowing. They are reviewing. They are excited.

Except one blog. The Big Bad Blog.

Here, we’re just a little confused about the excitement.

Here’s what Instagram does: It takes a photo with your phone’s camera. Whether this photo is good or bad comes down mostly to how good you are at taking photos. It comes down a little bit to the quality of the camera on your phone. Instagram does not help.

Here’s what Instagram does next: It allows you to apply a filter to the photo, which creates a fake vintage effect. As this filter usually ruins the photo, it is thankfully optional.

Here’s what Instagram does next: It uploads that photo to a social network.

When it came out in October 2010, this was an awesome combination. (Except the filter part.) All at once, it removed the barriers between taking a photo with your phone and sharing it. It made things instant, which presumably provided the “Insta-” part of “Instagram”.

As an iPhone user in October 2010, I jumped on the bandwagon, and thought it was fantastic. When I left the world of Apple and joined the ranks of Android users in 2011, I immediately searched for Instagram, and was disappointed to find the app was iPhone-only.

But my disappointment didn’t last long. Because there were many other developers more than willing to create an app for Android that linked their phone’s camera to their social networks. And many developers willing to create apps with crappy photoshop-lite filters that kind of ruin the pictures.

The best of these – in my opinion – is lightbox, which I have been using happily since December.

So Instagram does not come to Android as an original concept, as it did with the iPhone. Instead, it comes to a crowded marketplace. What makes it stand out?

To this blogger, two things:

• They took 18 months to bring it to Android, after releasing for the iPhone
• Even so, they seem not to have managed to make the Android version full-featured.

All of which speaks to an app that we can expect to be very poorly supported – the folks at Instagram are simply showing that they can’t be bothered to support Android properly.

Which is why I’ll continue to be perfectly happy with what I’ve got.