Omea Reader

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET Staff on February 27, 2009

This very handy freeware program gathers all your news, feeds, bookmarks, clippings, and contacts into one easy-to-use reader. Omea Reader's multitabbed and multipaned interface is a snap to navigate. This app is a boon for the busy power Net surfer. Installation is painless using a wizard that imports your bookmarks and feeds.

Omea Reader's comprehensive approach solves a lot of user issues. This app is a strong feed reader, newsgroup tool, and bookmark manager. It adds potent support for contacts and quick notes. The advanced search function finds information from any or all of the information sources. Views are flexible and easily set. You can choose to view all resources or just one segment. Switching takes just a click on a tab. Data is sorted quickly and a click displays chosen data by date, read status, flag status, category, or a number of other methods. Testers especially noted the Correspondent option to display all posts, messages, notes, and more by a single person. Flexibility is a strong point with this tool. It's very easy to create customized views, notifications, rules, and other personalization features.

Omea Reader does suffer from memory creep. It often greatly exceeded Firefox on our test systems. The app also requires a hard-drive minimum of 500MB at install. An optional plug-in fails in Firefox 2. Nevertheless, any power user burdened with news data overload will find this program makes order out of information chaos.