weave

Weave is a popular news reader for your Windows Phone and it was recently updated to version 4.0. The update gives the news reader a re-design and a respectable amount of customizability.

The update also brings a few under the hood tweaks that gives the app faster performance. Weave is pre-loaded with thirty three categories including world, financial, deals, fashion, videogames, technology and more. From there you can edit and add to the Weave feeds to better match your needs.

Just a few weeks ago, Weave, the super slick RSS news reader, received a major UI overhaul which we gave high marks due to its exceptional elegance. Now, v3.1 is available in the Marketplace (paid version) and it's all Mango outfitted for your pleasure.

For Mango features, you have your fast app switching/resume, which allows multitasking to finally be enabled. On top of that, the app is smoother for scrolling and quite zippy to use.

If you haven't tried Weave yet, you really should. One of the its best features are the 33 preloaded categories e.g. politics, technology, Windows Phone, etc. with each category featuring some of the best blogs and news sources around. In turn, you don't have to sit and think about which RSS feeds you should subscribe too (though of course you can manage those and even add new ones). There's a free version (currently non-Mango) and the paid version (with trial) which fetches for $2.99. Grab the Mango v3.1 here in the Marketplace.

Yesterday, mentioned about some OEM LG apps that were either added or updated and in passing, we remarked that there seems to be fewer of those free apps that LG was offering (see earlier coverage of the offer here).

As it turns out, we weren't the only ones as Michael Eggleston was wondering what happened to his Weave (review). Easily one of the most popular and stellar apps of the platform, Weave was offered for free to LG users. Not any more as our current app is "frozen" at v2.4 and is no longer listed (so you'll lose it after a hard reset). Michael wrote the developers, Seles Games and asked what the deal was and here is there response:

The LG campaign was a limited-time promotion where they offered 10 apps for free for 60 days. They should be making a 2nd set of 10 apps available soon. Since LG controls that version of Weave, we have no way of submitting an update. Until they give us back control of it, it will be stuck at version 2.4.

We want all our LG users to keep getting the latest version, so we are going to put the regular version of Weave on sale for the lowest possible price ($1) starting tonight at midnight.

We are also going to be releasing a free, ad-supported version of Weave soon.

Between the $1 price promotion and a free ad-supported version, we hope al our LG users will find that they still have a way to get the latest updates and don't miss out on features.

Thank you for your support and I hope you continue enjoying Weave!

Edit: SelesGames informed us that email was from a few weeks ago and no immediate sale is planed. Still, it's great app.

Companies like Seles Games are obviously doing their best to maintain customer support and kudos to them for their effort, but LG's offer of 10 free apps seems a little less genuine than before--or are we just being grumpy in these early hours?

The lines between desktop and mobile computing just got a little more blurry. (That's a good thing.) Mozilla's Weave service, which, in a nutshell, syncs your browser data — including bookmarks, passwords, history and even open tabs — just his 1.0 beta status. Why is this important for Windows Mobile, you ask? Because Mozilla's been working on its mobile browser (codenamed Fennec) for some time now, and Weave will play an integral part in it.

If you've been using a desktop browser sync, you already know what we're talking about. Your data is seamlessly synced between one or more computers and the cloud. Weave goes a step further, also syncing the data with the Fennec browser. I've been using Weave off and on with Firefox for a while now, and it's steadily improved. And v1.0b is even faster and more transparent. Now we just need to see Fennec get out the door (and get much faster), and we'll have a real browser war on our hands. [download Weave via Mozilla Labs]