You can add new feeds by searching for a feed or browsing a list of featured ones. You can also add an RSS feed directly by entering the URL. Newsroom integrates perfectly with the notification system and prompts you when new articles come in. There’s no way to read all new articles in one go, you’ll need to visit each page and tap on the icons with new numbers on them for each new article. Overall, this is a powerful and polished News and RSS reader with full-article support (not just snippets) and custom formatting that will almost certainly fulfill all your News browsing needs on the Palm Pre.

You can track your financial portfolio and the major world indices through this app as well. The really thoughtful and impressive feature is the offline sync. If you are entering an area with no cellular or WiFi reception, you can simply download all the current articles and your stocks portfolio data to your Pre and read and follow the articles completely offline. The download process is smooth and fast and worked like a charm. With this capability, Forbes on the Palm Pre leaps well beyond the other News apps on the App Catalog at present. Forbes brings both current news and in-depth analysis so you won’t be left wanting for more with this app. Forbes is a must-download News application for the Palm Pre.

You can search the AP news service right from within the app. The search feature is available with a single tap from every screen on the app and is reasonably quick and responsive. I would have liked to see the ability to search within a given news story, but that functionality is not offered yet. The breadth of member services offering feeds into this app easily makes this app more useful than the New York Times app previously reviewed. This is a true News junkie’s app.

If you haven’t downloaded and used a Classic emulated app before, here’s how to do it: Connect your Palm Pre to your computer with the USB cable and enable the USB Drive mode on your Pre. You’ll need to copy the “PRC” file that you get when you download a legacy app into the “ClassicApps” folder on your Pre. Launch the Classic app on your Palm Pre after disconnecting the USB cable, and you’ll see the new app under the “internal” category of the Palm OS launcher.

Similarly, content isn’t much different from simply browsing the mobile web version. What I would have liked to see is options to automatically refresh or pull the latest feeds from the NYT, or at least have some sort of notifications appear that provides information on breaking news. For news junkies, this doesn’t really cut it. For the casual news reader checking in every few hours, it works pretty well. If you enjoy logically separating your news from your browsing, this is definitely very useful.