Once blogs and news are on your handheld, Quick News does a great job of displaying them, letting you mark them as read or unread, and removing them according to your settings. The process of getting them onto the handheld, though, isn't as solid.

HotSync conduit, Internet connection, and automatic updates
The HotSync conduit works well, for the most part. It's slow, but it does the job. Occasionally one of my feeds does not get updated, reporting an error, but the next HotSync always gets the feed so I'm assuming a temporary glitch or a busy site is causing the trouble, or possibly a waver in my laptop's wireless Internet connection.

However, this conduit is the first one I've seen in my over ten years of Palm use that does not have the "set as default" check box. With that check box in place, you can set a conduit not to do anything at a given HotSync and know it will return to its pre-set default status on the next one. Instead, the Quick News conduit requires you to remember you've disabled it and go back in to re-enable it after the HotSync is complete. I wish Stand Alone had followed the convention here, as I often turn off various conduits to speed up my synchronization and was constantly forgetting to turn Quick News back on.

When I added my feeds on my first use of the program, I told Quick News to update all of them via the Internet connection (which it calls "local update", which confused me for a while). It opened the Internet connection, which I keep turned off by default to conserve battery power, and set to work. Two minutes into the process, the Palm turned off, as per my power off setting. I turned it back on to make sure it was still working, which it was, then left it alone for as long as I thought it would take.

When I pressed the power button, though, it refused to turn on. Concerned, I tried several more times, left it alone for a few minutes, tried again, and then it worked. I saw this again and again during my testing, and it appears that if the Palm is off during the final updating stage, the stage where the software is importing data, it cannot be powered on until the process is complete. Now that I know this, I don't worry about it, but I do think it's unfortunate that it responds this way.

Sometimes the updating process starts the Internet connection, updates only one blog, and then quits. While there is a feature to allow you to update only one, this happens to me as well when I ask to have all blogs updated, but not with any pattern I could discern.

Quick News provides automatic update features, via the Internet, to keep your blogs and news feeds refreshed. According to the manual, there is a spot in each feed's settings to state how frequently the feed should be updated. Despite the screen shot in the manual showing this setting, it does not exist. There is a global automated update setting, but I found the Palm didn't always launch an update when I expected it to do so. For example, I set it to run every two hours beginning at eight o'clock; it ran at eight and then said its next update would be at noon.