I’ll hand it to Apple, their iPhone has spurred a flurry of new development activity for mobile platforms. The web 2.0 aesthetic–simple, uncluttered interfaces, large button-like links, and streamlined services–works well with the iPhone’s touch-and-tap interface, and in many cases websites designed for the iPhone screen work well on other mobile screens as well.

That’s the case with the newly released iPhone version of Google Reader. The Reader was already one of the best online RSS readers out there, because it’s so easy to use and is more or less error free. The default mobile version, however, was a mess. It was designed for screens smaller than the N95, and for very slow connections, which means it’s hard to get any decent amount of information out of it.

The iPhone version displays on the N95 screen without requiring horizontal scrolling, which is the first requirement I have for mobile-ready website displays. Better still, item entries are displayed within large touch-friendly blocks of white space. Of course on the N95 there’s on way to touch-and-click, but it makes it very easy to select links.

The one big drawback is that the reader exists as a single page that’s refreshed as necessary, so the “back” button on the browser is never activated. That means if the Reader is the first site you visit on your N95 browser, hitting the “back” hardware button will exit the web browser app. Instead, you have to scroll to the top of the page and click the html “Back” button within the page.

Other drawbacks: no keyboard shortcuts, and of course the offline functionality enabled by Google Gears won’t work on your phone. But even with these limitations, the Google Reader iPhone Version is the cleanest, easiest-to-use web-based RSS reader you can access on your N95 to date.

http://www.google.com/reader/i or use the Qcode to jump to the site on your phone. (Have a low-rez camera? Click here to view a much larger version of the Qcode.)