Reviewer, 2008-12-16 09:37:00

A personal web-based portal software to track all your favorite web content including email, news, forums, weather and stocks.

Pros: As the name WatzNew suggests this is a portal tool to keep you abreast of whatever is new. It keeps you informed of breaking news, web-site updates, email (through both pop3 and web-based email), software updates, current weather conditions, stock rates, bid/online-auction prices, and more. It is highly customizable and most of the afore-mentioned updates can be chosen by the user. Contents of a particular website are presented in a customized form – this is done through user-specified search patterns and templates. All of this can be set for automatic updating or can be updated on cue.

Channels can be created so that you can keep friends and family informed of the same updates that you are interested in. Similarly, one can set-up channels to distribute content from their own websites such as blogs. It also features a multi-lingual interface. The interface is a little old-fashioned but useful because of its windowed nature (that is there are several windows that come up at the same time instead of forcing the user to have to use tabs, going back and forth or other kinds of navigation.

Cons: The customizations take time to be learned to perfection so until then the full power of the tool is not utilized. It is a predominantly text-based tool so that images, sound and other multimedia content is not readily available, if at all. This is a serious problem for users who have become used to a lot more. The trade-off is between its simplicity yet powerful customization options, at the cost of only a certain type of content being easily available.

Overall: 4 stars: A very useful tool. Great for an older generation of users who depend on text to get most things done – getting news, email, website updates. But lacks in its limited media capabilities and so is not the best fit for a new generation of users.