A few months ago, I reviewed Phonly, giving it a very decent rating as a Windows Phone front end to the massively popular Feedly news aggregator. Well, Phonly's back, and with the ability to directly open 'full' articles without messing around with IE or visiting the linked news sites at all. See also the update to Nextgen Reader, which seems to be tracking Phonly's improvements - all good for the end user!

New for this version 1.2.4.0 are (over and above features in the version I reviewed)

• Download full article without opening Internet Explorer or mobilizer (must be enabled in 'Reading Settings')
• Tap and hold an article in a list to 'Mark above as read'
• New settings page layout
• Updated login page background
• Bug-fixes

Here's the new version in action:

Phonly's clean front end to Feedly (and note in these screens that you can remove the ads with an in-app purchase if you want); reading a news article which is only summarised in its RSS feed normally results in this 'Continue reading' link and you have to open it up Internet Explorer.

However, with v1.2.4.0, you can opt to 'download full article' in Settings, and then, as if by magic, you have access to the full, optimised article within Phonly, just as if the site had published the full article in the RSS feed in the first place.

It's great for users, though I do wonder about news site owners, who may be seeing less eyeballs on their sites - and thus less ad impressions. Comments welcome!

You can download Phonly here in the Windows Phone Store.