Ever since the first cool jailbreak apps started coming out, and certainly ever since the App Store launched, most of us have tended to write off web apps, to class them very much as the ugly step-child amongst iPhone apps.

There is one web app though that has been an unbowed, undefeated champ for as long as it’s been around. A web app that’s been like Marvelous Marvin Hagler (his legal and fitting full name) – taking on a series of (often very tough) challengers, but always coming out on top (minus one very controversial decision against Sugar Ray Leonard). That web app is Google Reader.

The iPhone optimized web version of Google Reader just works superbly well, has done ever since it arrived – and Google seems to continuously tweak it and add little but powerful features to it. In other words, it’s always been good, and it keeps getting better.

Over recent weeks, I’ve been trying out a half dozen native RSS apps for the iPhone – Byline, Newsstand, Doppler, BoltReader, smartRSS, and Feeds. Most of them are pretty good, and I’ll be posting some thoughts on them and reviews of at least a few of them soon.

Here’s a very quick spoiler though (as if you haven’t sussed it already) – worthy as some of them are, none of them matches up to Google Reader itself – at least if you are a Google Reader user like me. If you don’t want or need to use Google Reader, then one of these might well become your favorite – but if they go head-to-head with the champion web app, they’re just a bunch of Tony Sibsons – game, and brave, but destined to be knocked out.

I don’t know how many of the deficiencies I see in each of the native RSS apps are due to problems at Google’s end, so to speak – as in, how hard Google makes it for other apps to interface with Reader. I do know that I just haven’t found anything that can do everything the web app can, and do it well. It seems the ones that handle sync best are missing a key feature or two. The ones that have the slickest interfaces, have the worst performance. And so on. Whereas Reader just works – and continues to add little bells and whistles (like the ability to add Notes directly within a feed items page).

What do you all think – do you use Google Reader? Is there a native iPhone RSS app that beats it? Have you ever seen a more brutal, awesome, edge of your seat dramatic slugfest of a fight than Hagler vs. Hearns? And if you haven’t ever seen that classic fight, and you like boxing at all, hit up YouTube right now – HERE for instance – and watch it – it is spectacular …

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