No question the analog stick works great for scrolling up and down on a web page. I don’t like it for reading feeds because it’s too slow for my reading. I’m a headline reader and a content skimmer, so if scrolled line by line I’d never get through my feeds. Hiding the feedlist (suggested by two folks) doesn’t work for me personally. I move around from feed to feed to quickly to hide and unhide them all the time, but for other folks, this is a great suggestion!

I’ve found that the Q1′s joystick works quite well for scrolling up and down the page. My U-keys are mapped the same as Kevin suggested with the exception of one key being mapped to “u” instead of the spacebar to quickly show/hide the feed list.

I use ‘Spacebar’ for down exclusvly, mainly because on a regular laptop that is the most natural. So on my Q1 I had U3 mapped to space almost as soon as it came out of the box.

Another speedy tactic I use to browse through feeds in google reader is just hold the cursor down button, on the Q1 it scrolls at a readable speed (laptops move way to quick for this). The idea is not to read the whole story, but to decide if I wish to stop and take a closer look at the article.

Hi Kevin,

I expected to find in your recommended list, U key which allows a much better reading experience on 7″ screen by hiding the list of feeds sources ;)

If I had a Q1, that’s definitely the way I’d go. In fact, I think I did during the week I had one, since Google Reader is easily the most used app on any computer I use.

I find that the d-pad and page up/page down dedicated hardware keys on my Asus R2H really work well with Google Reader. So much so, that I just naturally use them, and have never found myself wishing for other keyboard shortcuts.

Of course, the best way to do it is how Christopher is doing it – just get a Q1 Ultra with a thumboard. :-)

Hi Kevin,

Great post. I actually use my Q1U as my primary RSS Feeder. The keyboard on the sides allow me to thumb the shortcut keys without issue. I blogged about it here. http://www.christopherwelle.com/2007/06/google-reader-q-bert.html

Christopher