Life2Go lets you sync your mail, news feeds, iCal and Address Book info, weather forecasts, petrol prices, travel directions, movie screening and more to your iPod.

It can turn your iPod into a PDA, although of course the communication is all one way. You can’t enter information like new appointments or phone numbers, but it does put all the information you have at your finger tips on the road and out of the office.

In particular, syncing iCal, Address Book and Mail.app messages, safari bookmarks and documents in a variety of formats (RTF, PDF, Word .doc, plan text) makes your iPod a productivity tool.

Syncing these is done on an app by app basis:

You can select which mailboxes, calendars and Address Book Groups to sync, or sync them all. A new version (1.6.4) released today brings significant improvements to the speed and efficiency of syncing Mail.app messages.

As an added bonus, syncing your info like this, turns your iPod into a backup device for some of the most important information you have.

If I owned an iPod I would be most attracted by the idea of using it as a news feed reader. It automatically mirrors your NetNewsWire subscriptions and you can add extra ones directly within Life2Go:

You can read more about the other kinds of information that Life2Go brings to your iPod on the developer’s web site . Life2Go is shareware (USD 12.99).ipod, mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, syncing, RSS, news feeds, productivity

A new beta of NetNewsWire (a very fine RSS aggregator or news reader) has been released .

The updated beta (2.1b32) offers registered users a free two-year subscription to Newsgator’s syncing service, which is a third option alongside syncing with your .Mac account or FTP server for synchronising your news subscriptions between multiple Macs.

If you don’t already have a Newsgator account (free), the beta will guide through the process of creating one.

NewNewsWire is also currently discounted (USD 19.95 instead of the normal USD 24.95), an offer that will stand until version 2.1 is officially released.

Endo looks very pretty and Vienna is getting better, but NetNewsWire stands head and shoulders above the pack for stability, grunt and features.

I couldn’t do Hawk Wings without it. There’s no other way for me to get across all the information I need to see more efficiently and reliably.

If you’ve been waiting for a good time to register the full version, the time is now.

UPDATE: David Chartier at TUAW provides a list of the extra features included in the Newsgator subscription, which I should have done, but didn’t.netnewswire, rss, news feeds, news aggregator, newsgator, efficiency, productivity