Notifier’s home screen condenses quick snapshots of data from various sources into: “New,” “My Update” and “My Stream.”

For the past week, I’ve been testing an application called Notifier by iSkoot Inc. (iSkoot.com), which is designed to give basic cellphones a smart-phone-like shot in the arm. Notifier aggregates updates from various sources and social communities — including email, Facebook, Twitter, news feeds and instant messaging — into one application made for no-frills phones.

I tried Notifier on a Samsung Propel that costs $50 with a two-year contract and rebate. I appreciated the app’s way of keeping so much content in one spot, which saved me from checking various places for information. And Notifier is designed so you should need to sign into an account only once. But I found serious drawbacks in the experience.

Unlike on a BlackBerry or an iPhone, on which you can place programs you use frequently on the very first screen, Notifier is buried on the phone in a section called “My Stuff,” under a section called “Games and Apps,” which takes 10 clicks to reach. That’s a tremendous pain when you just want to quickly check Facebook. There aren’t any shortcuts or hard keys on phones that will open Notifier more quickly.

Second, Notifier’s user interface can be awkward. Posting updates to my social networks through Notifier was a clumsy process that was riddled with extra steps. My phone even had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but I preferred to use Notifier for its namesake purpose: It “notified” me of news like friends’ status updates, new messages (tweets) on Twitter and RSS news feeds.

Notifier costs $3 monthly and is exclusively available on roughly 30 AT&T (T) phones, 21 of which don’t have QWERTY keyboards. AT&T advises people who use it to do so with a data plan; these start at $15 monthly for unlimited data without text messaging. You must buy Notifier in AT&T’s online store, MEdia Mall.

Smart phones are flush with apps that aggregate content from several social networks into one spot, including Xumii for the BlackBerry or iPhone and a feature called Pulse in Yahoo’s (YHOO) oneConnect for the iPhone. There’s even a fun — though not too functional — iPhone app called Ziibii that floats social-network tidbits down an on-screen river.

Whether they’re on smart phones or basic cellphones, apps that display a lot of data in one condensed place need to do so clearly. Notifier does this by displaying a ribbon of icons at the top of the phone’s screen that it calls the carousel, and you can move the phone’s directional arrows left or right to switch from one program to the next. Whatever icon is highlighted in the carousel is the program that appears on the rest of the screen.

A tiny house icon represents the home screen, where three categories of boxes show quick snapshots of data: “New,” “My Update” and “My Stream.” The top box, labeled New, shows names of programs with numbers to show how many new items, or updates, were submitted to that program. For example, “Inbox: 3″ means that three new emails were received; “Feeds: 54″ represents 54 newly received snippets of news from an easy-to-use RSS reader built into Notifier.

Below this data are the My Update and My Stream sections, with left and right arrows to let you scan through various subcategories within each section. My Update shows your status on the various social networking sites.

I found My Stream to be a little confusing. It lets you arrow left or right to see what’s going on in your social network — if you received a new email, for instance, or someone sent you an instant message. But because you’re arrowing left or right, not up and down in a list, it’s hard to find the beginning of this stream. And Facebook notifications are a little too vague; one might say, “Barbie Roberts updated her Facebook profile,” without telling you what she did to update it.

Another Facebook glitch that I ran into was that I had to sign in more than once. This could be a hassle if you’re on the road and nowhere near a computer. In one instance, I was signed in and typed out a status update, but had to sign into Facebook yet again to post my new status. ISkoot says this and other Facebook navigation issues will be fixed within a week.

I flicked through My Stream while standing in line to board a plane and minimized the Notifier screen to get back to the phone’s functionality. Notifier can alert you of new messages even when it’s minimized. This works because the app stays connected to the network, so when you get a new message on Facebook, an email or an instant message, an indicator pops up asking if you’d like to open up the Notifier screen.

The trouble with this indicator is that it doesn’t specify what kind of message you received. I care a lot more about email and instant messages than I do about Facebook messages and would rather not be notified about Facebook. And messages received in the Facebook inbox won’t display in Notifier’s “New” inbox; instead users must take an extra step out to the browser. The company says it’s working on fixing this.

I liked the Notifier news feeds, which were easy to set up. A technology category offered content from 11 sources, and the entertainment category’s seven sources ranged from Rolling Stone to the Onion to Perez Hilton. These feeds are mixed into My Stream, like email or any other news from your network.

Instant messaging, however, required too many steps. It took a while for buddy lists to load. When I selected a person’s name to start an IM conversation, a white screen appeared that looked like a place where I could type my message, but I had to select a “Write” option to skip to another screen and start composing. Likewise, emails couldn’t be typed on the screen of the message itself; rather, you have to open a separate screen for text entry. You might get used to this after a while, but it felt clumsy to me.

Notifier’s extra $18 monthly cost (not including a voice plan) might be worthwhile if you just need a way to stay plugged in and notified of the latest goings-on with friends and email. And compared with the cost of a smart phone, it might be an economical alternative. But its awkward interface and poor placement on the cellphone leave a lot of room for improvement.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

The Kodak Theatre HD Player’s motion-sensing pointer remote works much like a mouse on a TV screen.

This week I tested the Kodak Theatre HD Player, the photo-centric company’s attempt to snag valuable real estate in the living room. This small, black box pulls photos and videos from computers around the house and displays them on an HDTV. It also enables the sending and receiving of photos via Kodak Gallery, and connects to Web-based photos stored on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, .Mac and others. Podcasts, Internet Radio and updates from news feeds, weather forecasts and stock quotes are also accessible using the HD Player. And it has a terrifically simple motion-sensing remote that works like using a mouse on a TV screen.

But the HD Player isn’t all smiles. Its $299 price doesn’t include any built-in storage for keeping content directly on the device. It currently has no way of accessing HD movies or television shows, nor will it work with Macs. In comparison, Apple’s (AAPL) $229 Apple TV has 40 gigabytes of storage, can access HD television shows and movies via the iTunes Store, and works with Macs and Windows PCs. This is important because as budgets tighten in the current economy, gadgets have to prove their value and versatility more than ever.

After using the Kodak Theatre HD Player with Windows XP and Vista machines over the past week, I can conclude that this device’s interface shines in its simplicity and is a lot of fun to use. Kodak teamed with Hillcrest Labs to make the player’s motion-sensitive remote and corresponding software, which includes satisfying extra features like images that automatically magnify when the remote control’s cursor points at them and icons that make chirping sounds when selected. The remote itself is shaped to rest comfortably in a hand and has three simple buttons and a scroll wheel.

Quick-access memory-card slots for six types of memory cards appear on the box’s front, and two USB ports can connect to digital cameras or USB storage devices.

Currently, the player’s software works directly with Flickr, RadioTime (8,750 radio stations) and FrameChannel, which grants access to various “channels” like Facebook, .Mac, Picasa, People.com news and National Geographic. Kodak says it will incorporate YouTube access in January; I got a sneak peek at the interface for this and it looks well-organized.

Yet the HD Player’s smart combination of software and remote left me wishing it did a bit more. Photo sharing is enabled only via Kodak Gallery, so you can’t use another Web-based account to share photos directly from your TV. Likewise, a blue light on the box slowly blinks only when new Picture Mail (a message containing shared photos) is received on a Kodak Gallery account, not when new photos are added on other sources such as Flickr Photostreams or Facebook pages.

The Home screen of the HD Player shows four categories: Pictures & Videos, Kodak Gallery, Music and Entertainment. Subcategories are where you might guess they would be, for example podcasts are listed under Entertainment. And a tiny Home icon appears in the top right corner of every screen so you can always get Home with one click. The Pictures & Videos category holds photos and videos from a currently selected Windows PC.

An unlimited number of Windows PCs can wirelessly pair with the player as long as they have special Kodak software installed on them. But only one PC’s content can be accessed at a time. I toggled between two paired computers without a problem, but would’ve preferred accessing music and photos from both sources simultaneously.

The HD Player’s motion-sensing pointer remote works much like a Wii remote control. Wherever you move it, a tiny leaf-shaped cursor appears on-screen. A Hide button on the remote will hide the cursor while you watch slideshows. The remote’s Back button is helpful; when pressed, it backs you out of one screen using visual effects that make the screen shrink into the TV as if you were moving backward.

A play button appears on the first photo in a folder so users can select this icon to quickly start slideshows. Whenever the HD Player receives new Kodak Gallery Picture Mail, or a slideshow is created on a connected PC, yellow alert circles appear on the screen to notify users and a number in the middle of these yellow circles indicates how many new items are available for viewing.

Some content on my PCs took a little while to be recognized by the HD Player, including podcasts that I subscribe to on iTunes. When they did show up, both audio and video podcasts played without issue and on-screen playback buttons made them easy to control.

The HD Player uses your photos to create automatically generated slideshows, called Picture Chronicles, once a week. These Picture Chronicles use up to 50 photos from the same time of year in all of your folders, for instance grouping all Thanksgiving photos together from the past five years.

Kodak has plans to make its player Mac-compatible in the future and also hopes to add other partnerships with new types of content following its YouTube announcement early next year.

The Kodak Theatre HD Player does its job well, bringing photos and videos that might otherwise live only on your PC to your big screen HDTV. For the holidays, this device could be a real plus. But Kodak has some work to do to make this a more useful Web-connected tool.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com