Flipboard was the first of a hit of magazine-style tablet news apps, joining Pulse, Zite, and Yahoo’s Livestand. Forthwith a brand-name competitor is entering the game: Google has unveiled its ain news-reading app, Google Currents.
Available for smartphones and tablets coursing Android or iOS, Google Currents lets users subscribe to diverse publications equally considerably as “trends” (the five almost popular narratives for topics such as business, entertainment, health, and more). The app launches with 150 partners, including CNET, Forbes, and the Huffington Post.
Once you’ve downloaded the free app and signed in with your Google history (required), you’ll commonwealth on the app’s habitation screen. Half of the habitation screen is involved up by a photo run highlighting tales from your subscriptions. The other half of the screen shows your library—by default it lists Fast Company, Forbes, and a few others equally subscriptions—and a tab for trending topics.
We similar Google Currents’ simple, scroll-down interface. The more subscriptions and trends you add, the more you’ll get to swipe down. Formerly you recitation down into somebody subscriptions, available stories are presented in a table of contents-style layout. Compared to Flipboard and Zite, it reads more similar a magazine, if merely because the swiping motility to get to the next page nearly closely mimics the get of becoming mark pages.
Perhaps the coolest feature of Currents is Trending. You could select to follow the top tales for a kind of categories, and for each storey the app shows coverage from a variety of sources. For example, when we clicked on a headline for the late shooting at Virginia Tech, we were needed to a page with coverage from a kind of sources, including AP, Financial Times, Washington Post, and more. This area feels more dynamic than the library subdivision of the app, which is obviously heavily curated by Google.
Another awesome lineament under the Trending section is user-generated content. When we clicked through to coverage of Virginia Tech, the tab succeeding to Narratives displayed YouTube videos tagged with the keyword “Virginia Tech.” (These were clips of football games and not related to the shooting, understandably.) A tertiary tab, foretold About, is an encyclopedia-style list of resources almost the issue in question. For Virginia Tech, the app delivered links to the university’s dwelling page, its Wikipedia entry, its matter page on the New York Times website, and more. Fairly cool.
Where Google Currents falls short of its news app competition is social networking integration; users may alone link the app with their Google account, while other apps let sharing via Facebook and Twitter. Still, there’s integration with Google+, so that’s you’re best wager for discovering message beyond Google’s preselected news sources.
Is Currents a viable Flipboard alternative? Yes—if the app supports your preferent news sources and if you alike to exercise down mystifying into a particular subject or story. Will it succeed over the iOS-only crowd of Flipboard users? Believably not, equally that app offers a wider kind of sources and social media tie-ins. Still, Google Currents is brand-spanking new, and its choice of publications is certainly to evolve with time.
