Flipboard was the first of a hit of magazine-style tablet news apps, joining Pulse, Zite, and Yahoo’s Livestand. Immediately a brand-name competitor is entering the game: Google has unveiled its own news-reading app, Google Currents.
Available for smartphones and tablets coursing Android or iOS, Google Currents lets users subscribe to diverse publications as well equally “trends” (the five virtually popular stories 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 chronicle (required), you’ll country on the app’s home screen. Half of the abode screen is necessitated up by a photograph run highlighting narrations from your subscriptions. The other half of the screen shows your library—by default it lists Flying Company, Forbes, and a few others equally subscriptions—and a tab for trending topics.
We alike Google Currents’ simple, scroll-down interface. The more subscriptions and trends you add, the more you’ll have to swipe down. Erst you drill down into mortal subscriptions, available narrations are presented in a table of contents-style layout. Compared to Flipboard and Zite, it reads more like a magazine, if only because the swiping move to induce to the succeeding page near nearly mimics the have of becoming mark pages.
Perhaps the coolest lineament of Currents is Trending. You can choose to pursue the peak stories for a sort of categories, and for each level the app shows coverage from a form of sources. For example, when we clicked on a headline for the late shooting at Virginia Tech, we were involved to a page with coverage from a form of sources, including AP, Financial Times, Washington Post, and more. This area feels more dynamic than the library section of the app, which is obviously heavily curated by Google.
Another awesome feature under the Trending subdivision is user-generated content. When we clicked through to coverage of Virginia Tech, the tab next 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 third tab, foreboded About, is an encyclopedia-style listing of resources virtually the subject in question. For Virginia Tech, the app delivered links to the university’s domicile page, its Wikipedia entry, its topic page on the Young York Times website, and more. Reasonably cool.
Where Google Currents falls short of its news app competition is social networking integration; users may entirely link the app with their Google account, while other apps permit sharing via Facebook and Twitter. Still, there’s integration with Google+, hence that’s you’re best bet for discovering message beyond Google’s preselected news sources.
Is Currents a viable Flipboard alternative? Yes—if the app supports your favored news sources and if you like to exercise down deep into a particular matter or story. Will it win over the iOS-only bunch of Flipboard users? Believably not, as that app offers a wider sort of sources and social media tie-ins. Still, Google Currents is brand-spanking new, and its selection of publications is sure to evolve with time.
