In lieu of lengthy Android App of the Week posts, I decided to devote my time to creating quick and hopefully helpful compilations of curated apps for specific genres. There are many ways to keep up to date on your blogs, news, and other online publications. I will take a quick look at Currents, Google Reader, Pulse, and BeyondPod. I’ll also make a shout out to the “reddit is fun” app.
- Google Currents – This is Google’s response to many newspaper apps like Flipboard, Feedly, and Pulse. Currents allows you to subscribe to online magazines, websites, or any RSS feed and tends to work best with content that contains pictures or videos. If you care deeply about your layout and typesetting, Currents is probably the right app for you. – Free
- LinkedIn Pulse (fka Pulse News) – Before Currents recent debut, the only real choice for a stylized news aggregator was Pulse. Even today, Pulse takes managing news feeds and makes the entire process much more intuitive.
Vertical scrolling takes you through your different content sources, and horizontal scrolling moves through chronological ordering of the posts. The experience is particularly enjoyable on tablets but works well on phones, too.– Free
- Google Reader (discontinued) – A plain and simple port of Google’s web reader app for Android OS. This is great if you already use Google Reader online as you won’t need to set up your reading lists and such. Feedly does offer Google Reader integration, though I’ve never tried it before. My wife primarily uses this because she follows a lot of blogs. – Free (discontinued)
- BeyondPod Podcast Manager – Billed as a podcast manager, BeyondPod is a fairly decent paid aggregator for all sorts of content. It manages RSS feeds as well as audio and video podcasts. It supports easy categorization of your feeds and integration with Google Reader. The real power comes from its built-in interface for either streaming or downloading any sort of video or audio podcast in a powerful way. This is for the hardcore podcaster. – $6.99 (7-day free trial)
- reddit is fun – I really wouldn’t call this an aggregator in the sense that this app only allows you to access reddit.com posts. The content tends to fall on the nerdy side of things, but if that is what you like, this app is a pretty good way to browse it on a mobile device rather than accessing the website directly. – (regular version) free | (premium version +widgets) $1.99
