Review: Pulse News Reader

Thursday, January 10, 2013
One of the best things about having a mobile device is having all the information you want at your fingertips. The problem with having all that information is figuring out how to handle it all and get to it in a way that makes it easy to consume, enter news readers. There are a lot of options out there on Android for news readers, even Google Reader but they all handle things a bit differently and offer their own benefits, the reader that is gaining a lot of ground on multiple platforms is Pulse News Reader. Pulse is available on Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows Mobile and the just recently released Kindle Fire.
My personal favorite is Pulse News Reader. Pulse offers all the benefits of a slim light weight news reader with a slick user interface and great control scheme, it is easily the only news reader I would recommend to anyone on Android, iPad or Phone and even Windows Mobile.
Overall Experience:
The overall experience when using Pulse is clearly tailored towards tablet users. You're greeted with a straightforward tile layout that pulls in articles from site feeds and populates them with large images, article headlines, and brief intro copy from each article. Site feeds are organized into rows that you can quickly scan and you can tab through pages if you have multiple sites that you're pulling from.
Once if you're interested in an article from the quick glimpse tile you can click on it and pull in the full version of the article. The full version of the article comes on-screen from a pull out so you still see the rows and tiles but you have a new overlay that has the full article text and images for you to read through. It happens so seamlessly and you never leave the app to read more of any one specific article.

Content Sources:
Adding content streams is easy and intuitive from the main menu of Pulse. Once you have a page set up you can click on the "+" symbol and you're shown a list of featured sources. If none of those are your style you can either browse, search, or import from Google Reader. Pulse filters content feeds by category in the browse section, by popular and straight forward titles. You can also search for specific feeds (like ours).
Also when you add a page you're able to "choose a pack" which is pre-populated with popular content streams to get you started.
Integration:
Overall Pulse integrates very well into Android allowing you to utilize background syncing to stay up to date with articles. Pulse alto notifies you when you have new articles that you haven't read yet. There is a simple icon that displays to let you know when you have new content to read. Also with the Android integration comes social features like sharing through multiple apps from Facebook, to Twitter, and Google+.
Conclusion:
At this point in the game there are multiple news aggregators available in the market and at the end of the day it is going to come down to personal preference which is best for you. With strong competitors like Flipboard for the iPhone and iPad, Livestand from Yahoo, and Googles recently launched Currents, Pulse has to provide something different, and in my opinion it does just that. The intuitive approach to content display and curation makes it simple for anyone to access just the content that they want. It works seamlessly between phones and tablets and once you have it set up, it just works

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