Prettiest news in town"
Consuming news is probably one of the most important pastimes on the internet – besides harassing others with your daily activities and watching cute kitten videos. Accordingly there are news apps aplenty. AppStore HQ currently lists 8349 for the iPhone alone. Let us introduce you to Pulse News Reader Mini – probably the most appealing way to aggregate multiple news feeds on your iPhone. The iPad has it’s own version tailored to the larger screen.
After starting up the app you’re presented with a nice and clean, if a little dark, layout. Each news source is presented with an article row, scrolled by swipe gestures. This is quite clever as it allows keeping the interface tidy without loosing richness of content. I haven’t yet found a limit to the number of news sources you can add but anything above 20 seems madness.
Tapping on an article brings you to the article view, complete with images and videos embedded. Articles can be shared via the usual suspects Facebook, Twitter and Email or saved to Instapaper by clicking the people icon in the top navigation. The additional sharing icons embedded in the articles seem a bit redundant but I’m not complaning here.
To manage your sources tap the familiar settings icon. Here you can add, delete and arrange your streams to your liking. When adding a source you’ll find a very familiar interface to navigate featured sources, browse by category or search. Pulse also allows you to access Google Reader, thus saving you the hazzle of searching your favourite blogs and news outlets.
The big advantage of the Pulse News Reader is that it allows rich media content by not limiting itself to RSS. They developed an API which allows embedding movies, images and sound bits. You’ll see this from the dedicated Youtube channel.
A funny little way of adding sources is “bump” – by bumping your handset on another you can exchange sources with your bumping mate. If your phone is to precious to bump giving it a shake works as well. The actual exchange then works via network which appears a bit strange as most mobile devices today have bluetooth which could be activated with the bump. Maybe not as seamless in the process but somehow more resource friendly.
Over time I grew really fond of this app due to its visual appeal, ease of use and wealth of sources. Despite the large number of news apps lingering around on my phone Pulse Mini has more or less become my one-stop-shop for news.
Verdict: highly recommended!
Datasheet:
Price: – free
System: – iOS min. 3.1
Size: – 5,3MB
Language: – English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish
Advertisements: – no
optimized for Retina Display (iPhone4): – yes
Multitasking: – yes
Universal-App: – no
Push-Notification: – no
Download for iPhone:
Appstore
Download for iPad:
Appstore
Screenshots
SdP
