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Hands-On With Google’s Digital News App

Flipboard was the first of a score of magazine-style tablet news apps, joining Pulse, Zite, and Yahoo's Livestand. Now a brand-name competitor is entering the game: Google has unveiled its own news-reading app, Google Currents.

Available for smartphones and tablets running Android or iOS, Google Currents lets users subscribe to diverse publications equally considerably equally "trends" (the five nearly popular stories for topics such equally 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 country on the app's dwelling screen. Half of the abode screen is necessitated up by a photo feed highlighting tales 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 similar Google Currents' simple, scroll-down interface. The more subscriptions and trends you add, the more you'll receive to swipe down. Erstwhile you drill down into soul subscriptions, available narrations are presented in a table of contents-style layout. Compared to Flipboard and Zite, it reads more like a magazine, if just because the swiping move to make to the succeeding page nigh nearly mimics the have of turning print pages.

Perhaps the coolest feature of Currents is Trending. You can take to follow the crown stories for a kind of categories, and for each storey the app shows coverage from a form of sources. For example, when we clicked on a headline for the recent shooting at Virginia Tech, we were needed to a page with coverage from a sort of sources, including AP, Financial Times, Washington Post, and more. This expanse feels more dynamic than the library subdivision 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 succeeding to Narrations 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, called About, is an encyclopedia-style list of resources virtually the subject in question. For Virginia Tech, the app delivered links to the university's habitation 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 could entirely link the app with their Google account, while other apps let sharing via Facebook and Twitter. Still, there's integration with Google+, thus that's you're best bet for discovering substance beyond Google's preselected news sources.

Is Currents a viable Flipboard alternative? Yes—if the app supports your favourite news sources and if you like to exercise down inscrutable into a especial matter or story. Will it win over the iOS-only gang of Flipboard users? Probably 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 surely to evolve with time.