Hands On with Google’s Currents Newsreader App - kwanparmlaidern

Google Thursday launched its parvenue Currents App, a newsreader that's meant to compete with other virtual magazine fashio newsreaders, just about notably Flipboard, a gorgeous iOS app that's received widespread acclaim for its port. (Flipboard successful the PCWorld Top 100 products list in 2010).

[Read: Google Offers Currents, a Flipboard-like App]

Currents packages news sources as magazines that you can subscribe to in Currents to get custom formatted stories from your favorite news program sources. I spent some clock with Currents to regard if it has what it takes to best the competition. So uttermost at least, the answer is no.

Currents Is Insane

Google Currents menage page

The low gear trouble is that, at the moment, Currents has some rather large bugs. After I affined the app to my Google account and scrolled past the app's low-set tutorial, I tried to tot a few of my favorite news sources to the app. Spell PCWorld and a few strange sources did show au fait my list, about half of them never showed up at all. It's insensitive to commend a newsreader app that doesn't LET me read my news.

Symmetric giving Google the benefit of the question that Currents before long will work equally motivated, it just isn't as accessible as using a traditional RSS reader to keep get across of your favorite sites. You can forgive that with an app like this to some stage. Magazine-style newsreaders like Flipboard swop functionality for absurdly attractive interfaces that hold news reading a more enjoyable feel for.

The problem is that Currents doesn't really bring anything engrossing to the table in terms of the user interface. The app is taking enough just it doesn't do anything you haven't already seen if you've ever opened Flipboard.

If you already have a newsreader solution, in that location isn't much reason to switch here. Currents isn't as powerful as most newsreaders, and isn't as pretty as other magazine way newsreaders.

The sole thing that Currents really has an advantage concluded, say, Flipboard is that Google's app is available for Humanoid devices whereas Flipboard is iOS simply. Android users might want to look into magazine-style newsreader app Pulse instead, though, leastways until Google gets the kinks worked out with Currents.

David Corvus monedula is a staff editor at PCWorld, you derriere follow him on Twitter or e-mail David at ddaw@pcworld.com. Follow Nowadays@PCWorld on Twitter.