Tech n Gadgets Blog: APP OF THE DAY: Pulse (Android Honeycomb)

Monday, April 18, 2011

APP OF THE DAY: Pulse (Android Honeycomb)

News, glorious news!
APP OF THE DAY: Pulse (Android Honeycomb)

Some you might have an Android tablet in your hand, some of you might even have a Honeycomb tablet in your hands. We’re sure that by the end of the year many more of you will have a Honeycomb tablet.

Of course you’ll be wanting to cut your way through swathes of information; you’ll need easily digestible news of your choosing. And why would you limit yourself to just the one source? Today’s App Of The Day introduces just the app for your Honeycomb tablet.

Pulse

Format: Android Honeycomb
Price: Free
Where: Android Market

Pulse is essentially a clever content retrieval application where you have full control over the content that you see. It relies heavily on the quality of the feeds that go into it and the results from different sources will vary accordingly.?

But Pulse is one of our top Honeycomb apps, if not the current top Honeycomb app simply because it works beautifully on the large screen. Pulse divides itself into a number of different tab pages, starting with Top and Social and followed by a number of additional pages that you can customise to your needs.?

Being tech heads we picked out some of the feeds from our favourite tech sites (okay, we used it as a way of spying on rivals, but hey), and found the information dropped into place quickly and easily. Each story from the source appears as a tile, with the title and image, which looks great.

Pulse offers up a number of featured sites, but if you decide you want news from elsewhere, you can simply search for a feed by tapping in the site URL or a keyword. You can also add your feeds from Google Reader.

The feeds then fall into neat lines so you can scroll along a particular source for more stories, or up and down the page to get to more of your sources. Click on a story you like the look of and it will open up in a preview page, which will let you read all the content of that story feed.

You also get links to the original article online, so if the source limits the feed to a preview of a few lines, you can head off and read the real thing in the regular browser, or click the “web” option in the top right-hand corner that will load up the page in the window.

From each story you can get social and share it through Facebook, Twitter or a number of other external applications - so you can share it via email or send the details to Evernote, for example.?

You can change a whole range of settings, including the size of the font used, and you can set a “dark mode” that changes the text background to grey (so it doesn’t hit you full beam when reading in bed).?You can also set the update frequency and tell it to only update over Wi-Fi. When new stories are added you get a notification in the normal Honeycomb way, so you know there is something interesting to read.

It’s a slick, considered and useful application which really looks good on the big screen of the Motorola Xoom that we’ve been testing it on. It’s also free, which makes it that little bit sweeter and comes highly recommended if you are an Android tablet owner.

Tags: Apps Android apps AOTD App of the day Pulse Mobile phone apps Honeycomb apps