Feedly for Android– RSS Reader that Rocks…

Posted on Jun 22, 2011 in Android, Productivity, Test Drive Apps by dee 0 Comments

Mmmm RSS feeds.. who doesn’t love the ability to subscribe to feeds from various websites and being able to read through the articles at ones leisure.

Now, when I had my iPad as my primary tablet, I used Flipboard ALL the time. It was amazing and one of the premiere products out there that supported subscribing to various topics as well as twitter accounts. That was one of the major reasons why I bought the iPad funnily enough. It looked so damn cool going through my Facebook and Twitter listings like a magazine.

Come forward to the Asus Transformer, there was no Flipboard, and I almost panicked when I found there would be no android version of this application.

The major difference between Feedly and Flipboard is that Feedly is a RSS Reader that integrates seamlessly with your Google Reader subscriptions. Flipboard on the other hand does funky stuff with your twitter and Facebook feeds.

Anyway, enough about Flipboard.. all about Feedly from here.

Feedly is first and foremost a news aggregator based on RSS feeds. Its optimised for Honeycomb and while it comes pre-configured with lots of fantastic content, its even better when personalised with Google Reader integration. Presenting your RSS feeds in a clean magazine like format, Feedly looks and behaves beautifully. Feedly comes with customised layouts for different types of devices (including mobile, tablet and web) and looks great in landscape more on my Transformer.

The developers have taken the user experience seriously and designed the interface to be intuitive and familiar. The panels transition to and from the background seamlessly with very little lag, and the rendering engine that sets up and displays the content is almost on par with Flipboard.

Integration with products such as Instapaper and Read It Later is excellent as well as the ability to discover and add additional feeds directly from within the application.

While Feedly is available on both Chrome and Firefox, I’ve never really used the PC equivalent. Frankly, it was easier to subscribe to the RSS feeds I needed via Outlook than to go through Feedly. However, on the tablet, this application has made reading the RSS feeds a new experience and one that comes with my highest recommendations.

Combined with the fact that its free from the Android and Amazon market, its one of those applications that can only get better with time.

Bring on Twitter and Facebook integration, and I’m happy to leave the iPad to the wife!

You can get Feedly for Android here:

• Amazon Market Link (US Only)
• Google Market Link

Tags: Android, Feedly, Test Drive Apps