Many of us use our phones and tablets to waste hours playing games or paying attention to social media of various types, and something that fewer younger people are taking advantage of is the ability to handle social media as well as the latest in choice news topics. Flipboard is a news aggregator app that does that, compiles social with news, in an elegant way. It first premiered as an app on Samsung’s 2012 spring flagship, the Galaxy S III, and has gained popularity and updates since then. Today, Flipboard unveiled the latest version, version 3, of the mobile news app, and it’s a large update.
Flipboard has had a unique aesthetic since it first launched, with the ‘pages of news’ flipping vertically like a rolodex, and the stream of user-selected news and social media being denoted with images galore, instead of a traditional text-only news experience. The version 3 update brings a refresh to the user interface as well as the back-end and feature set of the app.
According to the changelog on the app’s Play Store listing, there are now 30,000 more topics to follow and read up about, and that’s flowing across 10 million Flipboard magazines and the best news available online. There is also a new feature, called the Daily Edition, which is manually compiled by Flipboard at 7 a.m. each day to provide the perfect morning read. Instead of a usual newspaper or Flipboard update in the morning, it is a separate part of the app to give a newspaper-esque experience to the digital reader.
Now, you can follow other Flipboard users and keep up on what they add to their magazines and, if you like it, add it to your own as well. The app has gotten a facelift throughout, with a brighter white background and more vivid, Google+-like red accents, as well as a new, brighter red app icon. The phone version of the app also has a navigation bar across the top of the app, so you can swipe horizontally to switch between the main feed of latest news topics, their followed sections topics and social media, a search interface that is new to the experience, a list of ‘shared-with-you’ articles and such as well as notifications from people you follow, and the user account section at the far right of the bar.
The Flipboard update comes when many news aggregator apps have been the same for a while, or are focused on a single kind or platform of news. Flipboard has yet again made a unique experience for their fans and users, so go check it out when the update comes your way. If you have the update, how is it? Had any issues yet? If you haven’t tried Flipboard before, might you knowing what helps to make it special?