Five best Android News Readers

Content discovery on the go makes a smartphone worth its bargain. There are many ways you can discover and consume content on your Android phone. News Aggregation or Reader Apps are one of those ways!

There are many News Reader Applications available in the Android Market. Google Reader is just one of them.  Google Reader is a simple and very useful Reader Application. That is, if you have the habit of neatly managing your Google Reader Account. Many of us may not like the simplicity and straightforwardness that Google Reader offers on Android. Many of us may like a little more colour, a little more social integration into reading and a little more automatic content aggregation when it comes to a News reader App. There are many applications in the Android Market that just promise to do that. However, not all of them are true to their promises.

What I am trying to do here is to give you 5 Android News Reader Applications that I think are good. I use all of them one way or the other. Here we go:

Feedly 

Rating: ★★★★☆

Feedly is the smart and stylish way to read news on your Android Phone or Tablet. Its minimalistic design and elegant animations make reading a pleasure. Feedly automatically curates news based on certain key topics that are built into the Application. You can integrate your Google Reader account with Feedly and keep track of your rss feeds. You can also add websites of your choice to Feedly and categorize them. You have in-app sharing for Twitter and Facebook. Feedly also uses in-phone sharing so that you can share content using any Social Network App you have on your phone. Feedly depends on website feeds to curate news. Now, this means Feedly may not be able to give you the whole content in one tap as most websites have their rss feeds closed to give you only snippets of a write-up. Feedly has a built in browser which enables you to open the feed on Feedly itself. Don't worry if you can not read a website you have opened because the text size is too small for your eye. Feedly offers an option for you to reformat the content to make it readable on your mobile screen. 

Pulse

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Pulse is the most popular News Reader on Android. It is very simple. You can put five pages of rss feed on your screen and read on the go. Perhaps what makes pulse popular is the fact that it automatically strips the website html and present the content in a readable format. If you are someone who have a few website you check out regularly and you want them all in one place, pulse is just for you. You can swipe horizontally or vertically to read your feeds. And you can bookmark any of your content on Pulse Me to read it later. If you are using Google Chrome as your browser you can go straight to the Chrome Market and download the Pulse Me extension. Now, you can bookmark what you read on Chrome using Pulse Me to read it later on your phone. The only issue with Pulse is that it drains a lot of battery in the background.

Taptu
Rating: ★★★★☆

If you talk about design, Taptu is a single page replica of Pulse. I should say it is an improvement on Pulse. Taptu mixes what Feedly and Pulse does. Unlike Pulse with streams for individual websites, in Taptu you have streams for topic. You can either make your own stream or use any of those streams curated specially by Taptu. Taptu gives you a lot of freedom when it comes to curating content. You can colour code streams, make stream-width big or small and move streams around based on what you want to see first when you fire up the application. Like Pulse, Taptu strips html from the content automatically and present to you in a readable format.

ChannelCaster
Rating: ★★★★★

ChannelCaster is social news, they say. Ya, it curates links from your social networks and brings them all in one place. Then you have pre-curated channels you can use as you please. ChannelCaster stands out for its sleek design and user interface. If you are someone who likes a little splash on your App, ChannelCaster is good for you. Its design gives these so called well-designed iPhone Applications a run for their money. Oh yes, on ChannelCaster you can curate your content based on what you like too. You have the option to build your own Channels using key words and rss feeds. Tweets, Facebook Links, Webcontent, Video, Photographs - you name it and ChannelCaster allows you to type ina topic you like and bring all the content on the web about that topic in one place. The only issue is, once you find the content you may have to use another browser  because Channelcaster opens the content in its native web browser and it may not be as readable as you find them on Feedly or Pulse.

News360
Rating: ★★★☆☆

You have News360 for both phone and tablet in the Android Market. News360, like ChannelCaster, is sleek and yummy to look at. It is blue! Now, News360 works on topics. You need no rss feed. You need no website name. All you need are key words. And you can keep on building your news feed using any number of key words as you like. The best thing about News360 is that you can localize content using your gps on the phone. I would say, News360 is Google News in the form of an App. If Google were to come up with an App for their news site, it would be something like News360. the only issue with News360 is that it is uses a lot of data in the process of looking good.