Nathan Campos

Today was a very noisy day on my Twitter timeline. A lot of people talking about the new redesign and about how much they hated the new mobile apps for Twitter and etc. All this buzz around Twitter obfuscated the brand new mobile software that the search giant released today called Google Currents. This news reading app is just like Flipboard, except it's available for iOS and Android. So all those Android users that were jealous about their iOS mates using Flipboard now have some real alternative on their OS.

The app has it's phone version and has one which is optimized for tablets (Android tablets too). However you can only get it if you're in the US at the time. I have a US App Store account too and MarketEnabler on my Android phone so this wasn't a problem for me (which lives in Brazil). I must say that this is the first Ice Cream Sandwich optimized app that I test and it has a bit of lag and feels unoptimized on my Gingerbread devices, which might indicate that this is just a port of the ICS version for backwards compatibility. The app looks great on iOS, but Flipboard is still the best in my opinion.

It's a great experience on iOS, but on non-ICS devices it's a bit painful. The lag and bugs makes your experience not so good and it seems to me a bit disorganized. Because of these things I won't get off from my dear Pulse. With Pulse I have all my feeds in a great design, organized and with more sharing options. Anyhow, if you were waiting for Flipboard to come to Android this is definitely an app for you.

If you're a content-provider you can optimize your feed for the new Google platform using the Google Currents Producer, which is far lot easier than you think. The design interface is very simple and you can test how it would look on tablets, phones and on both of the supported OSes.

This article was imported from my old blog . Some things may be broken.