Reading is mostly what large screen users do. Yup, the iPad and Tabs are heavily used for reading, and not just watching movies or videos, or an alternate for a full time laptop (let’s not forget they come very handy when sharing presentations).
Flipboard happens to be one such app that lets you not just read your favorite stories on the web – add social stories to that – but also enjoy a smooth and rich content structuring and a magazine flip style interface.
Till recently, Flipboard was only available on the iOS platform, but just recently one of the developers on XDA Forum, Valcho, extracted and leaked an Android version that had been finished and was to be exclusively available on the new Samsung Galaxy S3. Fat chance for exclusivity Samsung, once you’re on Android, you’re open to all.
So anyway, I got my hands on it in no time, and there I was with Flipping through my news stream on my Galaxy Nexus and its large screen giving a completely vivid experience, though Flipboard has a large part to play in this gorgeous interface that they’ve built (OK I’ll admit, for iOS users… darn!). The choice of fonts are cool too, the slim and slender HelveticaNeue57Condensed and HelveticaNeue47Condensed (smaller font) just gives it a cool and different feel to it, on the phone and on their own website too.
Here’s a short video from the guys at Flipboard, though I don’t know if the guy in the video actually is one of them, but anyway, enjoy!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2vpvEDS00o&w=549&h=279]
It starts off with the cover photo of the most recent or most shared news post, followed by tiles of recent posts from other selected news feeds. It also allows me to keep my social posts from Facebook and Twitter on it, so anything new that comes in, its news worthy to appear on my Flipboard. The deeper you go in, you’ll have the ability to scroll or slide through content, till you reach a particular section, say Sports on the BBC feed, and then it’ll be back to flipping. It’s really cool how you can tap on an image and see it in its full screen view, and one more tap and it’s back to the news story. The typography throughout each post is vividly clear, especially because of the HelveticaNeue Condensed font (yes, I love this font!).
Flipboard says it’ll be releasing the Android versions officially in some time (coming months, as it says on their website though). The only problem I have with it is that it won’t go into landscape mode. Not cool, but I do hope they have it in the new update or when they officially release the app on Google Play. In the mean time, you can download it from here.