Pulse News Mini review

Pluse News Mini is an iPhone news reader based on its sister app Pulse News Reader from Alphonso Labs Inc. Pluse uses thumbnail images from RSS feed items to create an gallery style layout on its main page. Tapping on any image slides in the preview text of the news item formatted for easy reading on the iPhone. You can swipe through the other stories from the feed or hit the home icon to go back and read other feeds.

Stories can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instapaper, and via Email. You can also read the original story with a built in web browser.

Pulse has a very clean and Android inspired user interface with simplistic square borders and a grayscale pixel perfect shell. Managing your feeds is easy using drag and drop and delete actions. Finding new fees is streamlined using a keyword search interface, featured feeds and support for manual URL entry. Best of all you can log in to your Google Reader account and select feeds from your Google Reader settings that you’d like to follow in Pluse News Mini.

The good things about Pulse News Mini are: It’s very fun to use. Going through your feeds is a joy with its fluid and fresh user interface. Discovering new feeds to follow is a good little feature too, using the keyword search feature. It works offline without too much hassle.

Here are a few negatives about the app. The performance can get a little slow and jumpy at times when scrolling and switching through feeds, even on the new iPhone 4’s fast processor. There is a limit of 20 feeds put on by the app, on the news feeds you can follow at any time. Although Google Reader support lets you view your feeds, the read status of your items are not synced with Google. You also can’t subscribe to entire folders. Finally although Instapaper is supported, a few options are missing such as ReadItLater, Delicious, Google Mobilizer and Refresh intervals are not porvided, perhaps to keep things simple. Font sizes are not customizable as they are in the iPad version. Landscape mode isn’t supported either which is annoying.

Overall, Pulse News Mini is worth checking out. It shines a new light on your dusted old feeds and removes the clutter quite nicely. Although not recommended to hardcore RSS geeks, Pulse is a nice app for iPhone readers who want to follow their top 20 news sources and have something to brag about to their non-iPhone friends.

Here is a video demo of the Pulse News Mini app on the iPhone

AppSafari Rating: 4/5

AppSafari review of Pulse News Mini was written by Joe Seifi on July 4th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Feeds, News, Reading. Page viewed 5679 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.