Flipboard (iOS)

Full Review

Some mobile apps try their best to fit properly into the ecosystem that they've been designed for. Flipboard on the Apple iPad, on the other hand, feels like the tablet was designed around it. If you're hooked to your social networks and RSS readers (like me) and can spend hours browsing through stories, links and photos, then Flipboard is a great app for your iPad.

Interface

What Flipboard essentially does is convert your social networking and RSS feeds into a format that visually resembles a magazine. Every feed is represented by a tile on Flipboard's contents page and inside, the feed's content get headlines and a small block of teaser text, the way it looks like in magazines and newspapers. Links and videos that your friends share or present in your feeds will also show up as individual stories. Clicking on a link opens up a browser page within the app and lets you read the article in its entirety.

What Flipboard essentially does is convert your social networking and RSS feeds into a format that visually resembles a magazine.

Flipboard also has a bunch of recommended sections that are populated with feeds recommended by the Flipboard team on various topics such as technology, entertainment, science etc.



Navigation is dependent on swiping the screen left or right, similar to the way you can navigate through eBooks on the iPad.

Usability

Like I mentioned earlier, Flipboard works very well on the iPad. Animations are smooth and look good as well. You can customize the screen brightness from within the app and also mess around with the way text appears on screen.



The little nit-picking that I can do about Flipboard is the fact that the iPad's lack of proper multi-tasking means that it doesn't let the app sync data in the background. As a result, every time you access the app, you need to wait for a while for your feeds to get updated. This becomes especially annoying if you have enabled plenty of feeds.

Download: iTunes

Bottom Line

The fact that Flipboard is available for free to download from the iTunes store should make it a must-have app if you own an Apple iPad.  Flipboard requires 3.4MB of free space and an Apple device running iOS 3.2 or later.