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Google has produced more than a couple Android apps over the last two years with Listen, Scoreboard, and Sky Map among its most notable titles. Yet, there has been one app people have been clamoring for since the T-Mobile G1 debuted: Google Reader. Sure, we've always had a mobile optimized site available to use, but nothing beats a good native client. And earlier this week, Google finally released a Reader app.

Reader is not just a simple port of the Web experience since it adds some nifty features you don't get from the browser--take multiple account support, for … Read more

Taptu started off as a mobile search application aimed at helping users locate appropriate content for small-screened devices, with a particular focus on creating a user-friendly interface for touch screens. Now, the company is trying to make that even more apparent with My Taptu, an entertainment-centric app updated for Android devices.

The main goal of My Taptu is to provide users with entertainment on the go while filtering out content that is not optimized for mobile devices. It accomplishes this by pulling in specific RSS feeds that are made for small screens, but if you search for something that doesn'… Read more

Taptu started off as a mobile search application aimed at helping users locate appropriate content for small-screened devices, with a particular focus on creating a user-friendly interface for touch screens. Now, the company is trying to make that even more apparent with My Taptu, an entertainment-centric app updated for iOS devices.

The main goal of My Taptu is to provide users with entertainment on the go while filtering out content that is not optimized for mobile devices. It accomplishes this by pulling in specific RSS feeds that are made for small screens, but if you search for something that doesn'… Read more

Taptu started off as a mobile search solution aimed at helping users filter appropriate content for small-screened devices. It first appeared several years ago as a simple search portal on Web-capable phones, and then as an app for the iOS just last year. The folks over at Taptu have always had touch screens in mind while developing the interface for their apps. Today, they aim to make that even more apparent with My Taptu, an entertainment-centric app updated for both Android and iOS devices.

The main goal of My Taptu is to provide users with entertainment on-the-go while filtering out … Read more

New research from social-analytics company Sysomos reveals--surprise!--that your tweets have fleeting value over the course of a day and, moreover, a lifetime.

Using the retweet as a key indicator for the life of a short message, Sysomos examined 1.2 billion tweets posted in the last two months. The data shows that 29 percent of tweets produced a reaction, either a reply or retweet, and that 92 percent of retweets occur within the first hour of the original message.

This is an interesting set of data, with respect to the fact that companies have begun to embrace social media … Read more

Pulse News Mini gives you all the news from your favorite Web sites laid out in an intuitive interface. News sites are laid out vertically so you can swipe up and down to the latest news from all sites quickly, or you can swipe horizontally to read more stories from the same site. Each story heading has the headline and an included graphic, making for a more elegant approach than other news readers that show only text links. Touching a story heading gives you either a text-based summary, a mobile-optimized version for easy reading, or a way to view the … Read more

Remember Early Edition, the iPad app that presents your RSS feeds in an attractive newspaper-style format? Well, I've shelved it for now while I indulge my fascination with Blogshelf, a blog and RSS reader that has a dazzling iBooks-style presentation.

Designed for "casual users," Blogshelf ($4.99) offers roughly the same experience as browsing the magazine shelves at the library. It comes with about 20 popular blogs--Autoblog, Cinematical, Serious Eats, and so on--already configured, but you can line your "shelves" with preselected blogs from 18 categories.

It also has a search option to help you … Read more

I'm a big fan of revolving photo frames. I mean, why stare at the same old picture when you can see a different one every time you walk by?

Thursday only, Dell has the ViewSonic VFP838-11 8-inch photo frame for just $59 shipped. I've seen similar frames for less, but not with the one feature I covet most: Wi-Fi.

Using your home network, the VFP838-11 can wirelessly connect to online photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa. It also supports custom RSS feeds through a service called FrameChannel, which serves up things like weather, sports scores, and Facebook and … Read more

When people ask me how I like my new iPad and what I'm using it for, I answer as follows: "I like it, and I'm using it mostly for reading."

Not books--I still rely mostly on my iPhone for that--but news. As a news reader (and surrogate newspaper), the iPad rocks.

And for actually doing the reading, one of my favorite iPad apps so far is The Early Edition. (A big, big shout-out to reader Hanoveur, who recommended it when I asked which iPad apps I should install first.)

In a nutshell, The Early Edition aggregates your favorites news sources and presents them in an attractive, familiar-looking newspaper format. It's what happens when high-tech meets old-school.

The app comes with about a dozen news feeds already configured. The default All Feeds view generates your "newspaper" from all these sources, though you can tap any one of them to view just that source. 

As with actual newspaper apps, tapping any story brings it to the fore. However, if the story includes a "read more" page break, you'll get only the first portion. You can tap through to read the entire article, but that takes you to an embedded browser view of the actual Web page, thus killing the newspaper "feel" of the experience.

That's a minor gripe. A bigger one is with The Early Edition's method for adding feeds: You have to enter each RSS link manually. There's no search option, and no way to import feeds from another reader.… Read more