Flipboard review - By Mustafa Mahmoud

Flipboard – your news magazine

Many of you would have heard of Flipboard. With over 200,000,000 downloads between Android, IOS, Blackberry, and Windows Phone, most people would have at least heard of the app. But what does it do?

Flipboard (true to its name) is a free news magazine. More specifically it allows you to follow both people and categories, that then pulls assorted articles from its barrel of over 34,000 topics. These topics include almost anything, from world news to the latest twitter gossip, ensuring that at any one time you’ll have something to read.

This vast array of articles is probably Flipboard’s strongest suit, this, along with the fact that it is on any format short of a Symbian phone. If you do have a Symbian phone (and believe it or not, some people still do!) Flipboard have you covered with its dedicated website www.flipboard.com. Yes, it’s not merely there to redirect you to its native apps, it also serves as a news reader itself, meaning that if you don’t own a smartphone, or if it’s just on charge, you can hop on to the website and continue your reading.

How will it know what you were reading? Well Flipboard acts almost like a social network, in fact you can merge it with your social networks (a wide variety of them). This social network esque app allows you to like, comment, and save articles. And for those users who post particularly good articles, you can follow them too. If you’ve got the android app, you can place widgets on your home screen, displaying the newest articles.

Accounts you can connect with

Flipboard widgets

                  

The one major drawback is the feature that gave Flipboard its name ie. the flipping. When scrolling through the multitude of articles, or reading the articles themselves, it is all based around the fact that you flip the page horizontally…like a Flipboard. As amusing as this is however, it’s counter intuitive as it slows down your pace of reading, and generally means that you can fit less information on each page. Flipboard has changed the way in which we scroll down things, and frankly, it’s for the worse. The only other issue is that this app sticks closely to its description, meaning that it shows news and nothing but news, so unfortunately this can’t be used for studying, however it can be used to help with your overall knowledge of the subject you're reading about. Flipboard will help make you relevant and seem just that extra bit smarter.

                                                          Counter intuitive navigation

TL;DR

The good:

•         News from over 35,000 articles
•         You can link it with your social networks
•         Available on almost any device
•         You can like, comment, and save articles
•      Daily notification
•         Free!

The bad:

•        Unintuitive article navigation
•         Gives you news and nothing but news

In conclusion, Flipboard is a great app, worthy of you attention if you’re one of those people that likes to know what’s going on, no matter what it is, and uses this knowledge to aid you in your everyday life. I’m one of those types of people, therefore this app appeals to me.

The app can be accessed from here: www.flipboard.com

Written by Mustafa Mahmoud