We Review The Best iPhone News Apps

Are you guilty of enjoying catching up with the latest news on your iOS device? Then just stick to us while we guide you through some fun apps to use on a regular basis.

While the iPad is a great tool we all enjoy to use and has an extended functionality range, what many of its users do with it, among other things, is to use it in the weekends, or on the metro for instance – to simply flip through the latest news. Taking full advantage of this, we can now select from a great multitude of news app, starting from the most basic of them (the ones that just catch al)l the latest headlines for you, to the very fancy apps, designed with a cool sleek layout and headings to catch your eye, bringing a note of elegance to the entire news reading experience.

Speaking of new elegantly designed apps, let’s talk about Trapit for iPad, a somewhat newly launched newsreader you can use to get your latest stories about any topic you might want. The trick with Trapit for iPad is that it can be “trained”, in the sense that once you search for any keyword, Trapit uses it and makes a Trap of the latest news stories on that very subject. You can therefore either swipe to browse or even tap to view the whole story. This is really really cool and useful.

But Trapit is not the only one with this layout. There are also a series of other similar newsreader apps that you might want to take a look at, so let’s just take a glimpse of a few other ones so that you can decide which one is the best for you to use. We will talk about Pulse for iPad and about Flipboard, both free apps. Both these newsreader apps are great for flipping on the latest stories via your iOS device, replacing thus the traditional paper with a more modern and functional approach. Out of the two, I would rate Flipboard as being better (and one of the best newsreaders currently available)?in the sense that it can be the virtual equivalent of a magazine. It lays out the news for you and the social site updates exactly in the same format as a magazine’s. The first app we mentioned is pretty cool as well, and it lays out vertically all the stories caught from different sites, and then, in order for you to see the latest news stories from one site of your choice, it lets you swipe it horizontally. Once we are done with these 2 apps, we will also briefly present some other options.

Let’s first dig in with these two and then have another insight on the other apps available on the market.

1. Pulse News for iPad.?This free app comes in a very simple and straightforward interface, making it so easy for you to use. It provides you with all the news collected from your own favorite websites and it does all this in such a graceful way. You can swipe up and down to the latest news from all the sites very quickly and easily, as the new sites are laid out vertically. If you want to get a better and more informed perspective on the stories that the same site holds, then you can simply swipe horizontally and you will be able to do so. This app, as I have already mentioned, is a lot more elegant than the rest and has some new features that convey this. It not only shows text links, like some other newsreaders do, but its awesomeness comes from the fact that a headline and included graphic are here attributed to each story heading. Depending on the news provider, you can view the news differently if you touch a story heading. For instance, you can either view it as a text-based summary, or perhaps you have the option to see the story on the web, or view it in a mobile-optimized version for easy reading too. No matter what option you choose, you will be content with it. By using this app, you can add to your Pulse home screen a different number of famous and popular websites that can be located at the bottom of the interface. If you have already decided what your favorite sites are, then you can use the app to search for the feeds from your most favorite sites.

If you are a beginner when it comes to the newsreader apps, then you might as well start with Pulse, as it will make your start and transition a lot more smooth due to its high intuitive interface. No need to state that it might not be the first iOS app to give you a hand in collecting news feeds’ section, but it is important to mention that it is very user friendly, especially to those at the beginning, I repeat. So just get it and buckle your seat belts for an easy and quick start. One of the features most users have reported to be passionate about is its customization potential. Having said this, let’s extend: its Pulse home screen can be subjected to reorganization, so if you would rather have the sites you read the most often shown first, then you can simply reorder your list of feeds. There is also a Refresh button available with this app, and you can make use of it, let’s say, after you have exhausted the stories you were reading and want to take a look at something else. By pressing the Refresh button (you will find it at the top of the interface), you can choose to see if any new stories might have been added while you were reading. If you want to stay even more updated to the virtual “environment”, then you can also check out what your Facebook friends might have added in the meanwhile, and you can do this by adding Facebook to your feed. Can you be more connected than that?

In a nutshell, just make sure you get this app. I am sure it is almost all you have been waiting for. It pretty much does anything you need to make it work. So if you want an app that centralizes all the news from the sites you like the most, placing them under a slick designer umbrella, then you have found your tool – Pulse News. We recommend you get the Pulse News Mini version for your iPhone.

2. The second app we promised to discuss is Flipboard, and it is a free one as well. You can pretty much call it a social network hug, as this newsreader app helps you organize all the information you want to access and look at exactly like a normal magazine does, so it makes it easier for you and also more approachable. Before you are able to use its perks, you need to create an account with Flipboard and then just sign in to your Twitter,?Facebook, Google+. This is the first step.

Have you already set up your account? Then you are now in and Flipboard will present you with all the social networks and some default news categories to browse through, ?once you have signed in. Let’s see what the app does and how you can use it more efficiently. First of all, if you touch a panel then you can browse through the before mentioned categories you have by default. But this is not all the panel can be used for. If you touch and hold the panel then you can delete the default categories and then simply replace them with whatever you want. If you touch the More panel in the lower right, yon can make your Flipboard even more personalized on your own desires, so then if you access the More panel you can just flip across the News,?Technology, Business, Entertainment categories, and so on. If you decide you want to touch the category containing News, then you can have access to adding a series of sites to your Fliboard, and we can give you here as examples The Guardin, BBC news, Salon (the list can go on). If you want to get your hands on something in particular that you do not find in the categories you have, then you can also use the search bar. Problem solved. To make it better, any of the stories you find can be saved to Instapaper or Read It Later. This is very handy as you can check the stories at a later stage if you are not able to do so in that very exact moment and. And I forgot to mention – the customization here doesn’t know any limits, and this is mostly due to the large amount of info that exists that gives you the option to make your Flipboard exactly your own, different than anybody else’s.

There is more to say about Flipboard. As mentioned before, it is a good catalyst for keeping you updated with the latest news, so by using it you can stay really connected to the social networks you use, and perhaps this is one of the great things that makes Flipboard so popular. We don’t necessarily want to say that by using Flipboard your social sites’ experience is better than actually using the sites themselves (you can check and see what you make of this), but it at least keeps a very close range to this feeling. It pretty much does the same thing for all of the social apps: for?Google+ it lets you see the latest stories from your circles, for Twitter you will see all the tweets displayed in a magazine format, and you can also have liked stories laid out exactly like a magazine too so even before you touch to see the entire story you get to catch a part of the article. Things are not that different with Facebook either and there is also a magazine format style displaying you the latest news. You can also here see images that your Facebook friends have posted via links.

Talking about improvements, Flipboard’s developers looked even further into it and and made it all possible for us with the SoundCloud support, and we can now to listen to podcasts and audioclips from our friends or people we ?simply?know. We can browse through audio content by using a tab in the Guide, and we even have a new player available (located in the musical notes icon in the lower left corner of the interface).

3.?AP Mobile iPhone app (The Associated Press, Free) is another news reading app worth mentioning here. While it can incorporate a good deal of news content, it can sync with your local news and weather as well. But it has other features too, and just like Flipboard, it gives you a vast chance to personalize your homepage with the selected news you want to find there. You can get push notifications for breaking news and has very cool photo galleries, but you might not be so fussed with the interface because of its high number of ads and article ratings. But I guess this doesn’t bother us so much, as the rest of the features work so well.

4. NPR News iPhone App. This is the?iPhone app from the National Public Radio (NPR, and you can get it for Free)?and it can really satisfy your needs of constant news updates. Primarily focused on radio news, it gives you a timely newscast (an hourly one, to be more specific) and you can also listen to the NPR radio shows, streaming both live or even archived episodes if you think you have missed an important one. Users have claimed a great quality of reporting so the overall feedback has been very positive. But don’t think that the radio content is the sole focus of this app. No, you can also get a good number or print articles, so just give it a go.

5. The New York Times iPhone app (The NY Times, for Free as well) gives you a peek into the Time’s accurate news on a variety of subjects, and also allows you to save any particular article for a timeframe of 7 days. It is also very closely connected to the social networks media, and you can share your news via text, Twitter or email, so the options aren’t that limited. However, we can’t exactly say that this is the best app when it comes to the news sector, and it does not support push notifications either, but you should check it out for yourselves and come back to us and tell it how it is.

6. One of my favorite apps is CNN Mobile app,?and that is mostly become I am really much into video news too. This is not a free app, it can be purchased at a?$1.99 cost, but makes it all worth due to its great (and vast) collection of videos. Not only can you get clips from the CNN shows (which is pretty cool), but you can also look for user-generated content in the iReport section. You will always be updated with the latest news and always know when to take your umbrella with you thanks to checking the weather report via the CNN Mobile app.

7. The MSNBC news app (from Zumobi Inc, free) is the last app we will mention today, but that doesn’t mean it is not great. On the contrary. Push notifications are what makes it special perhaps, but if at some point you do not find them useful, you do have the option to turn them off. You can get your hands on small parts of the clips from the NBC shows ,so this turns it into a cool experience, but among the disadvantages this app has is the high number of ads.

All in all, hope you have enjoyed our journey through the world of the best news-reading apps for the iOS touch screen. As you have seen, the options to choose from are multiple, and it is only a matter of needs, taste and utility in what concerns picking the one that suits you best. I’m sure one of them will be perfect for feeding your inner news strive with insightful breaking news! Share it with us once you have found it. Thank you. We would love the feedback.