By Leena Rao
Pulse, an innovative news reading app for mobile devices, has updated its iPhone and Android apps with a number of new features including new content sources and improved sharing with social feeds and news discovery features.
Pulse, which is developed by Alphonso Labs, launched last year via an iPad app as a more seamless (and visually appealing) way to read your RSS feeds. But recently, Pulse ditched RSS in favor of hooking up with APIs to access content. Pulse’s home screen renders stories from your feeds on a dynamic mosaic interface and via a touch interface, allows you to swipe up and down to see headlines from various sources, and right and left to browse stories from a particular source.
Pulse users can now bring in their news from 60 sources as opposed to 20 sources previously. And the developer has improved the speed and performance of the app with faster image loading, three times the load speed, and more.
While you could previously share content on Facebook and Twitter, you can now pull in content from your social networks and platforms including Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Digg, Reddit and Hacker News (it doesn’t appear to integrate with Twitter yet). The app specifically has an in depth integration with Facebook, allowing you to like and comment on news that is posted within the Facebook feed. This was previously added to the iPad app.
Users can auto-populate an entire page of news within the apps with multiple sources for politics, finance, sports, or other subjects.
With this update, Pulse is playing catch up to Flipboard, which populates articles and images your social streams like Twitter and Facebook, and presents them in a visually appealing, magazine-like format. But Pulse says that smartphone users now account for nearly 70 percent of Pulse’s total installs and is actively going after the mobile market as well as tablets.
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