The News360 app started off on iPad, offering a rich, categorized way of ingesting current events, and moved to the BlackBerry PlayBook, Android Honeycomb, and Windows Phone shortly after. Now they’ve shifted slightly off of tablets and are now available on Android smartphones running OS 2.2 and up. The layout is a little re-jiggered, but it still lets you browse the choicest morsels of news across a variety of preset categories or user-defined keywords based on what’s showing up on top information sources. Full browser capabilities are baked right into the app, so you can see the full story and back out to the home screen with minimal fuss.
This category of graphic-rich web content browsers is becoming increasingly popular, thanks in no small part to Pulse News. Yahoo! and Microsoft are both interested in presenting tablet-friendly web content through tailored apps, but they do have news outlets of their own that they would no doubt be interested pushing before anything else. For that reason, I would sooner trust a smaller third party like News360 to curate sources, but that’s just me.
Right now, News360 isn’t quite a Google Reader client, but they’re working on integrating with the prominent RSS reader service, as well as Facebook, Twitter, and Evernote for saving and sharing stories that matter to you. Personally, I’m not sure if this style of app is particularly compelling on anything but a tablet, but I’d be willing try it out, especially once Google Reader capabilities were built in. Interested in giving it a shot? Head on over to the Android Market to download the new smartphone version of News360 for free.