Sean D. Francis

Android App of the Week: Pulse

Posted on 01 September 2010

Break out your newsreaders. What do you mean you don’t have a newsreader? Don’t you realize that newsreaders are the easiest way to follow all your favorite websites? Okay for those of you who don’t use newsreaders, go ahead and ignore this. Come back and read this once you catch up to 2001.

For the rest of us Android carrying newsreader users, there is now a very stylish newsreader available for Android phones called Pulse from Alphonso Labs. Pulse is a paid app, which I recommend lightly. I’ve paid for very few apps and tend to suffer buyer regret. Now that I have 24 hours to test an app out I am more likely to try and this was one of those apps that I was willing to give a try.

Pulse pulls together all the RSS feeds (up to 20 feeds) into a nifty display and interface. What Pulse does that is extra special is interface with Google Reader. If you haven’t been using an RSS Reader, then this is a good start. Pulse will interface with Reader, letting you select which feeds you want available to you on your Android device.

While I haven’t hit the 20 feed limit yet, it feels unduly restraining for a paid app, but I guess it does help in the performance of the device. I haven’t added any unusual feeds, like twitter feeds, but wait… let me do it now.   Okay, so I went to Twitter, pulled up one of my saved searches (Social Media Jobs near Chicago hint, hint, hint), added it to Google Reader, went to Pulse, clicked the Add from Google Reader, and selected the newly added feed.  Bam! Talking about maybe 3 minutes and the feed is added to the Pulse.

If you have an Android phone (Pulse is also available for Iphone and Ipad but I don’t know anything about that) and want a nifty newsreader, check out Pulse.