Android App Review: Pulse
If you’re like me, then you want to always be in the know. When I’m not in the know, I get a serious case of FOMO (fear of missing out) and I use all of my apps to help me stay on top of what’s going on in the world. Needless to say, I was more than happy to have stumbled upon Pulse, which offers easy access to compelling content from various news sources all in one place. The app covers just about every category and top news source out there. The extensive coverage that Pulse offers was enough to make it my go-to news app on a daily basis. After spending some quality time with Pulse it became apparent that its no-frills interface and streamlined news feeds presented both pros and cons to the app. So, let’s dive right into the review.
Pros:
- Intuitive navigation throughout
- Aesthetically pleasing interface
- News categories cover all major interest groups
- User can customize each page by selecting desired sources
- Pulse offers “news packages” to fill a page by category if you are unfamiliar with that particular type of news
- Social aspect of sharing content through Twitter and Facebook
- Option to save news content to a personal account via Pulse.me
- News stories within source are crisp and clean, not distracting
- Good blend of imagery and text to make selecting a story quick and easy
Cons:
- Limited number of feeds (12 sources per page)
- Offline support needs improvement
- The more sources added to each page, app seemed to act sluggish and had to force close several times
- When reading in dark mode some sources shutter from white to grey which is harsh on the eyes
- Customer support slow to respond
Interface
Pulse’s interface is made up of uniformly sized news “tiles” lined up in rows. Each row is its own news source, and each tile is an individual news story from that source. The user can scroll up or down to view all of the sources on a page, and left or right within each row to view the various news stories. The user can create a page by category and then tap to add a news source to the page. Overall, the user interface is what I enjoyed the most about Pulse. It was extremely appealing to the eyes with its clean and crisp design, which made it innately intuitive to use. I’m a very visual person, so the mixture of images and text helped draw me into a particular news story without feeling overwhelmed with too much information. From there it was as simple as click to read.
Categories/News Sources
Pulse provides 15 categories including: Social, What’s New This Week, Local, Technology, News, Business, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Science, Art & Design, Sports, Fun & Humor, Politics, Food, and Genius. Each category has ten sources to choose from to fill up each page. The vast selection of categories and sources leaves the user with plenty of major news outlets to choose from.
The user has the option to create news feeds by creating five different “pages,” two of which Pulse has pre-populated. Grouping news feeds by pages helps keep everything streamlined and organized. Managing a news feed is simple and easy to do; simply tap the +bar at the bottom of a page or the gear icon in the upper left hand corner. Aside from creating a customized feed, users can also choose from featured feeds, search for or add RSS feeds individually, and import subscriptions from a Google Reader account.
Pulse does limit users to a maximum of 60 feeds, which turns out to be 12 feeds per page. I’m a hardcore news junkie and ran out of feed slots rather quickly, and found myself having to decide between All Things D and CNet (gasp, I know). On a side note, there are no restrictions on the number of feeds in comparable news apps like Flipboard and Zite.
Reading A Post
With the app in landscape mode the user can take advantage of the full text reader, which opens on the right while the rows of unread feeds stay stationary on the left. This makes for easier user navigation. While in portrait mode, the user has to open the post on top and the source row maintains on the bottom until you actually scroll down. Once you scroll down, the reader opens full-page. The source row re-appears once you have reached the end. Once within the actual post there is nothing to distract the reader, which makes it easier to just focus on what you’re reading. It’s just one image, you, and the text.
Social
Pulse can extract news from Facebook including links shared by friends, status updates, and the user’s own wall. I didn’t find much use for this feature as I tend to go directly to my social networking apps to lurk what my “friends” are doing via Facebook or Twitter.
Pulse.me
Pulse.me allows users to save their favorite stories to a personal account that can be saved directly on your Android device. This was helpful for when I wanted to save a particular story for later use.
Sharing Content
Sharing icons can be found on the bottom right corner of the app, which enable the user the ability to tap and share news stories directly to Facebook or Twitter. Content can also be shared through other apps like Instapaper and e-mail. Unfortunately, users can’t share items from Google Reader feeds like the Flipboard app offers.
Offline Use
Pulse will cache text from the stories it loads that users can then access offline. However, Pulse won’t cache images and there is no way to manage or control how many stories the app caches at a time. For example, one feed could load up to 25 items by default. Hopefully, Pulse will improve their offline support as even the most basic news apps have better offline viewing options. The offline limitations is one of the biggest disadvantages to Pulse.
Conclusion
Pulse is a fantastic news reader app for novel and hardcore news junkies alike. The crisp interface was easy to navigate and won’t leave you feeling distracted or overwhelmed. Pulse did a satisfactory job at providing ample news categories and all of today’s major news sources in one place. I did max out my number of pages and sources which was disappointing. The app acted noticeably sluggish after maxing out the number of sources, but after I consolidated my feeds down to 3 pages at 12 sources each the app seemed to run better. Overall, I would not hesitate recommending this app to anyone looking for a versatile news app. Check it out for yourself and don’t forget to let us know what you think in the comments below.
Pulse is a free app available for Android 2.1 and up.
