Flipboard, a popular social news-magazine app for iPad, is planning to add books, movies and TV content to its ‘pages.’ The company will also be launching an app for iOS devices with smaller screens son.

Currently, Flipboard offers content from various magazines like the Economist and Rolling Stone, while hosting customized news-feeds via Facebook and Twitter. How Flipboard will include books in your personalized feeds is uncertain, but it may work through a bookstore such as Amazon or iBooks.

While Flipboard is reportedly hoping to cut deals with studios and providers to carry film and TV content, the company is declining to say who will be approached or even when this project will materialize.

An app for iPhone and iPod Touch is expected to launch in the coming weeks, pushing an app that has been downloaded over 3 million times into a huge market of smartphone users. It might not be as convenient to use on the smaller 4″ screens, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

via BGR

Tweetcaster already offers one of the most popular Twitter apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. Now the developers have introduced a new version of the app which plays well with the iPad as well.

The iPad user interface was designed to utilize the iPad’s 10″ screen, meaning you’ll find Trends, Nearby, Who to Follow and Search boxes all in the real estate of a single screen. The phone-sized app requires you to switch between views one at a time.

TweetCaster also developed a unique feature called Smart Filters, which filters your timeline in a single tap to show only tweets with photos or tweets with links.

Besides a clean, visually-impressive interface, you’ll find support for multiple accounts, Facebook integration, ‘advanced’ profile editing, and all of Twitter’s standard features (such as URL shortening and multimedia uploading.) Other features include custom color coding (for specific Twitter users, including yourself), multiple themes and font sizes, and Instapaper support for offline reading.

You can download TweetCaster for iOS from the App Store for free if you don’t mind seeing advertisements in the app. If you want to go ad-free, you can pick up the TweetCaster Pro for $4.99.

The good news is that CNN is now broadcasting its 24-hour live news channel over the internet for free. You can tune in on a desktop web browser or using an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. The bad (but not particularly surprising) news is that you’ll need to be a paid TV subscriber to use the service.

If you go to CNN.com/video and click the Live button, you’ll see a key icon that says “Unlock to watch.” In order to unlock, you need to provide your account information for your cable, satellite, or other premium TV provider such as Verizon FiOS or AT&T U-Verse.

That makes sense, since CNN and television providers work out deals worth an awful lot of money. But considering just how much news CNN and other news outlets offers for free on its website — and the fact that there are commercials embedded in the live stream, it’d be nice to see the network come up with a way to offer a stream for non-subscribers.

If you’re not a cable subscriber — or if you have an Android device, you can always get live news coverage from Al Jazeera English.

The Financial Times has decided to replace its aging mobile applications for iOS, Android and other platforms with a new web app based on HTML 5. The move could pave the way for more web apps based on the latest web standards — but not just because of the new features HTML5 offers. The new web app also offers the FT a way to provide its 600,000 subscribers with access to the news while sidestepping Apple’s rules for subscription-based apps sold in the App Store. Update: While the web app is designed for the iPhone and iPad you may have some luck getting it to work with browsers on some other platforms.

The FT joins a growing number of companies that have expressed displeasure with Apple’s system, where Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all subscription revenue. The move also offers a platform agnostic approach. You can access the web app on any mobile device with a web browser that supports HTML5.

The new web app is free to use until June 14th. You’ll need to pay for a FT.com subscription to keep reading after that, with prices starting at $4.99 per week.

Some users are reporting that the initial load time is tediously slow, but mine was zippy and about as fast as waiting for Mobiputing’s new app for iOS to load. The biggest problem is some unnecessary choppiness when tapping new categories, but the overall speed of the app felt quite fast compared to similar native iOS apps.

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Fox News Channel has released an app for iPad available as a free download in the App Store. FOX isn’t the first TV news network to launch an iPad app. The news app joins the ranks of apps from CNN, BBC and the AP.

The Fox News app is well-designed and optimized for easy use on the iPad’s 10″ screen. Feature highlights include the swipe-able “Happening Now” section for the latest stories and videos, a live Fox News Ticker updated in real-time, and full access to all of Fox News.com’s content. The app appears to be more focused on providing easy access to videos rather than articles, making it a bit different than Al Jazeera‘s article+blog centric application.

Other features include the ability to subscribe to push notifications (for breaking news alerts), a ‘Favorites’ section for storing content, and easy sharing options to Facebook, Twitter and email. You can also listen to Fox News Radio directly in the app. There is currently no Search option, so there is some room for improvement in future updates. However this app does a fine job delivering Fox News to your iPad at no cost.

You can download the Fox News app for iPad from the App Store for free. The app is sponsored by Exxon Mobile.

via IntoMobile

Google has added a new feature to the mobile version of Google News, allowing you to select “News near you” to find the latest stories rom whatever area you happen to be in.

Google News already lets users select local news from cities manually, but this feature makes the process automatic — and since it relies on Google’s location-based services, your news will move when you do. If you’re traveling you can pull up the local news for whatever city you happen to be in just by pulling up news.google.com in your mobile browser and clicking the News near you link from the “Jump to” button.

The new feature is available for Android and iPhone right now. The first time you visit Google News in your mobile browser you’ll be asked if you want to share your location. If you say no, then you’ll have to find your local news the old fashioned way… by searching for it.

You can also disable News near you by scrolling to the bottom of the page and hitting the “Personalize edition” link and then “hiding” the sections you don’t want to see — including News near you.

Taptu is an alternative news-aggregator that allows you to personalize your streams with anything from Facebook to a specific area of interest. It doesn’t deliver a magazine-like experience like the competing Flipboard, but for now that app is limited to the iPad and it’s capped at 21 sections of content. Taptu is available for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Pulse News is also a like-minded application, but you’re limited to 60 content sources.

Taptu, on the other hand, supports up to 200 streams in a clean grid interface. Read through your selected content and get a snapshot of your streams or you can tap on one individual headline to access the full story.

The full story pulls up right away, and there is no lag time while it goes out to another website within the built-in browser (looking at you, Pulse). To save a particular article and read it later, tap the star button in the top right corner of the app’s toolbar.

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News.me is an iPad app that shows you the stories you’re most likely to find interesting based on the people you follow on Twitter. There’s nothing particularly unusual there, since social news apps are a dime a dozen. But News.me has a few things that really set it apart.

First, in addition to seeing the top stories shared by people you follow on Twitter, you can click on a thumbnail icon for any of the people you follow — and then see articles shared by the people they follow. In other words, if you have a favorite blogger, journalist, comedian, or just a really smart friend, News.me will give you a news feed based on the people they find interesting, giving you a chance to see a tiny section of the world the way that person does without first signing up to follow all the Twitter users they follow.

Second, News.me is a partnership between The New York Times and bit.ly, and the companies have reached licensing agreements with well over 600 publishers allowing News.me to display full-length, ad-free articles.

Third, because of that licensing agreement, News.me isn’t free to use. You’ll have to pay 99 cents per week for a subscription, or $34.99 per year if you want a 30 percent discount.

The concept is interesting and the app certainly provides an attractive way to view the news. But I have to wonder whether people are willing to pay for this type of news curation service.

News.me is available for download starting today from the App Store.