FLUD is a mobile news app that grabs the headlines and images from your favorite websites and presents it in a magazine-like format. The company has offered iPhone and iPad for a while, and this week FLUD launched its first Android app.

When you first load the app it will pull in news from a handful of popular websites, but you can add to the list by choosing websites by name, topic, or URL. You can also add RSS feeds from your Google Reader account.

You flip between news sites by scrolling left or right, and FLUD creates an attractive cover page for each with large images and headlines. When you tap to read an article, you’ll see a streamlined view with text and an image, but few ads and no sidebars.

As with most other apps of this type, FLUD can only display the content that’s available in an RSS feed. So if you add sites that use partial feeds you’ll only see a few lines of each article. If you add sites that offer full text feeds you’ll see the whole thing.

You can hit a heart button on any article to “love” it and add it to your bookmarks page, share articles using Facebook, Twitter, or other apps.

If you read dozens or hundreds of websites every day, FLUD might not be the best app for organizing your news. But it’s one of the more attractive newsreaders available if you only have a few top sites you want to negotiate daily.

If your newly-launched tablet is struggling to compete against the likes of the iPad, it’s probably a good idea to make sure that any first-party apps you release really show off its potential. RIM feels differently — at least that’s the impression I’m left with after playing around with the company’s new BlackBerry News app for the PlayBook.

News comes pre-loaded with several popular RSS feeds from traditional content providers such as AP and Reuters, as well as online favorites like Engadget and Mashable. Articles are grouped by categories: headlines, business, travel, technology, science, arts & entertainment, and sport. Wait, my bad — there’s no sports section, so you’ll have to add all that content yourself.

But there’s good news on that front — BlackBerry News lets you add items by searching for site names or URLs and you can also browse through its News Library, a collection of feeds from additional sites which didn’t warrant display when you tap a main category icon for one reason or another. Here you will find sports feeds (SI, ESPN, USA Today, etc.), but each custom subscription gets its own icon. There’s no way to group them as of yet, and more often than not BlackBerry News slaps the default RSS icon on the feed instead of a site’s favicon or logo. You can’t even tap-and-drag items on the My News page to reorganize them.

BlackBerry News does present items in a reasonably nice way, with its “virtual newspaper” layout. But when you tap through, the experience is a roll of the dice. Some items link to the article on source’s website. Some display a nice, clean RSS item in its entirety. Others load a truncated RSS item with no link to continue reading the rest of the content.

I was really hoping BlackBerry News would blow me away, but it’s a halfhearted effort at best. For now, I’ll be sticking with Glimpse on my PlayBook.

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News360 has launched a new app optimized for Android tablets. The company has been offering news apps for iOS, Android, and other platforms for a while, but the new app for tablets running Android 3.x Honeycomb may just be one of the best tablet news apps I’ve seen so far.

The home screen is divided into a navigation bar on the left and headlines and photographs on the right. You can choose from top stories, latest news, world, US, politics, business, tech, or other categories. You can also connect to your social networks so News360 can deliver personalized news.

From the menu at the top of the app you can search the news, hit the Local button to view stories from your area, and click the 360 view to watch a stream of photos from the news float by. Tap on any photo to view more information or bring up the full article.

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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.

24 hour news channel Al Jazeera has launched a new mobile app for Android and BlackBerry devices. The news network had already offered a simple Android app which provided live streaming video from Al Jazeera’s English and Arabic news channels, but the new app is a full-featured news utilties that provides photos, written articles, video clips, and live streams, among other things.

The Al Jazeera English app for Android has an attractive home screen with thumbnail photos for top stories in a number of categories including News, Opinion, Features, and Video.

There’s also a “Your Media” section which lets you submit content to Al Jazeera from your phone, CNN iReport-style.

While there’s still a heavy focus on video, the new Al Jazeera App also lets you view full length articles from the company’s web site, formatted for a mobile device. The app also has a picture gallery which lets you browse for stories by images… for some reason.

My only complaint is that the navigation looks like it was designed for the iPhone rather than Android. You can use the Android back button for navigation — but there’s also a back button at the top of each screen allowing you to return to the previous category or home screen. There are also forward and back buttons at the top of each article which you can use to navigate between stories. And pressing the menu button on your Android device does nothing, but there’s a settings button on the home screen.

What’s funny is that while the new Al Jazeera English app looks like it was designed for iOS and ported to Android, it isn’t yet live in the iTunes App Store. The BlackBerry version, however, is available from the BlackBerry App World.

via Reddit
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CNN introduces its first app for Android in January. Unfortunately it was only available for tablets running Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb initially, which meant that you couldn’t really use the app until the Motorola XOOM hit the streets more than a month later.

Now CNN has finally gotten around to launching a full-featured news, video, and radio app for Android. You can use the CNN app to view the latest CNN videos, read the latest stories, or listen to CNN Radio reports.

The app sorts news into a number of categories including latest, top, most popular, US, World, Politics, and so on. You can login to your Facebook or Twitter accounts to share stories.

There’s also an iReport section where you can see stories reported by CNN’s army of citizen journalists. You can also submit your own photos or videos from within the app.

As Android Police points out, the smartphone app is choc full of advertisements. Not only do you get a pre-roll ad whenever you start a video, but there are several ads per page because the ads show up in between news stories instead of at the top or bottom of the screen.

Still, for a free app, the CNN app for Android offers quite a bit of news and multimedia content.

The CNN app for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.

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Three out of four imaginary doctors recommend a daily dose of news, reviews, and videos from Mobiputing every day. And you wouldn’t want to disappoint three doctors I just made up, now would you? Fortunately it’s easier than ever to keep up with the latest from Mobiputing, thanks to the new Mobiputing Android app.

You can grab the free ad-supported Mobiputing app from the Android Market. If you prefer the ad-free experience, you can pick up Mobiputing Pro for just $0.99.

Both apps bring you the latest headlines and full length stories from Mobiputing. If you’re only interested in Android news you can filter by the Android category. There’s also a video section for the latest Mobiputing video content.

We’re also working on an iPhone version of the app which should be available soon.

It must be reddit week in the Android developers cabal. Hot on the heels of the launch of BaconReader for Android phones, a developer has released Reddita, a reddit app for Honeycomb tablets.

Reddit is a social news web site which allows users to submit links to news items, pictures, or just about anything. Visitors vote on stories so that only the best make it to the front page, and the comments section for each post is (almost) always fascinating reading.

If there’s one major down side to reddit though, it’s that the web site is only a step above Craigslist when it comes to site design. It looks like it was designed in the 1990s, and the user interface is especially difficult to navigate on a touchscreen tablet. Reddita fixes that, making reddit more fun to browser on a tablet than a desktop web browser.

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