Pulse has pushed out an updated version of its apps for Android and iOS bringing new social features to Pulse News Reader. Pulse lets you view news from a number of web sites in an attractive wall of news format with headlines and images pulled from the web pages. You can then click on any article to view a stripped down version formatted for your device, or click a “web” button to see the full story.

The latest version lets you add up to 60 news sources to your account. Earlier versions topped out at 20. Despite the extra stories and images to load, the new version of Pulse is actually faster.

The other big change is the addition of a Social section, allowing you to view the latest updates from your Facebook contacts as well as top stories, images, and other content from social sites including Flickr, Reddit, Digg, and pcplz. You can also share any item you’re reading with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Pulse News reader is available as a free download from the iTunes App Store and Android Market.

via TechCrunch

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Pulse is a news reader for mobile devices that made a big splash when it landed earlier this year. At it’s most basic level, Pulse is just another RSS reader. But it features a unique interactive design with a heavy emphasis on photos and touchscreen gestures that makes reading the news on a mobile device a more pleasant experience. Basically what Google Reader is to newspapers, Pulse is to magazines.

The app initially ran from $1 to $4 on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Google Android. Today the company is making all of those apps available for free.

The New York Times reports that the goal is to increase the number of uses for each app and attract advertisers and publishers to help fund the software. The company behind Pulse also raised $800,000 in venture capital, which probably provides a bit of a cushion to make up for any lost revenue from removing the price tags on these apps.

Out of the box, Pulse will show you news stories from a handful of popular news sites including TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, Salon, Good, and Fast Company. Each publication gets its own row, with a list of headlines, author information when available, and a nice big photo. You can tap any story to open up a page where you can read the text of the article and see a larger photo.

You can remove any of the news sources you don’t need and add your own, either by selecting a news source from a list maintained by Pulse or by logging into a Google Reader account to add any RSS feed you subscribe to. If a site doesn’t provide a full RSS feed, you won’t get full text in pulse, just the first few lines, but you can tap the headline to pull up the full web page — which may not look as good on your mobile device.

Honestly, I still find the Google Reader web app provides me with a much faster and easier way to get through my daily news reading routine — but I’m a blogger and I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds every day and spend more time skimming than reading. If you have half a just a few dozen or fewer news sites that you like to check out every day, Pulse certainly provides an attractive way to do it.

You can download Pulse News Reader for the iPad or Pulse News Mini for the iPhone and iPod touch for free from the App Store. The Pulse app for Android is also now available as a free download from the Android Market.

You can find a few more screenshots of the iOS version after the break.

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There are plenty of apps that take advantage of your phone’s hardware to do obvious things. You can turn your phone into a GPS unit or even a compass by using the accelerometer and GPS receiver. You can use the camera for augmented reality apps. But every now and again a developer comes up with a way to use the hardware that just barely seems possible.

Instant heart rate is one of those apps. It’s a free Android app that measures your heart rate using the camera.

Scan to download

Basically you place your finger over the camera for about 10 seconds and it will start to monitor your blood flow. You have to hold your finger awfully close to the camera for it to work — but you also have to make sure not to press too tight or you’ll cut off blood flow.

Overall I’m not sure how much more practical this pulse rate monitor is than the old fashioned method of placing your fingers on a vein and counting. But that’s beside the point, because it’s incredibly awesome that it works at all.

The last app I saw that surprised me this much was probably Football Real Kick, an iPhone app that uses the speaker to blow enough air to kick a tiny spitball-sized soccer ball across a real table.

Instant heart rate is available as a free download from the Android Market.

via Reddit