Hitpad – See what’s up!

Hitpad is the easiest and quickest way to see what’s going on today. Five minutes with Hitpad is like spending an hour browsing around.

What it does?

Hitpad delivers bite-size information snippets about the most important and worth-knowing topics of the day, highlighting why they are important and may be of interest, so you become current in no time and with very little effort.

Hitpad eliminates the need to read many sources and sift through social media streams that are often full with reverb and noise. As you use Hitpad, it learns your interests in order to deliver you the most important information snippets in the areas that you care about.

Hitpad Features:

• Discover the topics people talk about, in a range of categories, at any given time in a beautiful and engaging interface.

• Get a sweet & short summary highlighting why a topic is important today and may be of interest

• Get an aggregated view for any topic that includes news stories, tweets, videos, images and web results with rich website previews in one place

• Free Search let’s you find information about any search term and enjoy the same beautiful, rich, visual interface.

• Easily share items of interest on Twitter & Facebook with your followers and friends

• Save items for later reading using Instapaper

• Email articles to your friends from within the application

• Copy an item to the clipboard and paste it into another application

• View trending topics and items in both portrait and landscape orientations

Cons

1. Too much US Focus trends that are not related to other countries’ trends, if you are in other country other then USA it’s not so interesting.
2. As many trends are “marketed” trends by using bots, how do we know if the trends topic are REALLY what we human like to see?
3. The trends seems to be “filtered”, what about those popular news blogs out there?
4. Some USA videos from youtube cannot be accessed by other countries, putting those videos on your Hitpad can only hurt users from other countries. Kindly detect where we are then filter those videos away thanks
5. The reason why other news apps like “flipboard” uses social network like facebook or twitter to display news is because the news will be Vetted by our friends (living nearby) previously enough to share hence higher INTEREST level or entertainment value.

Overall, this app has the potential to teach google a thing or 2 on how to display their search results however like many socialist country in China…the results are too US centric and cannot keep international viewers interested for long.

Category: News

Type: iPad Only 

Price for iPad: Free

Flipboard – iPad RSS in Times Magazine Style & Free!

Named Apple’s iPad App of the Year and one of TIME’s top 50 innovations of 2010, Flipboard is a fast, beautiful way to flip through the news, photos and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Flickr and Instagram. See your social media in a magazine layout that is easy to scan and fun to read. Share articles and photos, comment on posts, and like or favorite anything. Customize your Flipboard with sections created from your favorite news, people, blogs and topics.

Your Flipboard is everything you care about in one place. It’s your magazine. It’s your Flipboard.

Here’s what others are saying:

Reviews:

1. “Flipboard is a fantastic iPad app that makes everything you read on the Web better than it is by itself. I can’t recommend it highly enough.” Macworld
2. “Flipboard offers iPad users an entirely original alternative to browsing the Web for news; its magazine-style layouts and breathtaking use of photos and white space show the way forward for digital media.” PCMag.com
3. “Flipping for Flipboard: The brilliant iPad app that has changed the way I read the news.” SLATE
4. “Flipboard begins to imagine an entirely new way of accessing the social Web.” New York Times
5. “Stop. Put down this computer, go pick up your iPad and come back here. Now go get this app: Flipboard. Why? It’s pretty awesome.” Wired.com
6. “I am thoroughly impressed from our first run with Flipboard. It is simply gorgeous and a pleasure to browse.” Mashable
7. “Flipboard turns Facebook updates, tweets into digital magazine” USA Today

Pros

1. You save probably hundreds of dollars in magazine purchase!
2. You can flip through your social network’s latest news in the most enjoyable way!
3. Internet at your finger tips if you put all your RSS feed into Google reader & add it to Flipboard in iPad!
4. There’s Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter integration…and flip through them like a magazine!

Cons

1. There are no bookmarking features to copy or back up articles for later viewing?
2. They should begin to give advertiser option to reserve a small slot for advertisement, it’s screaming iAds
3. You can never finish this magazine as it updates every 30 minutes I think…yes it’s going to be a time travel app, once you use it time flies!

Category: News
Type: iPad Only 

Price for iPad: Free