Lumiappaday #34: Pulse demoed on the Nokia Lumia 800

You guys loved the Horus Qt news reader on Symbian, well Pulse is what inspired that app to come about and here it is on the Nokia Lumia 800.

#34) Pulse

Price: Free

Link: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-GB/apps/ccf41a44-0b37-4dd9-bb1f-287e1ae5e7ea

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McS2YKFbXBA

Developer Blurb:

Meet Pulse. A beautiful award-winning application that makes reading news fun and engaging. Pulse is a beautiful app that takes your favorite websites and transforms them into a colorful and interactive mosaic. Tap on an article to see a clean and elegant view of the news story. Sharing a story via Facebook, Twitter, email and text is as easy as two taps.

Press:

“Alphonso Labs, creators of Pulse News – the new king of Apps” – Fortune Magazine

“Pulse, popular app, moves to attract more users” – New York Times

“Pulse News is a solid app, visually pleasing even on a smaller screen.” – TechCrunch

Features:

• ☆ All your content in one place: So easy to add any content you want – from major publishers to blogs and social networks.
• ☆ Dual view: For each article on Pulse, you can switch between a clean summary of the article or go to the website directly. When you tap on an article, both are ready to view, almost instantly!
• ☆ Offline sync: No Internet? No problem. Pulse loads the news stories you read, and makes them available wherever you are.
• ☆ News discovery: Pulse features new publishers each week. You can also search for a news source by simple keywords.
• ☆ Easy share: Found an interesting news article? Sharing a news story on Pulse via Email, Facebook, and Twitter is as easy as two taps.

Rating: 9.75

Design: 10

Pulse is a beautiful news reader, with scrollable thumbnails of different news feeds and within each row, side scrollable for each story for that particular feed.

The little animations are also very welcome from opening feeds and individual stories. I like how they’ve made the featured list something very colourful as opposed to just a plain list.

Category feeds with nice icons. Lots of nice touches that makes this a really good looking app.

Usability: 10

Very clear and usable. You have at your first start up a drawing over Pulse app to show how to use it. It’s all straight forward and should cause little fuss.

Scroll vertically to look at different feeds, and scroll horizontally to look at stories in that feed. Tap a thumbnail to go directly to that story. You can change stories quickly by clicking on the thumbnails. They hide themselves away when you want to read full screen.

I didn’t get a screenshot but you can also rotate the main pulse view in landscape too as well as the stories themselves.

Videos can be played. The one above got removed so I tried another one. It will open up in the full screen player.

Adding new feeds is simple, either browser categories or find a site with search. Organizing the order of the feeds is a doddle too, as well as pinning your favourite feeds to your homescreen

Performance: 9

Nigh on perfect. I’m being very strict on a load time of about 3 seconds (to reload your news, I guess it would be quicker if it didn’t do that, but it makes it more convenient not having to refresh).

Otherwise, it is super fast, super fluid, it multitasks so it can resume precisely to what story and zoom level etc.

Currently very stable, yet to experience problems.

When reading, you can easily tap the story to view images/full article directly from the site.

Price:10

Free. With no ads.

Conclusion:

Great little news reader application. If your favourite site does not yet have a mobile app for their news, this is great to set up a tile on your home page.

Tags: featured

Category: Applications, Lumiappaday, Nokia, Video, Windows Phone