For those who like their news in the palm of their hand Newsstand will deliver the goods. Newsstand is an RSS reader app that offers up the news from a chosen list of sites or feeds. It displays the information in both portrait and landscape view. It couldn’t be easier to set up. Just choose the sites that you visit frequently and save them to the app. Edit the names of the feeds you’d like to place in the app and create folders to keep everything organized.

The first thing you’ll notice about Newsstand is the very nice visual interface. Newsstand is complete with different backgrounds. Second it’s not so complicated. In fact, it’s pretty intuitive to use. You can use the landscape view to read the news so it’s almost like reading a real page from newspaper or book. You can set up Newsstand to stream everything form the New York Times site to You Tube.

Occasionally, there were problems with the app freezing or with the browser failing to switch to landscape mode. It would be nice if Newsstand auto-cached some feeds for offline use. This would make it a commuters dream.

What Newsstand does exceptionally well is handle multiple feeds. Of the forty feeds we programmed in, it only duplicated a couple of downloads. Although, it must be said it doesn’t work with all feeds. Although, this is something that could eventually be fixed in future versions of the app. Also, there are fewer options in landscape view than portrait view.

The largest problem with Newsstand is that it tends to be a little buggy. Sometimes when you switch from portrait to landscape mode you run into feed issues or the app tends to crash. A download and reinstall didn’t seem solve the issue. But, compared to some other RSS feeder apps, Newsstand tends to do a pretty good job. Its visual appeal and almost idiot proof use make it a must for anyone who is a news and information junkie. Newsstand is priced at $4.99 in the App Store.

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app category: News, RSS