APPY Geek for Tablet

CNET Editors' review

by: Jaymar Cabebe on October 28, 2011

Appy Geek is a real-time technology news aggregator that pulls from thousands of curated sources. Running the same engine as its older brother, News Republic, this app is just as smooth, smart, and easy to zip around.

One of the first things you notice about Appy Geek for Tablets is its unique interface. It features dual sliding panels, with one coming in from the left side of the screen and the other from the right. Tap the world icon on the left, and the corresponding panel slides out with a 3D floating tag cloud for picking topics to read about. While it may not be the most space-efficient way to present topics, it sure is unique and quite neat-looking. Tap the home icon on the right, and that panel slides out displaying shortcuts to each of your favorite topics. Overall, we like the interface, especially since it's been optimized for a tablet. It makes it easy to shuttle through articles and quickly jump between topics.

The meat of Appy Geek is in its ability to detect and serve articles by topic. Using a proprietary technology called TagNav, Appy Geek scours its partner sites, and serves up only posts that are closely related to your topics of choice. As you can imagine, this experience is much different from that offered by many other apps, which may only serve up posts filtered by source sites.

In addition, Appy Geek gives its users a few shiny little extras. You can share, save, even vote on articles. What's more, the app comes with a few home screen widgets that give you updates on your favorite tech news topics as they come.

The bottom line is, if you're a tech geek looking for an app to aggregate all of your tech news by topic, then Appy Geek is an awesome option. Its TagNav technology is reliable, its interface is attractive, and it's easy to use. On the other hand, if you need the flexibility to subscribe to your own hand-picked Web sites, or the ability to sync with your Google Reader, then it may not work for you.