Flipboard: Your Social News Magazine

CNET Editors' note: The "Download Now" link directs you to the iTunes App Store, where you must continue the download process. You must have iTunes installed in order to open the link, and you must have an active iTunes account to download the application. This download may not be available in some countries.

CNET Editors' review

by: Jason Parker on May 16, 2012

Flipboard is a must-have newsreader and social network hub that lets you organize the info you want to look at and then flip through it like a magazine. Get started by creating an account with Flipboard, then sign in to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Once you're all signed in, Flipboard presents you with an intuitive layout of your social networks and some default news categories to browse. Touching a panel lets you browse through any of the default categories. But touching and holding a panel lets you delete it and replace it with whatever you want. To customize your flipboard, touch the More panel in the lower right to browse through several categories like News, Technology, Business, Entertainment, and many others. Touching the News category, for instance, lets you add popular sites to your Flipboard like BBC News, the Guardian, The Economist, Salon, and many more. There's an enormous amount of content to choose from making it possible to customize Flipboard with only the types of stories you want. There's also a search bar if you want to find something specific that you don't see in the presented categories.

Possibly the best thing about Flipbook is how it handles Facebook and Twitter. Touching Facebook, for example, brings up all your latest news stories in a magazine-style format and automatically displays images from links your friends posted. Similarly, when you touch Twitter, you'll get each tweet laid out in magazine format, but also with linked stories laid out like a magazine so you can read some of the article (more than on Twitter) before touching to see the whole story. In this way, Flipboard might even be a better way to look at Twitter than Twitter itself.

Even if you know you're not going to be online later (say, if you're going on a trip via plane) any of the stories you find can be saved to Instapaper or Read It Later so you have the articles handy.

In recent updates to the Flipboard app, you'll now be able to listen to podcasts and audio clips from people you follow, with newly added SoundCloud support. A new tab in the Guide lets you browse through audio content, and a new player is now available by touching a musical notes icon in the lower-left corner of the interface. The app also now has new accessibility controls that enable a visually impaired person to listen to posts on Flipboard.

Overall, Flipboard offers an excellent layout for browsing the latest news feeds and popular social sites that's perfect for both the iPhone and iPad. With tons of customization options and a unique magazine style interface, anyone looking for a better way to browse the latest news and social info should definitely download this app immediately.

Publisher's Description

From Flipboard:

Beautifully designed for iPad and iPhone, Flipboard creates a personalized magazine out of everything being shared with you. Flip through your Facebook newsfeed, tweets from your Twitter timeline, photos from Instagram friends, sounds from SoundCloud and much more.Fill Flipboard with the things you like to read, from niche blogs to publications like Rolling Stone and Lonely Planet, and use Instapaper or Readability to save articles to read later. Flipboard creates a single place to enjoy, browse, comment on and share all the news, photos and updates that matter to you.In addition to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, you can flip through your newsfeeds and timelines from Google Reader, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, Tumblr, Flickr, 500px, Sina Weibo and Renren on Flipboard.See why Flipboard has been named Apple's iPad App of the Year, one of TIME's Top 50 Innovations, the top social app at the 2012 Webby Awards, the Brit Insurance Interactive Design of the Year, and other accolades.

What's new in this version: Connect Flipboard to SoundCloud and enjoy amazing sounds created and shared by your friends and people you follow. Explore dozens of recommended audio feeds in new Audio category in the Content Guide. Accessibility for visually impaired people. Apple's VoiceOver helps users navigate Flipboard and listen to articles. Fully localized Japanese edition of Flipboard. Use Readability to save articles to read later. View related sections for social networks (new on iPhone). For example, tap on the "Twi... See all new features