When Samsung first announced the Galaxy S III the company revealed temporary exclusivity to the Flipboard application, but today we can tell you of the Android Flipboard beta, and we have a link to the APK.
The application has long been on the iOS platform and recently an unofficial version was leaked online for the Android platform, and as Cnet are reporting Android users can now download an official beta version of Flipboard via this link. For those of you that are not aware of the app it’s a magazine style news reader service that has grown in popularity among iOS users.
Flipboard can also take care of all your social media integrating user’s accounts into its feed, and providing status updates and tweets as it would for news stories or blog posts, which include images and video thumbnails, and this together with the tiled interface has helped the application grow in popularity.
The Android version looks just as visually good as the iOS offering and it has a clean and minimal design with a vibrant display of photographic tiles. Users can easily swipe up and down through the news feeds, but the Android version has a pair of widgets preloaded that are a small and a medium widgets that can update with the latest cover stories.
Flipboard for Android is not just pretty to look at as the functionality allows users to add a number of different feeds from social media accounts from the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr. You can also add feeds from any site that has a RSS feed and also subscribe to a Flipboard topic feed.
Currently the application beta has not been optimized for tablet PCs, it can be downloaded to such a device, but the image quality won’t be that great. If you have a Google Reader account this can be added to a feed, but at the moment it doesn’t allow you to swipe through individual sources within the Google Reader account.
So far the application has impressed and it doesn’t seem like a quick port of an iOS app over to the platform, which can often happen when a successful iOS application arrives on Android. Have you used Flipboard for Android yet?