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FLUD vs Pulse
- Pulse vs FLUD, Comparison between Pulse and FLUD, Pulse or FLUD

Competition is a good thing, especially in the App Store. Literally thousands of apps are trying to get our attention and keep it. As a consumer, one of best competitions to watch is the competition between Pulse News Reader and FLUD News with which you can read iPad News. Both debuted as iPad apps and are now available as iPhone/iPod touch apps too.

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FLUD vs Pulse: About Pulse

Pulse News for iPad transforms the news gathering and reading approach and perfectly appropriates those practices for optimal consumption on the iPad.

The $3.99 application is more than a stylized RSS reader, and includes Twitter and Facebook integration as well as built-in functionality, that lets users create their own my Pulse mini blog and automatically share their favorite stories with friends.

As a news reader, Pulse does not disappoint. Application users can select from featured sources, add their Facebook and Twitter accounts as content sources, connect their Google Reader accounts or add individual RSS feeds or websites. The application supports up to 20 different news sources, apiece displayed horizontally with pictures and text to depict apiece story. Users who activate my Pulse get an additional five slots for sources.

Stories can be viewed in landscape or portrait mode, text or web format, shared on Twitter or Facebook, and "Pulsed". Users can also flip from one story to the next.

Pulse comes in iPhone and Andriod-friendly versions as well, which makes for a news reading experience that extends beyond the iPad and is almost universally accessible. (Related: How to Transfer Apps from iPhone to iPad on MacBook?)

Price: $3.99.
Notable Features: my Pulse, and Bump technology for instantly discovering friends' sources. Lacking: Categories for newspaper-like navigation would be a welcome addition.

FLUD vs Pulse: About FLUD

FLUD closely resembles Pulse News in purpose and design. The $3.99 application is built to feature news stories from user-defined sources. The app highlights stories with pictures in a magazine-like fashion.

FLUD presents app users with several news sources to get started. Users can click the wrench picture to edit those preferences, select from feature feeds, search for feeds or connect their Google Reader statement to select from those feeds. (Related: Transfer Pictures to iPad)

In landscape mode, stories appear to the right of feeds. In portrait view, stories appear above feeds. The app displays apiece article in "Text View" to highlight just the text and pictures for apiece story, but users can also tap on "Web View" to view the story as it would appear on the site.

FLUD has one design element that distinguishes it from the competition: Categories. The application distinguishes sources by type, so users can navigate to view just the technology, creative, politics, business, science, lifestyle, entertainment or sports sections individually. By sectioning news based on their sources, FLUD is still able to reinvent the way we consume news while maintaining familiar elements for simple digestion.

Unfortunately, FLUD is absent in the social media department. Individual articles can be shared and posted to Facebook or Twitter, but users are not able to use either social network as a news source.

Price: $3.99.
Notable Feature: Intelligent, auto-defined categories.
Lacking: Source support for Facebook and Twitte.

Tags: pulse vs flud, comparison between pulse and flud, pulse or flud, competition between pulse news reader and flud, flud vs pulse

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