Thursday, March 29, 2012

Zite for Android officially launches, learns your habits and tailors your news

Zite for Android

If you're a big consumer of news and information on your Android device, you'll be happy to hear this news. Zite, the personalized magazine app that's been popular on iDevices for about a year now, has finally been brought over to Android.

Zite aims to bring you the news most tailored to your interests, and it continues to learns what your preferences are the more you use it. Fortunately, the app doesn't leave you out in the cold after your first boot. Once you've opened the app once, you can link your Twitter and Google Reader accounts to give Zite a starting point for what your interests are.

After you've linked some accounts, you can then pick from a list of different genres to further tailor the news you'll be brought. The list is fairly expansive, and should give nearly anyone all of the options they could hope for (and more).

Navigation around the app is easy; simply swipe left or right to move from genre-to-genre. Articles are presented in a list fashion, and if you tap an article, you're shown the full contents of what was written. A little niggle I noticed is that certain articles decided to automatically launch in the browser instead of the app. I'm hoping that's just an early release issue and will get fixed soon.

Otherwise, on a tablet, the UI is pretty plan, but functional. Zite doesn't look like it was optimized for Android tablets, but it runs, nonetheless. With Ice Cream Sandwich out, I was kind of hoping for more in terms of visual polish, but if just getting a working app out the door was the goal of the developers, they've done that much.

Zite for Android definitely comes off like it's still in beta, but it's been a hit on iDevices for some time, so if you were pining away for it, it's finally here. If your run-of-the-mill RSS feeds (or Pulse or Google Reader) weren't cutting it, definitely give Zite a shot. If they were, maybe you should give Zite a shot, anyway. It's definitely got room to grow, but I'm sure the developers will be hard at work, ramping up their app for the Android faithful.

We've got a whole bundle of screenshots after the break.

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