Hands on with Flipboard (beta) for Android, not exactly tablet optimized
Flipboard for Android leaked a few weeks back when someone pulled it off the Galaxy S III, but now Flipboard has come out with an official beta for the app.
Being a beta, the app obviously still isn’t finished, but at least it’s one step further. You get access to the beta by signing up to the newsletter and waiting for a link, or you could just use the link that Droid-life found and download the .apk file directly. I tried the app out back when it first leaked, but decided to give the beta version a try too.
Flipboard is a news reader, a fairly popular news reader that has been on iOS for ages. The name derives from how you flip through pages to browse stories, and you can add various sources ranging from social networks to RSS feeds and news categories.
The problem is that it’s a phone app. It warned me about not being optimized for my Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus’ screen when I started it up, and sure enough, it doesn’t exactly look good on a large screen. It’s a phone app, meaning that you have the typical one column view on everything. It’s the same old discussion about tablet mode vs phone mode and it’s just frustrating to see yet another app ignore tablets, beta or no beta. The Galaxy S III isn’t exactly a small device with its 4.8-inch screen either, and the same goes for more and more Android phones, so you’d think that new apps in particular would start to cater more to large phones and tablets, instead of small phones. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
Still, Flipboard is a good looking app with both great design and animations. That’s not a given on Android, and I’ll take anything I can get. If it could just stop wasting time on an app that best fits 3-inch devices I would be happy. As it stands, it’s frankly too oversized even for my phone, and it’s not even that big of a phone in this day and age.
