Flipboard review [iPhone]

There's a reason print and paper magazines are fading, beyond the simple availability of digital mags and e-books. It's as much to do with our changed reading habits. People who don't even read books probably get through a novel-length quantity of words simply by browsing Facebook every day, or by tapping out their life on Twitter.

Magazines are a month behind at the least, and none can accommodate the variety of news, stories, information or entertainment that each of us, individually, want to read about. And when you see a magazine app like Flipboard, you can really hear the last coffin nail being hammered into the traditional publishing model.

This app is like many others we've seen in the past, in that it pulls together categories of news and entertainment from across the web and presents it in an image-rich magazine-style layout. But Flipboard also understands that much of the news you're interested in isn't coming from a journalistic source, but a personal one.

It includes your Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter accounts as important sources, and blends those feeds into more traditional lists of news to give you a comprehensive magazine that's quite literally tailored to your life. You can also search through its vast database for broad - or specific - feeds you might want to add to your Flipboard manually.

The app is able to generate its essential magazine layout from most any source you can find. A Twitter feed, an RSS list, a blog, Tumblr and anything else that publishes content to the web. Add it to your Flipboard pages and it becomes a seamless part of your personal mag.

Its operation is equally interesting and functional. The pages turn from bottom to top with an upward swipe, which also serves to open specific stories within a feed. As the app is tied into your Facebook and Twitter accounts, it's also a doddle to share a link, snippet of full story through the social networks or via email. Depending on where the item originated you can also reply with a comment or RT directly from within Flipboard, or add comments to the growing Flipboard community.

Pulling a page downward offers a neat refresh facility, which is always welcome in apps that use aggregated content, and if you don't have the time to read something right now, but don't want to lose the page, Flipboard is just as happy to hook up to your Instapaper or Read It Later accounts. Any content you're looking at is then funnelled into your account for reading whenever you have the time.

On top of all this, Flipboard isn't just a triumph of intelligent design. It's also genuinely intelligent. The front page offers cover stories, which are automatically picked out by the app from all your feeds and networks. Initially this works almost at random, or based on popularity among a wider community of users. But the more stories you tap on as you read your personal magazine, the more the app learns what you like to read about.

Gradually the cover stories become more and more attuned to your interests as the app monitors what you're reading, until the first page is the only page you need - at least, until you're looking for a longer reading experience and delve deeper into the mag.

Given that all this is provided free of charge, and can be synced between your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, Flipboard is set to become a news reading revolution on the iOS platform. Might as well jump on board now. It's also interesting to consider how you can begin contributing to those feeds, as well as reading them.