Android, Tablet Apps | featured news

At the moment, one of the chief unmet needs is simplicity, says Guenther, who was president of TiVo before joining NIM. While iPad users, for instance, can find most of the magazines they might want to buy in Apple‘s Newsstand app, they still have to download each magazine’s reader app individually and manage their subscriptions separately. NIM’s answer, which it’s unveiling Wednesday, is a unified tablet newsstand in which users can jump between dozens of different titles. At launch, it will be available on Android tablets running the Honeycomb operating system or higher, but Morgan says the company plans to submit its iOS app to Apple for approval in the next few weeks.

Google‘s long-awaited answer to Flipboard, the “social magazine” exclusively on Apple‘s iPad and iPhone, just debuted today. Google Currents offers a similar appearance, except it works on Android devices as well as iPads and iPhones. It’s the latest in a long string of applications, most recently Yahoo‘s Livestand, that seek to turn online content into something resembling print magazines, but without all those dead trees and with 20th century innovations like, say, video.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is available in stores across the country today, and it seems the company has offered the best Android tablet on the market. The hardware on the tablet is great; it’s sleek and light with a great screen and is easily the best Android tablet I’ve played with so far. But what I — and non-Apple manufacturers, apparently — keep running up against is the iPad question. With the number of applications designed for tablets on Android, there’s just no comparison.