Google Currents for Tablets & Smartphones

Cost of the app: FREE

Website:  http://www.google.com/producer/currents

Download : Google Currents on Apple App Store / Google Currents on Android Market

Video introduction to Google Currents -

It seems like aggregated magazine apps are all the rage these days. Due to the size of the screen these magazine apps were launched exclusively for iPad users.  First, it was Flipboard then Zite, then AOL’s Editions and then Yahoo!’s LiveStand.

Trying to make a huge push in mobile and social applications, how can Google remain behind? Google released Google Currents, a magazine app for iOS and Android devices a couple of days ago without any publicity. I was so excited about this app that while lying in bed and ready to sleep I came across a tweet that said that Google had released Google Currents.

Without any further ado, I went to the app store on my extremely slow network and downloaded the app. It’s around 10 MB in size but I fell asleep while downloading it. After getting up, the first thing I did was to try my hands on Google Currents.

Let’s see the screenshots before we go any further. The iPhone screenshots are from when you first open the app.

1. The first screen tells you that it provides free magazines for your smartphones and tablets with a focus on you.

Google Currents - the get started tutorial

2. Google has included a few magazines for free by default to get you up and running. You can either touch the icons to open or add more magazines.

Google Currents gets you up & running with a few free magazines

3. Trending topics – you can’t be social without including people, right? Google Currents tells you what is being read by other readers around the world with Trending tab.

Trending topics - to know what people are reading right now!

4.  Learn about the controls. While some of the controls are self-explanatory, Google could have done a better job providing standard icons for sharing and sync.

The controls in Google Currents iPhone app

5. You’re ready to roll. This ends the getting started phase of Google Currents. Click done to enter the app.

Time to Dive in

Now, whenever Google releases something I have high hopes from them. I’m almost always certain that they’re going to raise the bar in design, aesthetics and it’s trademark – speed. I was expecting something that would completely replace my news & magazine apps but I was sorely disappointed.

The app is slow – When you click an article on your phone you want it to load instantly. No exceptions. You just don’t have the patience to wait 15 seconds before you see any word of it. Google Currents downloads the whole magazine before you can read a word. While it is certainly good for offline reading there should be a setting whereby a user can toggle between offline & online reading.

The controls are confusing – The app just doesn’t feel intuitive. On some screens you can’t see the home icon. On some there’s this list of articles and 3 controls. Sometimes the app starts syncing all by itself.

The design is not good enough for phone reading – Scrolling is not comfortable on a smartphone. I though Google knew that. I would like to give brownie points to Flipboard which has rather successfully implemented the “card deck” mechanism to scroll ( Flipboard review coming soon!). I’m yet to try my hands on the iPad version of the app so I can’t say if this is just the phone thing.

No custom font and size – I know the font Google has chosen is acceptable but still it would be better to have a choice of fonts if only for size. Zite gets fonts and font sizes very well.

There are a few hundred magazines and according to Google all are free. I don’t know if it will be applicable in the near future but right now the collection of magazines is better than most apps out there.

Frankly, it feels like Google was desperate to launch an app and it quickly locked a few developers in a room on a condition that they’ll be released only after finishing an app.

I could have stuck with Google Currents if there were enough reasons to. But right now – I’d wait for improvements for Google Currents before deleting my magazine apps.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

You can buy Google Storage. It is cheap and affordable if you really dont want to wash off your precious memories and work done by you.

Go to this page > http://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage

You can buy 20 GB for just $5 a year, I myself is a Google user and I have purchased the $5 one. Only 9 GB used out of 20 GB. Let me tell you that Google is actually a good choice if you want to all your photos at one place. If you have more than 20 GB then you have a great catch of 80 GB for just 20 bucks a year.

Note that the storage added is in the addition to the current free quota given to you.

Google Nexus S really takes over the smartphone industry with Android open-source platform. I know, but Android has got more than the iOS. Talking about Nexus S, really downs the iPhone 4 in nearly every field.

Nexus S is just more than what you think. Let me tell you that iPhone 4 can be used in the US locked and unlocked price is high over the charts if you wanna buy a phone under $500. Google is selling this phone unlocked which can be used all over the world without the worry of unlocking it at $525 to be exact.

Going on Android, it supports Flash. Yeah, Flash. Nexus S has the latest Android 2.3 Gingerbread update. Google’s Nexus S comes with a 4″ 800 x 400 resolution display with a 16 GB of internal memory with sadly no SD card slot. Offers B / G / N Wifi.

Battery is user-replaceable where one cannot replace the iPhone 4′s. Same as the iPhone 4′s 5 MP Camera but the Camera app loads faster than the iPhone 4. It has a front facing VGA Camera for the video calls on 3G, 4G. Has a powerful 1GHz Hummingbird Processor.

It is also featuring us a three axis gyroscope with a briliant contour display. The Nexus S has a cool and sleek design for you to handle it easily. iPhone 4 is famous for its brand but there are other Android phones that may defeat it at everything. And this phone is one of them.

Google’s Nexus S offers everything from Google’s Mail to Google’s  Maps.

Costing at $525 unlocked this is the iPhone killer. Head to the PROs and CONs

PROS

Latest Android software

16 gb internal memory

contour display

Humming bird Processor

CONS

No MicroSD Slot

No HD Video

No Notification Light

Fingerprints look easily on phone

Google alerts visitors of a Tsunami in the East-Asian region due to earthquake in Japan

Just saw this on Google homepage. The text reads -

Tsunami Alert for New Zealand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, and others. Waves expected over the next few hours, caused by 8.9 earthquake in Japan.

Looks like Google has realized that it’s homepage is a great way to alert people worldwide about calamities that have taken place/are going to take place.

Update:

We advise people in the affected areas to remain safe. The scale of the earthquake is a staggering 8.9 and according to some news outlets it’s the biggest in Japan’s 140 year history!

• Find people who are lost in the Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami using this Google website.
• Keep yourself updated by visiting alerts and warnings from the US government’s website – Weather.gov
• See places affected, electric blackouts, realtime map and other media on Google’s Crisis Response website.
• Realtime tweets about the Tsunami from Twitter (Twitter seems to be a little slow due too all the requests & tweets being broadcast)
• Microsoft doesn’t get much attention these days but they’re trying in their own way – go to Microsoft disaster response website for real-time imagery, before and after maps, etc. They’re even donating $1 for every tweet upto $100K. Kudos to them!

I’ve been a Jeremy fan ever since I’ve learnt to make websites and his tips and tools always help me identify the shortcomings that are so easy to forget.

So when Shoemoney launched his website, I decided to try out his Free SEO report site which lets you get a completely detailed SEO report for your site (or any site for that matter!) in 3 easy steps -

1. Enter your site

2. Enter your keyword – the primary keyword you’d like to evaluate

3. Your email to send the report

Let’s see my experience with FreeSEOReport.com

I went to the site and put truthaboutabs.com into the box. Obviously, its not my site but I want to analyze the website to see how much SEO effort the owner is putting into the site.

One thing I’d like to emphasize is that its not just good for SEO standpoint you can also use the detailed SEO report to see how much effort someone is putting into the site. More effort usually equals more money so you can really gauge the profitability of a niche in a blink!

Once you enter the details you can choose a password and all those usual stuff and wait for the report to be prepared. Yes, the site took some time to create a nicely formatted SEO report for me.

Once the report is ready you can download it on your computer to analyze it in detail.

Download link for the Free SEO Report PDF

The start of the report shows the contents at a glance which contains overview, document titles, headings, body text,etc

Contents of the Report

The next useful page I found is the analyzed web pages which lists related websites and number of pages from those websites indexed as tracked by Yahoo! and the amount of links and pagerank and such useful information to really see how strong the sites are to compete.

Analyzed web pages

There’s also one nice little pie chart that shows the distribution of pagerank among competing websites. So you can easily see if the majority of your sites are PR 4 or PR 5 or anything. If more sites have a higher PR than it might be difficult to get the top spots but also there’ll be better opportunities for high PR links.

Bar Chart of PageRank distribution

Another page lists the average PageRank, Yahoo! links, age domain and Alexa rank as compared with your competing websites and your site. See for yourself – pretty slick, eh?

Your Website vs the Competition

Conclusion: I think this is one of the easiest method of performing Market Research and you an accomplish it in 2 easy steps – enter the URL and keywords and done you get a nice formatted report in 2 minutes.

If you’re a seasoned marketer than the $19.99/month subscription wouldn’t seem so bad considering you can generate unlimited number of reports and the amount of time it saves doing all the repeat work!

Google Chrome Extensions

The day has finally arrived – Google can now sync bookmarks and has enabled extensions both on the same day!

I’ve restricted my use of Google Chrome for the very reason that it wouldn’t let me sync bookmarks online.

Sync your Google Chrome bookmarks online

Have you ever saved a lot of web pages on Chrome and have lost all of them due to a PC crash? Well now you can make sure that your bookmarks can survive because Google has introduced “Sync bookmarks” feature in Chrome.

To enable Sync bookmarks in Chrome click the wrench icon and then click on the “Synchronize my bookmarks…” option. It’ll present you with a Google account sign-in box. Fill in your details and Google Chrome will start syncing your Chrome bookmarks by creating a folder in Google Docs and continuously syncing your bookmarks there!

You can also sync multiple computers and make sure that all your bookmarks are organized at a single place. When I accidently saw this option today I thought it’d sync the bookmarks with Google Bookmarks which (thankfully!) it didn’t!

Extending Chrome with Extensions

One thing that was stopping Chrome from attaining mass adoption and popularity despite its speed and simplicity was that it was a totally closed ecosystem. For one, you couldn’t install any toolbars – not even the ubiquitious Google toobar! While there was a work around to it by simply bookmarking the services and docking the bookmarks bar, it was too much work and it didn’t look good often cluttering the bookmarks bar.

Google has been in beta mode for Chrome extensions for quite some time. Some of the most popular extensions include Gmail notifier by Google, IE tab, AdThwart(!), Google Translate, AdBlock(!!) and many more. One of the alarming trends I see is that among the 5 most popular Chrome extensions 2 are for blocking ads – the pillar on which Google stands and the other 2 are Google’s and the remaining one being IE tab which I guess is used by Web developers to debug and run websites made for Internet Explorer.

A few days ago, the New York Times published an article - In Allowing Ad Blockers, a Test for Google where it discussed about the concerns Google could face if the extensions really took off (as they have done!) and there isn’t much Google can do to stop it. If it does, it could backfire in a lot of ways including more publicity for the extensions and other privacy concerns.

Use the Extensions at Your Own Risk

While the extensions exponentially increase the value of Google Chrome as a browser there is a risk in using these extensions.  While installing the extensions Google displays a warning that these extensions have access to private pages and even the whole computer.

The day since Google announced Android everyone has been waiting for the “Google Phone”.  While it was pretty obvious that Google won’t get into the “dirty” hardware business, it was inevitable that Google would be keen to manufacture an Android phone according to its configurations. Google will sell the Nexus One phones manufactured by HTC and distributed through AT&T.

First, it was the Droid – a fantastic, game-changing Android phone. And now, its the Nexus One – built by HTC and installed with the fully-customized Android OS. I think the smart-phone market is going to experience some intense heat with the launch of more and more smart-phones built for the Android platform!

While I think it is difficult to dent the share of smart-phones that iPhone has achieved it’ll surely be a good alternative for consumers looking for more options and variety. I still love the iPhone though!