Google Reader Application Now Available for Android

On December 1st, the Mountain View-based Internet giant Google has announced the release of its official Google Reader application for the Android operating system.

The software solution comes with a wide range of appealing features, including support for the basic functionality that Google Reader users should be familiar with.

Here's what Google notes on the matter: “the app supports all the basics you’d expect like unread counts, friends, sharing, liking, and starring, but it also has a whole lot more.”

Among these new capabilities, we can count support for multiple accounts at the same time, as well as synced preferences, so that users would enjoy an experience in line with what they had on their desktop PCs.

At the same time, users would take advantage from full subscription features (subscribe and search from your phone), as well as from search capabilities.

Some of the features that might not be that easy to discover with the application include:

- Volume-key navigation: if you enable this in the settings, you can navigate by using your phone’s volume keys for next and previous
- Long-press on a folder or subscription to bring up a contextual menu that lets you rename, unsubscribe or change folders
- If you hit the menu key on an individual item, you can use the “send” feature which integrates with other apps on your phone to send the item using any 3rd party app

As Google notes in a recent post on its official blog, the first version of the application was already made available for download for all mobile phones running under Android 1.6 or higher, basically for almost all of the Android devices out there.

Some more info on the application can be found in the screenshots attached to this article, as well as through downloading and installing the software solution from the Android Market. To download the app, users can scan the bar code below with their mobile phones.