14 DAY TRIAL // Google can’t be bothered to innovate these days. But it’s not like anyone cares. We’re addicted to their services and everything they launch is almost always free of charge. Well, at least if you don’t treasure your privacy.
The search giant has released a personalized news + weather application for iOS customers that resembles Yahoo’s own offerings quite a lot.
News & weather at your fingertips
If there’s two things most people can’t live without it’s the news bulletin and the weather forecast. Google decided to make new inroads into people’s lives by throwing in this handy Google News & Weather app that offers hot headlines from 65,000 publications and categories like Top Stories, Technology, Sports, and more.
“Tune your layout with any of 60 country-specific editions and personalized news sections such as ‘Hollywood’, ‘NASA’, ‘Fashion’, or anything else that catches your fancy,” says the company.
“Tap any story for a deep selection of viewpoints, including in-depth articles, Opinion, and local perspectives,” adds Google.
The Weather component sits at the top of the news section. They’re both crammed together on the screen. Despite looking like a direct replica of Yahoo’s own app for news and weather, somehow Yahoo’s looks a lot more polished.
Customization features
It’s customizable, but not very much so. You can choose your news categories but you can’t use the weather component like a real weather app. It constantly asks for your location, even though you’ve already granted it permission to pinpoint you, and it feels a bit intrusive.
But it’s not a bad apple. It’s designed well and it offers a good reading experience. Plus it has day and night reading modes, something that every app should have these days. And don’t expect it to load any type of video. It basically works like an RSS app. Whenever it stumbles upon some Flash or Silverlight content, it won’t be able to assist.
Requirements, optimizations, language support
Google News & Weather is a free download and works with all iDevices natively. That includes the two new iPhones released by Apple earlier this month. The minimum firmware requirement is iOS 7.
The software offers support for over two dozen different languages, including English, Arabic, Bokmål, Norwegian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
So far there is no feedback on how the app runs for everyone, but our experience has been good. Try it out and see how you like it yourself.
