Summly


Summly

Summly (but just been bought by Yahoo, [1])

Free

Available on iPhone

An app I have used for quite some time, the look and feel is beautiful, one can understand Yahoo buying this app out for several thousand, [1].   However it has meant the android app has been shelved.  

The app deliveries summaries of the news from leading on-line official news sources, for example The Guardian,etc.  The news articles are summarised down to typically to 140 words, so the news is easier to digest on your iPhone.   The app enables you to scan the news and gain an appreciation of the key world news. This is a useful app if you are an academic that uses news articles in your lecture to assist in making your subject area more current.

However unlike Flipboardand twitter news stream with an embedded web link, when you click on the summarised article in Summly it will not take you to the full article.  Just occasionally users may wish to read more and in more depth.. 

It is quick and easy resource to give oneself a quick overview of the news, but does not provide functionality to collate all the relevant news articles together in your own personal news summary, as you can in Flipboard.  However, it is Summly’s simplicity that attracted this student to the app, to support their learning of the mainstream news oppose to Flipboard;

“[Flipboard] at the moment it can sometimes feel like too much, it can feel like there are too many features compared to apps like Summly”

The app provides functionality that enables you to share individual news articles via Facebook, Twitter, and email.   The functionality is rather neat in design and practical, but you still can’t share collation of articles together like in Flipboard.

Reference

[1] Saner, E. (2013) " Summly creator Nick D'Aloisio: 'I try to maintain a level of humbleness'”The Guardian Friday 29th March 2013, last accessed 2nday 2013 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/29/summly-creator-nick-daloisio-interview

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