News360 iPad app puts a variety of news at your fingertips

Voracious newsreaders know it can be challenging to keep up with a variety of news providers, so if you’re looking for a smart method of tracking multiple sources, app News360 for iPad might be your answer.

Within News360, more than 100 news sources are aggregated, giving you complete coverage of everything being reported in the world. The app offers two methods of browsing: list format in portrait mode or via a picture slideshow when you orient your iPad to landscape. In this landscape “discovery” mode, the day’s news floats by as images. Occasionally the speed of your swipes will cause the photos to overlap, which makes opening a news story a bit difficult, but even so the presentation isn’t one I’ve seen often.

When you find a story you want to read, the article opens in iPad format featuring large text. Versions of the story from other websites are present in tabs above the body of text, so you can quickly access other perspectives or gain additional information — a feature particularly useful for partisan issues that might be presented differently depending on the media source. At the bottom of each story, you can tap to pull up the original source page and view the article directly on ABCnews.com, or whatever the source.

Through the “My Stories” tab, you can create a customized news section about specific topics. To create it, you drag and drop icons from trending and popular topics, or search for your own. You can do the same with sources when viewing the sources pane, so your feed shows you the most results from preferred media.

News360 offers the standard social networking integration, but one feature I hadn’t seen before was integration with TripIt. Connecting through TripIt will pull in local news for your upcoming destinations — great for travelers looking for comprehensive destination coverage, and requiring little work on the user’s part. News360 also uses GPS to pinpoint your location to pull in nearby news.

For all its customized features, I’d expect News360 for iPad to cost something. Luckily, this app is free.

Download the free Appolicious for iPad app

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