About a month ago my Droid updated itself (okay, I need to press “ok” a few times) to version 2.1 of the Android operating system. I really liked the results – things ran better, I finally had pinch-and-zoom action for my photos, and lots of applications had features that hadn’t shown up when I was running 2.0. But what I’ve appreciated most in the long run is a handy little application called “News and Weather” that appeared when I updated. It’s such a basic thing – it gives you the current weather and forecast wherever you are (or whatever city you set it to), and you can browse through screens of current news stories in different categories such as World, Sci/Tech, Entertainment, and so on. The powerful part is that I can change these categories so it searches different terms and shows a page of the top news results for each term. Browsing is smooth – just swipe right for the next topic. This is a great complement to Google Reader – I have Reader pulling in a lot of specific feeds, while News and Weather pulls news on subjects I’ve chosen from a wide variety of sources. My “copyright” subject page has stories right now from AP, Hip-Hop Wired, FOXNews, Techdirt, and The Canadian Press. I also have it set to give me stories on the Google Books settlement, on Victoria Espinel (have I mentioned she scares me? But that’s another post), and Hawaii.
In conclusion? Smooth, easy-to-use app that satisfies a need I didn’t even know I had (up-to-date news on a few specific subjects from a wide variety of sources).





