Google Releases iPad Friendly News Reader: Google Reader Play

Google has released an iPad friendly version of their popular RSS aggregator service called Google Reader Play. 

This service uses Reader's popular 'Recommended Items' feature to offer an easy way for users to browse through interesting blog and news articles. 

Google Reader Play is very similar to the slideshow feature on popular photo sharing websites like Flickr. Users are displayed a gist of blog articles - one at a time, which may be navigated through by pressing the arrow keys while on a desktop computer or by using the virtual arrows on an iPad. Google explains that unlike Google Reader, users may be able to access Reader Play without the need to sign in with a Google account. However, 'starring' and 'favoriting' blog posts will require users to sign in and these activities shall be synced with the users' activities on Google Reader. 

Google Reader Play is currently available on Google Labs and the company insists that the service may supplement the actual Reader service without actually replacing it. Reader Play does not use multimedia platforms like Adobe Flash and is hence an ideal service for iPad users to flip through news and interesting posts.

You can checkout some of the screenshots below:

Google Reader Play can be accessed from the iPhone as well. However, as Wired notes, the service works on a tap based system to flip through news articles and does not support swipe, which may not conform to the average iPhone user experience. 

Nevertheless, if you are interested to try it out, visit www.google.com/reader/play and let us know what you think about Google Reader Play. 

[via Wired]